Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 6
October 14, 2025
October 14, 2025
The government shutdown, which started on October 1, is entering its third week. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained this morning, the Senate is in session, and it keeps voting on two bills to reopen the government. Majority leader John Thune (R-SD) keeps having the Senate vote on the measure passed by Republicans in the House. That measure funds the government until November 21. It has failed repeatedly to get past the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. The Democrats have offered an alternative measure, which extends the healthcare premium tax credit—without which health insurance costs on the Affordable Care Act market will skyrocket—and restores nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. That measure, too, has repeatedly failed to pass.
Murphy notes that normally the two sides would negotiate. But, he says, President Donald J. Trump is telling Republican senators to “BOYCOTT NEGOTIATING,” and they are “following orders.”
The House of Representatives is even more dysfunctional. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pushed the continuing resolution through the chamber on September 19, the Friday before leaving town for a week. Then Johnson canceled the House sessions on Monday and Tuesday, September 29 and 30, both to jam the Senate into having to accept the House measure and to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was elected on September 23. Grijalva will provide the 218th signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the files collected during the federal investigation into the crimes of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his officials promised to release those files, but have tried to avoid doing so since news broke that Trump, who was a close friend of Epstein, is named in them.
Emily Brooks of The Hill notes that jamming the Senate as Johnson tried to do was a tactic employed by the far-right Freedom Caucus, and they are cheering him on. But Democratic senators refused to vote in favor of the House measure, standing firm on extending the premium tax credits before their loss decimates the healthcare markets. Now, although Democrats are in Washington, D.C., ready to negotiate, Johnson says he will not call House members back to work until the Senate passes the House measure.
Brooks notes that not all Republicans are keen on the optics of staying out of session during a shutdown. Mike Lillis of The Hill reported on Sunday that the cancellation of all House votes since late September has some Republicans warning that the tactic will backfire. In addition to the question of healthcare premiums, there is the issue of military pay stalled by the shutdown, and the fact that, by law, Congress was supposed to deliver its 2026 budget by September 30.
Over the weekend, the administration tried to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic senators to cave when it announced it would fire about 4,200 federal employees. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes that the threat seemed at least in part to be designed to follow through on a threat Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had made to pressure Democrats before the shutdown. When those layoffs didn’t happen, the administration then suggested it would not pay furloughed workers after the shutdown ends. After backlash, they walked that threat back. The new announcement seemed in part an attempt to prove they would do something.
On Friday night, hundreds of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received notices they were being fired, only to receive a follow-up letter less than a day later saying they were not fired after all. As Tom Bartlett of The Atlantic put it: “No explanation, no apology.”
Marshall points out that other cuts seem to have come from agencies Trump especially dislikes, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which Trump has hated since its then-director Chris Krebs said the 2020 presidential election was not hacked. The administration also gutted the office responsible for special education in the U.S. Department of Education serving about 7.4 million students with special needs.
Today, Trump tried to pressure Democrats by telling reporters the slashing of government programs will hurt only Democrats. “We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work,” he said. “So the Democrats are getting killed, but they’re not telling the people about that…. So we are closing up Democrat programs that we think that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open again.”
The administration continues to try to demonstrate its power. Today it announced its fifth known attack on a boat “just off the coast of Venezuela” in international waters. Once again, Trump asserted that the boat was trafficking narcotics. The U.S. has now killed 27 people in this and similar attacks, making the argument that drug smugglers are enemy combatants. This is problematic not just because the administration has never produced any evidence that those killed have been smuggling drugs but also because lawyers say these killings are illegal. Charlie Savage of the New York Times points out that the administration has not produced any legal analysis that defends its position.
Conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “That’s twenty-seven flat-out murders. That’s twenty-seven lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law.”
The administration’s attempt to portray itself as powerful is running not just into the law but into popular perception. The administration insists it needs extraordinary powers to fight back against South American gang members illegally in the U.S. The attack on the boats serves the idea that drug cartels are invading the U.S. to kill Americans, a theme the administration hits when it insists that those it is rounding up in the U.S. are “the worst of the worst.”
