Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 38
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
On his social media feed yesterday evening, President Donald J. Trump announced he was “directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders…. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
No one is reopening the island of Alcatraz as a federal prison. Officials closed it in 1963, after 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to operate: more than three times as expensive as any other federal prison. Since then, it has become one of the most popular sites of the National Park Service, located as it is in San Francisco Bay, easily accessible by ferry.
It feels rather as if Trump is throwing any strong words he can at the wall to distract from a series of news stories that are not going his way.
One of those stories is that Trump’s popularity is falling in rural areas, which make up his base. That popularity is unlikely to rebound quickly, as rural areas are being hardest hit by the administration’s cuts. It’s possible Trump hopes that throwing the word “Alcatraz” in all caps at those voters will remind them that he is supposed to be the president who will crack down on the immigrants he insists are dangerous criminals.
But seven journalists from the Washington Post reported yesterday that many of the men rendered from the U.S. to El Salvador were in the U.S. legally and were complying with U.S. immigration rules. Furthermore, although the Trump administration said it had to send the men to El Salvador because Venezuela would not take them back, the journalists reported that Venezuela refused the transfer only after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Trump’s proclamation said that property belonging to those he deems enemies is subject to “seizure and forfeiture,” and Venezuela was not willing to send planes under those circumstances.
Since then, the Washington Post journalists report, Venezuela has accepted at least two deportation flights a week.
When asked about the initial flights to El Salvador, the White House fell back on the argument that rendering the migrants to El Salvador was Trump’s prerogative under the president’s power to manage foreign affairs, a prerogative the Supreme Court protected in its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision saying that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official acts. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Washington Post journalists the administration would not “detail counterterrorism operations and foreign policy negotiations with foreign countries for the press.”
Also commanding attention these days is the corruption in the Trump administration, centering around Trump and the Trump family. In The Times yesterday, Dominic Lawson recalled that Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, wrote that Trump admired Russian president Vladimir Putin primarily for his ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company—like the Trump Organisation, in fact.” Lawson observed that Trump was not able fully to realize that dream in his first term, but “now he is indeed running the U.S. government as an extended arm of the Trump Organisation.”
There is the easy-to-understand corruption, like Trump’s exempting the products of his big-oil donors from tariffs, slashing the division of the Internal Revenue Service that audits high-earning individuals and corporations, or offering businessmen a one-on-one meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, or a group dinner for $1 million.
Then there is the more complicated corruption involving business deals with foreign governments. The Constitution spells out that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept…any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” An emolument is a profit, fee, salary, or advantage.
On January 10, 2025, shortly before the start of his second term, Judd Legum of Popular Information explains today, Trump simply released an “ethics agreement” that prohibited the Trump Organization from making deals with foreign governments. Already, Legum reports, the Trump Organization has violated that agreement. Last Thursday it cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
And then there is the massive corruption of the Trump family’s involvement in cryptocurrency. As Lawson points out, the Trumps control World Liberty Financial, which has its own cryptocurrency, $WLFI. Foreign nationals who are barred from donations to American political campaigns have invested in that coin. One of them is China-born billionaire Justin Sun, who was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission when Trump took office, bought $75 million in the coins, and then successfully lobbied for a pause in the SEC case to negotiate a settlement.
World Liberty Financial also produces a different cryptocurrency: USD1, which is known as a “stablecoin” because it is pegged to the dollar. Last Thursday, May 1, a founder of World Liberty Financial announced that an investment firm backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates would use USD1 to complete a $2 billion deal with Binance.
Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange. It is monitored by the U.S. government because in 2023 it admitted to money laundering. Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, has asked Trump for a presidential pardon.
As David Yaffe-Bellany reported in the New York Times, investors deposit money in stablecoins because their value is pegged to a state-backed currency and thus fluctuates very little. The stablecoin owner makes money by using that deposit to invest for returns that the stablecoin owner then keeps. Yaffe-Bellany notes that although the details of the UAE–World Liberty Financial deal are opaque, “it appears that…World Liberty now has $2 billion in deposits to invest. Those funds alone could generate tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for the Trump family and its partners at World Liberty.”
Yaffe-Bellany also notes that the partnership signals to investors around the world that working with the Trump-associated company can pay off.
The $WLFI and USD1 coins are separate from the $TRUMP memecoin that the president launched on January 17, 2025, just before he took office, and which the Financial Times estimates had netted about $350 million by early March. By late April it had fallen 88% from its high. Trump then offered the top 220 holders of the coin an “intimate private dinner” with the president, bumping up sales and making an estimated $900,000 in trading fees.
Trump is also getting hammered on his tariffs, and his frustration is showing. The president appears to like monkeying with tariffs because, unless Republicans take back Congress’s power to manage tariffs, he can just make a decree and watch the world jump. But the economic effects have shocked Americans. That shock is encapsulated in the news beginning to sink in that toys are highly dependent on trade with China: 80% of the toys sold in the U.S. come from there. Ninety-six percent of U.S. toy manufacturers are small businesses, highly dependent on supply chains from other countries.
Christmas orders should already be underway, but because of the tariffs, they are not. Trump has taken to arguing that girls need fewer dolls. Representative David Joyce (R-OH) acknowledged this morning on CNN that Christmas trade is already slowing down, but added: “I think American people will understand that because American people understand shared sacrifice.”
Americans who didn’t realize they were going to be asked to sacrifice—Trump promised that foreign countries would pay for tariffs, after all—have been pushing back against the tariffs. Apparently angry at being asked how trade negotiations are going, Trump last night told reporters on Air Force One: “At the end of this, I'll set my own deals because I set the deal. They don't set the deal. I set the deal. They've been ripping us off for years. I set the deal.... I'm going to be setting the deal. I'll be setting the tariff.”
Last night, in a social media post, Trump announced that foreign-made films are a national security threat and said he would institute “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Today the White House walked the announcement back.
And then there is the Signal scandal, which got even worse yesterday when Joseph Cox and Micah Lee of 404 Media reported that a hacker was able to breach the TeleMessage app administration officials have been using in about 15–20 minutes. TeleMessage is a clone of Signal that has the additional ability to archive messages. The hacker retrieved messages, usernames and passwords, and data related to Customs and Border Protection and banking institutions. The hacker did not retrieve all it was possible to see, but could have done so, making the point that the system is not secure. This afternoon the company that owns TeleMessage announced it was suspending service.
Today, likely reacting to voter sentiment and looking to 2028, Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would not challenge Democratic senator Jon Ossoff for Ossoff’s seat in 2026.
Also today, at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies.... Nobody's ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we're going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it's gonna be very interesting. We'll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it's a big hulk that's sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it's sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It's sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it's got a lot of it's got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point.”
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Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, May 4, 2025, 6:55 p.m.
The Parnas Perspective BREAKING: Donald Trump will reopen Alcatraz to House American Prisoners I was planning on taking the rest of Sunday off, but this news is too important, and I didn’t have it on my bingo card. Donald Trump has announced that he will be directing the FBI and the Department of Justice to re-open Alcatraz… Listen now2 days ago · 1579 likes · 463 comments · Aaron Parnashttps://www.bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls-rural-voters-2067254
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/04/trump-exempts-big-oil-donors-from-tariffs
https://fortune.com/2025/03/18/irs-audits-trump-job-cuts-lost-revenue/
https://www.wired.com/story/people-paying-millions-donald-trump-mar-a-lago/
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-9/clause-8/
Popular InformationTrump promised no new business deals with foreign governments. He lied.On January 10, 2025, President Trump released an "ethics agreement" detailing how he would handle his personal business interests while in the White House. It is remarkably weak and does not require Trump to divest any of his holdings. Unlike a similar agreement for his first term, it does not prohibit the Trump Organization from striking new deals abro…Read morea day ago · 591 likes · 56 comments · Judd Legumhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-coin-dinner-with-president-meme-coin-price/
https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/kemp-out
Donald J. Trump, post on Truth Social, May 4, 2025, 7:18 p.m.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-washington-2027-nfl-draft/
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lof4x6vvz62y
atrupar.com/post/3lof5dcckve2l
atrupar.com/post/3logsozsz5d2a
May 4, 2025
May 4, 2025
In an interview aired today on NBC News’s Meet the Press, reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In his decision in the 1993 case Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.