But as Jacob Soboroff and Kay Guerrero of MSNBC reported today, the Department of Homeland Security announced on October 3 that more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants had been arrested in and around Chicago since September, when their operation began. It said those arrested included “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” But it has produced little evidence for that claim, and federal data shows that more than 70% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees as of last month had no criminal convictions.
So the administration is upping its claims. Today the Fox News Channel reported on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegation that “narcoterrorists in Mexico are reportedly working in coordination with domestic extremist groups to place bounties worth thousands of dollars on the heads of federal immigration officers in Chicago.” DHS called it “an organized campaign of terror against agents just trying to do their jobs.”
The administration is attempting to paint immigrants as violent criminals and those opposed to their raids as terrorists. They are producing slick videos to make that point. But protesters have deprived them of photo opportunities by dressing in animal costumes. ICE agents staring down a giant frog and Mr. Potato Head don’t look very dominant.
Cracks are showing elsewhere in the administration’s picture of strength. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that media outlets agree they would not publish any material about the Defense Department—even if it were unclassified—unless it was explicitly authorized by department officials. He set a deadline of 5:00 tonight for them to sign an agreement or hand over their press badges.
Every major press outlet, including the Fox News Channel, refused, saying such a demand is an assault on the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Airports around the country are refusing to air the video Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recorded to be shown at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints, which blames Democrats for the shutdown. Some have noted it violates the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government assets for partisan purposes.
As the administration faces resistance, Republican lawmakers seem worried about the upcoming No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark notes that Republican lawmakers are scrambling to get in front of a potentially large protest event with a prebuttal. House majority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) has alleged that those protesting are “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, “playing to the most radical, small, and violent base in the country…. They just do not love this country.”
While Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) retorted that the No Kings event is about loving America, not hating it. “It’s a rally of millions of people all over this country who believe in our Constitution, who believe in American freedom and are not going to let you and Donald Trump turn this country into an authoritarian society.”
Today, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hardline pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.
One of them wrote to the others, “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked [for real for real].”
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5549384-johnson-house-closed-government-shutdown/
https://thehill.com/newsletters/the-movement/5553741-speaker-johnson-freedom-caucus-shutdown/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5550435-pressure-mike-johnson-house-shutdown/
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5554758-senate-gop-vote-government-shutdown/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/mass-layoffs-update
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/us/politics/trump-drugs-boat-attack.html
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/trump-immigrants-violent-crime-chicago-illinois-ice-rcna237272
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5555797-media-outlets-decline-pentagon-policy/
https://apnews.com/article/tsa-video-airports-shutdown-noem-cb6967f94f9c3949c687ddc69f03a801
The Bulwark‘No Kings’ Has Republicans in DisarrayThe upcoming anti-authoritarian “No Kings” rally, which is scheduled to take place across the country on Saturday, including on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol, has set off klaxons for Republican lawmakers, who are scrambling to mount a preemptive defense. While many GOP l…Read more18 hours ago · 673 likes · 151 comments · Joe Perticonehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2025/10/13/kristi-noem-shutdown-video/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146?cid=apn
Bluesky:
chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3m35ky6ddxk2o
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3m36h2h7ivw2s
50501movement.bsky.social/post/3m36psee23c2j
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3m36jgs43b22m
cwebbonline.com/post/3m34selk2qc2g
October 13, 2025
October 13, 2025
Last Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump showed to Canadian officials a plan for a triumphal arch that would sit on the banks of the Potomac River opposite the Lincoln Memorial in a traffic rotary at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge below Arlington National Cemetery. The idea, apparently, is to build the arch to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States in July 2026.
On Thursday, the White House press pool reported, the plan was laid out on President Donald J. Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. The massive stone arch appears to be the same height as or taller than the Lincoln Memorial. Early in the morning on Saturday, October 11, Trump posted on social media an artist’s rendering of what such an arch might look like, complete with what appears to be a gold winged victory statue at the top of the arch.