Welker tried again. “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”
Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “[t]he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”
Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post reported today that federal judges are becoming increasingly impatient with the incompetence of the Department of Justice lawyers who are defending more than 200 cases against the administration in court. Judges have accused DOJ lawyers of providing inadequate answers and flimsy evidence, defying court orders, and even behaving like toddlers.
Trump has said the justice system is a “rigged system” run by “radical left lunatics,” but former federal judge John E. Jones III, whom President George W. Bush appointed to the bench, agreed that DOJ lawyers have “lost a fair measure of their credibility.”
Authoritarian governments are based on the idea that some people are better than others. This translates into the idea that some people have special insight based only upon their superiority. They don’t have to listen to experts, who just muddle the clear picture the leader can see. When reality intrudes on that vision, the problem is not the ideology of the leader, it is obstruction by political opponents.
As Trump told Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about his presidencies: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Trump himself illustrated this ideology again in the interview with Kristen Welker when he explained his trade war. “Look,” he said. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”
It is not, in fact, that simple.
This impulse to downplay expertise and concentrate power in a strongman shows in Trump’s tapping of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting national security advisor, as well as acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, Trump doesn’t think he needs experts in at least three of those four senior posts. Perhaps it also shows there are few experts still willing to work in a Trump White House.
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “[p]ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
At the end of March, Kennedy also vowed to study possible links between vaccines and autism, although repeated scholarly studies have shown no link. Kennedy has tapped David Geier, who does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license, to perform the study.
On Thursday, former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that both Geier and Kennedy have made significant money thanks to their anti-vax stands as they monetize alleged treatments and sue pharmaceutical companies.
In Ars Technica on April 30, microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole explored another angle to understand Kennedy’s policies. She noted that Kennedy, who is neither a doctor nor a public health expert, does not believe in the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory.
In a 2021 book, Kennedy argued the idea that microscopic viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi cause disease serves the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry that grew around it by “emphasiz[ing] targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those supporting this system, including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a proponent of the Covid vaccine, of misleading the American public.
While Kennedy appears to believe germs exist, he also claims to believe in the older theory of disease called “miasma theory,” although as Mole points out, he misunderstands that theory—the idea that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors—and really appears to believe in another old idea: “terrain theory.” Terrain theory maintains that diseases are signs that the internal “terrain” of the body is out of whack.
This would explain Kennedy’s assertion—refuted by doctors—that the children who died of measles were malnourished. As medical blogger Kristen Panthagani, MD/PhD, explains: Kennedy’s way of thinking is “the belief that infections don't pose a risk to healthy people who have optimized their immune system.”
While underlying medical conditions certainly affect people’s health, Mole notes that “the evidence against terrain theory is obvious and all around us.” But if you think germs are less important than overall health, things like the pasteurization of milk to kill E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria bacteria—which Kennedy opposes—are unnecessary.
In 1876, German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the cause of anthrax was a bacterium. Germ theory challenged established practices In the U.S., where doctors in the 1860s during the Civil War believed the best demonstration of their skill was their bloody aprons and instruments, instruments they kept in a velvet-lined case.
In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.”
But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it.
And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago.
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Notes:
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-5/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/04/trump-policies-lawyers-court-judges-unimpressed/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-905.ZO.html
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-trade-deficit-how-much-does-it-matter
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/health/measles-treatments-vaccines-kennedy.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/04/30/rfk-jr-vaccine-testing/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/01/rfk-mmr-vaccines-fetus-claim
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/03/25/vaccine-skeptic-hhs-rfk-immunization-autism/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/01/rfk-autism-study-science/
Beyond the NoiseUnderstanding RFK Jr. RFK Jr. believes many weird things about the causes, treatment, and prevention of infectious diseases. These false beliefs might seem disparate and unrelated, but they’re not. They’re all rooted in a single belief described on pages 285-288 of his book…Read more3 months ago · 271 likes · 312 comments · Paul Offithttps://www.youcanknowthings.com/germ-theory-2/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/trump-second-term-comeback/682573/
Jerry Green, ed. After Wounded Knee: Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Launderdale while Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890–1891 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), pp. 15–17.
Bluesky:
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3loehu7wt5c2h
May 3, 2025
May 3, 2025
I had thought to post a picture tonight and then realized that today was the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby. The event was launched in 1875 as horse racing—with its famous Black jockeys, who won more than half of the first 28 derbies—was gaining an audience in the U.S.
A horse-based event gives me the opportunity to repost a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. While it has no deep meaning, it does illustrate that there is history all around us, a theme you’ll hear more about from me soon. And it was totally fun to research, too. I spent hours watching Mr. Ed shows and reading entertainment theory, but the insightful detail—and the inclusion of Khartoum—is all Michael. This piece remains one of my favorite things I ever had a hand in writing.
So tonight, let’s take the night off from the craziness of today's America and recall past eras when horses could make history.
1) Traveller
General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.
2) Comanche
Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.
3) Beautiful Jim Key
Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia—buttons, photos, and postcards—or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”
4) Man o’ War
Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss—to Upset—came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.
5) Trigger
Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.
6) Sergeant Reckless
American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.
7) Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.
8) Black Jack
Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands—a U.S. brand and an army serial number—recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.
9) Khartoum
Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him…and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
10) Secretariat
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.”
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Notes:
May 2, 2025
Yesterday I identified incorrectly the messaging app newly fired national security advisor Michael Waltz was using at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday as the unsecure Signal app. Joseph Cox of 404 Media identified the app as “an obscure and unofficial version of Signal” from “a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them.” As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, this third-party app introduces even more insecurity into those White House communications.
Today I spent time organizing the many tabs I had opened over the past six weeks. When they were grouped by topics, what emerged was the story of an administration that decided from the start to portray President Donald Trump as a king, creating an alternative social media ecosystem designed, as Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, “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.” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
They are engaged in a marketing campaign to establish Trump’s false version of reality as truth. The White House has also brought into the press pool right-wing influencers, who are asking questions that tee up opportunities for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to push administration talking points, which the influencers then amplify on social media.
Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism are showing today in the announcement that there will be a military parade on Trump’s 79th birthday, June 14, which coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Second Continental Congress’s establishment of the Continental Army in 1775. About 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters will proceed from near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, to the National Mall at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Trump’s attempt to empower loyalists showed today in the news that the Trump administration has reached a settlement in principle with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Trump loyalist who was shot by Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd as she tried to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby on January 6, 2021. The right-wing Judicial Watch organization had filed a $30 million civil suit on behalf of Babbitt’s estate. A 2021 internal review determined that Byrd saved lives.
The administration’s hunkering down in right-wing ideology showed as well in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s public attack on U.S. ally Germany for declaring the German right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist party that goes against Germany’s “free democratic order.” That designation is the result of a three-year investigation. It allows the government more leeway in monitoring the AfD.
Both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire White House advisor Elon Musk supported the AfD and backed it in a recent election. Rubio took AfD’s side today, writing on social media that that new designation was “tyranny in disguise.” He attacked the current government and urged Germany to “reverse course.”
The German Foreign Office responded publicly. “This is democracy. The decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”
It says something about the Trump administration that the German government is lecturing the U.S. government about the dangers of right-wing extremism.
Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan spoke to reporters yesterday, threatening Wisconsin governor Tony Evers with arrest after the governor issued a memo to state workers directing them to check with a lawyer before turning over documents or other items to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Evers said Republicans were mischaracterizing his memo, which did not direct anyone to break the law.
"We now have a federal government that will threaten or arrest an elected official, or even everyday American citizens who have broken no laws, committed no crimes and done nothing wrong," Evers said. "And as disgusted as I am about the continued actions of the Trump administration, I'm not afraid."
Yesterday, at an event for judges, jurists, and lawyers, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke out against the attacks on judges currently plaguing the country. Judge Esther Salas, whose son Daniel was murdered by a man who came to their house looking for her, has been calling out the recent tactic of sending pizzas to the homes of judges or their children, making the point that right-wing opponents know where they live. Furthering their attempt at intimidation, the perpetrators have been using the name of Judge Salas’s son.
Judge Jackson began her remarks yesterday by saying she wanted to address “the elephant in the room”: the attacks on our legal system. Such attacks are not just on individuals, she said, but undermine the system itself. “Attacks on judicial independence is how countries that are not free, not fair, and not rule of law oriented, operate,” she said, and she told her colleagues: “I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.” According to Laura N. Pérez Sánchez of the New York Times, the audience gave her a standing ovation.
At least some of the administration’s intimidation is an attempt to cow opponents. It does not appear to be working.
Yesterday, about 1,500 lawyers and their allies packed the plaza outside Manhattan’s federal courthouse to defend the rule of law. According to Santul Nerkar of the New York Times, they held up pocket Constitutions, reaffirmed their oath to support and defend the Constitution, and chanted: “The rule of law protects us all. Without it we will surely fall.”
Speaking in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., constitutional law scholar and U.S. representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The whole country needs a constitutional refresher.” He recited the Preamble of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
On March 6, Trump issued an executive order attacking the law firm Perkins Coie, which has represented high-profile Democratic individuals and causes, by barring the federal government from hiring the firm, suspending the security clearances of individuals working for it, barring its lawyers from entering federal office buildings, and preparing to end government contracts with any of its clients.
Rather than back down, as several other firms did, Perkins Coie sued the next day. Today, Judge Beryl Howell permanently barred any enforcement of Trump's executive order, saying it “violates the Constitution and is thus null and void.” In her opinion, Howell noted that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.” Trump’s executive order violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to free speech, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, and the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of right to counsel.
She pointed out that the fair and impartial administration of justice has been part of the U.S. since John Adams “made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre.” “I had no hesitation,” Adams wrote in his diary, because “the Bar ought…to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.”
Today, Riley Board and Dylan Tusinski of the Portland Press Herald reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Maine reached a settlement in the state’s lawsuit against the Trump administration after it froze funding to Maine education. The administration claimed the state violates the law because it allows transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams. Governor Janet Mills said she was following state and federal law and that Trump could not change the law by fiat. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said the state had no choice but to sue in order to force the USDA to follow the law. The settlement restores the funding and establishes that the administration will go through the legally required process to pursue its policy.
When Trump tried to bully Governor Mills over the issue at a White House meeting in February, she told him, “See you in court.” Today she commented: “It’s good to feel a victory like this. I stood in the White House and when confronted by the president of the United States, I told him I’d see him in court. Well, we did see him in court, and we won.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched a different lawsuit against the Maine Department of Education that would pull funding primarily from poorer students and students with disabilities. “That’s a separate complaint they filed a few weeks ago, it’s only a one-page complaint that cites no authority, no case, no law,” Mills said. “We’ll see them in court on that one as well.”
Finally, tonight, Trump’s apparent determination to dominate the news and to project an image of leadership is overlapping with his increasingly erratic behavior. After suggesting on Tuesday that he’d like to be Pope, tonight the president of the United States posted on his social media site an AI-generated image of himself wearing papal robes and a miter.