Triumphal arches are free-standing structures consisting of one or more arches crowned with a flat top for engravings or statues. They hark back to ancient Rome, where leaders built them to commemorate military victories or significant public events. Those arches inspired others, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, built to honor those who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Observers immediately noted that the photographed plan showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong way, and compared the Trump Arch both to the Arc de Triomphe and to another arch modeled on it: the German Arch of Triumph proposed by Adolph Hitler to commemorate Germany’s victory in World War II.
That triumphal arch was never built.
Architect Eric Jenkins told Daniel Jonas Roche of The Architect’s Newspaper that the proposed arch would disrupt the symbolic connection between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The two are connected not only by the Arlington Memorial Bridge, but also by the Civil War. During that war, the nation began to bury its hallowed dead on the grounds of the former home of General Robert E. Lee, who led the troops of the Confederacy. Lee’s Arlington House sits directly behind the memorial to Lincoln, who led the United States to stop the Confederates from dismantling the nation.
The proposed construction of a triumphal arch contrasts with the expected sale and probable demolition of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1940, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was built to house the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration.
In August 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. That law established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
The vision of government behind the Social Security Act was very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, those behind the Social Security Act recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality. They replaced that vision with one in which the government recognized that all Americans were equally valuable.
Their reworking of American government came from the conditions of the United States after the rise of modern industry. Americans had always depended on community, but the harsh conditions of industrialization in the late nineteenth century had made it clear that the government must protect that community. City governments like New York City’s Tammany Hall began to provide a basic system of social welfare for voters, making sure that they had jobs, food, and shelter and that women and children had a support network if a husband or father died.
Then, in the 1930s, the overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression showed that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
And so Perkins pushed for the Social Security Act, the law that became the centerpiece and the symbol of the new relationship between the government and American citizens.
Once FDR signed the law, the next step was to create a building for its administrators. To decorate a building that would be the centerpiece of the government’s new philosophy, administrators announced a competition for the creation of murals to decorate the main corridor of the new building.
Among those who threw their hats into the ring was Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn, one of the most sought-after artists in the United States, a social realist painter who designed murals to illustrate “the meaning of Social Security.” Shahn wrote: “I feel that the whole Social Security idea is one of the real fruits of democracy.” He set out to show that idea in his art.
Shahn depicted the evils of a world of economic insecurity, showing “endless waiting, men standing and waiting, men sitting and waiting, the man and boy going wearily into the long empty perspective of a railroad track.” He showed the “little girl of the mills” and “breaker boys working in a mine. The crippled boy issuing from the mine symbolizes the perils of child labor…a homeless boy is seen sleeping in the street; another child leans from a tenement window.” He showed “the insecurity of dependents—the aged and infirm woman, the helpless mother with her small child.”
Then he illustrated the alleviation of that insecurity through government support. He showed “the building of homes…[and] tremendous public works, furnishing employment and benefitting all of society… youths of a slum area engaged in healthy sport in handball courts…the Harvest—threshing and fruit-gathering, obvious symbols of security, suggesting also security as it applies to the farm family.”
Shahn finished the pieces in 1942, and said: “I think the Social Security mural is the best work I’ve ever done…. I felt I had everything under control—or almost under control—the big masses of color to make it decorative and the little details to make it interesting.”
Shahn’s work stood alongside that of Philip Guston, who depicted the well-being of the family under the Social Security Act; Seymour Fogel, whose portrait of security included children learning and a table piled with food; and sisters Ethel and Jenne Magafan, who were warned their mural in the boardroom should not distract the members, so they painted mountains in snow. Gray Brechin, the founder of the Living New Deal, a nonprofit that tracks the fate of New Deal art, told Timothy Noah of The New Republic that the Cohen building is “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”
But by the time Shahn and the other artists had completed their work, Noah explains, plans for the building had changed. The Social Security Administration never occupied it. First, the War Production Board, which managed the conversion of U.S. companies to wartime production, commandeered the building, and then in 1954 the Voice of America (VOA) moved in.