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Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-signal-scandal-somehow-just-managed-to-get-much-worse
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/06/trump-white-house-media-social-influencers/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/02/white-house-influencers-propaganda-leavitt/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-army-military-parade-birthday-2f5cd12c8ccd4efddc29bfa3cf8f2705
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4vz9jed5lo
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/g-s1-64037/afd-germany-extremist-alternative
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/us/politics/supreme-court-justice-jackson.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/nyregion/national-law-day-courthouse-protests.html?smid=bs-share
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278290/gov.uscourts.dcd.278290.185.0.pdf
https://www.pressherald.com/2025/05/02/maine-settles-case-over-frozen-usda-school-funds/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, May 2, 2025, 10:29 p.m.
Bluesky:
vermontgmg.bsky.social/post/3lo7r6g5fqc2q
May 2, 2025
May 1, 2025
May 1, 2025
President Donald Trump waited until the 101st day of his administration to fire national security advisor Mike Waltz, the official responsible for including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic on an unsecure Signal chat in which leaders shared classified information about a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who uploaded the classified information in that chat and shared it in another unsecure chat with his wife, brother, and personal friends, is still in the Cabinet.
On April 28 the U.S. campaign against the Houthis cost a $60 million F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet. The plane fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier when the vessel turned sharply to avoid fire from the Houthis while military personnel were moving the aircraft. Both the aircraft and the tow tractor moving it were lost, and one sailor suffered minor injuries.
The Signal scandal does not appear to have changed the Trump team’s communications habits. A Reuters photographer caught Waltz looking at his Signal messages during yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. The list of messages included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Vice President J.D. Vance, whose message began: “I have confirmation from my counterpart….” Although Signal messages appear to violate the Presidential Records Act that requires the preservation of documents from an administration, the Trump team apparently continues to use the app.
Trump announced that he will nominate Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the position Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) expected but that Trump pulled from her because the Republicans' majority in the House of Representatives is so slim. Secretary of State Rubio will assume the duties of national security advisor. Rubio is now serving as secretary of state, national security advisor, U.S. archivist, and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). All of these jobs are high-level, work-intense positions.
A spokesperson for the State Department learned about the change in Rubio’s portfolio from a reporter during a press briefing.
At 101 days, the “Department of Government Efficiency” and its leader, billionaire Elon Musk, are also running into trouble. Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion from government spending, but that number kept dropping until he said DOGE will save about $150 billion. As David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine noted in the New York Times, that number is largely unsubstantiated. The DOGE team’s list of cuts is riddled with errors. In addition, the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE cuts have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year, not including lawsuits.
Yesterday Musk told reporters that Congress will have to get to work to make the cuts he began permanent as he pulls back from government work to oversee Tesla. His foray into politics so badly hurt the company’s performance that it saw a 71% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2025. According to Emily Glazer, Becky Peterson, and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has begun looking for a new chief executive. While both Musk and Tesla’s board deny the report, Musk will move back toward company business. When asked if he needed a successor in the White House, Musk answered: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
It’s not clear that Congress will, in fact, embrace the cuts DOGE has made willy-nilly throughout the government. Three days ago, a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that only 35% of Americans approve “of the way Elon Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration,” while 57% disapprove. “The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee told Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.”
As the damage it has caused becomes clearer, DOGE seems unlikely ever to become more popular. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has turned control of the Interior Department over to a DOGE operative, and Wes Siler reports tonight that DOGE is preparing a “reduction in force” for the National Park Service, bringing total workforce losses there to about a quarter of all NPS staff. According to a group of NPS employees calling themselves the Resistance Rangers, the cuts are directed at regional and national offices that support park-based staff in order to make the cuts less visible to the public.
As Siler notes in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the National Park Service is an important public-facing part of the federal government. Parks are “highly visible, and serve as symbols of national pride.” He notes that hurting “the visitor experience, attraction closures, and general bad news around NPS may serve to embarrass the administration more than news of, say, reductions to Internal Revenue Service staffing.”
Problems at DOGE continue to emerge. Jake Pearson of ProPublica reported yesterday that the DOGE employee who is working to shrink the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Gavin Kliger, owns stock in four companies the CFPB oversees. This conflict of interest potentially violates federal ethics laws.
Yesterday David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that the DOGE operative installed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Christopher Sweet, is an undergraduate with no government experience. He is using artificial intelligence to comb through the agency’s rules and regulations, compare them with the laws authorizing them, identify rules that can be relaxed or removed, and rewrite them.
A source from HUD told Gilbert and Elliott that such work is redundant: officials created the rules only after “a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder.” Another source told the Wired reporters they were informed that Sweet is refining a model “to be used across the government.”
As Trump’s poll numbers have dropped, Trump’s team has doubled down on immigration to energize its base. Today Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a federal judge Trump appointed to the Southern District of Texas, rejected the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting Venezuelans from his district. This ruling may have implications for lawsuits elsewhere.
Rodriguez permanently prohibited the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans from the Southern District of Texas under that law. He noted that the law authorizes such deporations only during wartime or a hostile invasion, and concluded that its “plain ordinary meaning” meant an invasion by military forces, not migration by alleged gang members.
Trump’s empowerment of heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics led last Thursday to a raid on a house in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in which agents who said they were U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI put a family outside in the rain in their underwear and then tore apart the house. They took the family’s phones, laptops, and life savings. But the people in the house were not the ones on the search warrant. They were all U.S. citizens, a mother and three girls recently arrived from Maryland.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” the woman told KFOR news. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
In his recent interview with Trump, Terry Moran of ABC News revealed that Trump has a problem with a disconnect between his actions and the country’s principles. Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence installed in the Oval Office, and Moran asked the president what it means to him. Trump’s answer made it clear he has never read the document. “Well, it means exactly what it says,” he answered. “It's a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity, and love and respect and it means a lot. And it's something very special to, to our country.”
Last night, former vice president Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president in 2024, gave her first major speech since losing the election. “Throughout my entire career…I have always believed in the ideals of our nation,” she began, “[t]he ideals reflected in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. Ideals advanced and affirmed by the service and sacrifice of generations of patriots, the ideals that ground the Constitution of the United States, that here in our country, power ultimately lies not with the wealthy or well connected, but with all of us, with ‘We the People.’”
After excoriating the Trump administration’s “narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves, all while abandoning allies and retreating from the world,” Harris noted that “this is not a vision that Americans want.” She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”
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Notes:
https://people.com/marco-rubio-four-different-roles-trump-administration-11726691
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/politics/us-navy-jet-overboard/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contracts-savings.html
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-musk-ceo-search-board-0ce61af9
https://newrepublic.com/post/194659/melon-musk-report-tesla-looking-new-ceo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/28/elon-musk-approval-poll/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/01/trump-100-days-elon-musk-doge
Wes Siler’s NewsletterDOI Prepares To Fire 1,500 Further National Park StaffAccording to internal communications leaked to me, DOGE is preparing a “reduction in force” for the National Park Service that would remove a further 1,500 full-time members of that agency’s workforce. That would take total workforce losses to approximately 5,000, or one-quarter of all NPS staff. The cuts could begin as soon as tomorrow…Read more13 hours ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Wes SilerWes Siler’s NewsletterEvery DOI Employee Asked To Justify Ongoing EmploymentThe Department of the Interior is asking every single one of its 70,000 employees to submit resumes supporting their ongoing employment, ahead of mass reductions in force. The measure includes employees at the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and more…Read more7 days ago · 87 likes · 16 comments · Wes Silerhttps://www.wired.com/story/doge-college-student-ai-rewrite-regulations-deregulation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/us/texas-judge-trump-alien-enemies-act.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-gavin-kliger-stock
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