Like most federal buildings, the Cohen building is owned by the General Services Administration (GSA), to which the agencies in the building pay rent. With a total budget of $300 million, the VOA’s rent could not keep the building up, and in 2020, under the first Trump administration, the GSA told the VOA that it would have to vacate the building by 2028. During the Biden administration, Noah reports, the GSA proposed renovating the building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” but before the report was widely circulated, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) inserted into a water resources bill a provision to sell the building.
Now, although the market for commercial buildings is depressed, the Trump administration is proceeding with the sale.
Since taking office in January 2025, officials in the second Trump administration have made war on the vision of government embodied by the Social Security Act, promoting in its place a return to the rugged individualism that is even less true today than it was a century ago.
Now the administration is getting rid of the building built to house the Social Security Administration, along with the murals that champion the government’s role in protecting the equality and security of ordinary people, while Trump contemplates building a triumphal arch, carving MAGA ideology into the nation’s capital in stone.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/10/trump-triumphal-arch-washington/
https://www.archpaper.com/2025/10/trump-triumphal-arch-arlington-national-cemetery/
https://www.insidevoa.com/a/historic-murals-at-voice-of-america/1364570.html
Howard Greenfield, Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life (New York: Random House, 1998), available on Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/benshahnartistsl00gree/page/n7/mode/2up
https://edan.si.edu/transcription/pdf_files/41347.pdf
https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/wilbur-j-cohen-building-guston-fresco-washington-dc/
https://livingnewdeal.org/artists/ethel-magafan/
https://newrepublic.com/article/201055/ben-shahn-wpa-art-trump
https://newrepublic.com/article/201204/ben-shahn-murals-new-deal-cohen-building-trump
https://www.pbrb.gov/files/2025/05/OMB-Approval-Letter-1.pdf
https://francesperkinscenter.org/learn/her-life/
Bluesky:
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3m2sd2a4mqs2f
October 12, 2025
October 12, 2025
On October 9, President Donald J. Trump’s office issued an official proclamation declaring Monday, October 13, “Columbus Day.” The proclamation says that the day is one on which “our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus—the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”
The proclamation goes on to present a white Christian nationalist version of American history, with much more emphasis on Christianity than Trump’s previous, similar proclamations. It claims that Columbus was guided by a “noble mission: to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands.” “Upon his arrival,” it says, “he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.”
“Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve,” it goes on, “Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas—paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”
Then the proclamation turns to MAGA’s complaints about modern revisions of this triumphalist history, saying: “Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.” Our nation, the proclamation says, “will now abide by a simple truth: Christopher Columbus was a true American hero, and every citizen is eternally indebted to his relentless determination.”
This proclamation completely misunderstands the fifteenth-century world of expanding European maritime routes that entirely reworked world trade—including trade in human beings—and the role of Italian mariner Christopher Columbus, who worked for Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, in that expansion.
It also misses what historians call the “Columbian Exchange”: the transfer of plants and animals between the Americas and the “Old World”—Europe, Asia, and Africa—after Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. That exchange went both ways and transformed the globe, but its effect on the Americas was devastating. When Columbus and his sailors “discovered” the “New World,” they brought with them both ideologies and germs that would decimate the peoples living there.
Estimates of the number of Native people living in North America and South America in 1490 vary widely, but there were at least as many as 50 million, and possibly as many as 100 million. In the next 200 years, displacement, enslavement, war, and especially disease would kill about 90% of those native peoples. Most historians see the destruction of America’s Indigenous peoples as the brutal triumph of European white men over those they perceived to be inferior.
Historians are not denigrating historical actors or the nation when they uncover sordid parts of our past. Historians study how and why societies change. As we dig into the past, we see patterns that never entirely foreshadow the present but that give us ideas about how people in the past have dealt with circumstances that look similar to circumstances today. If we are going to get an accurate picture of how a society works, historians must examine it honestly, seeing the bad as well as the good. With luck, seeing those patterns will help us make better decisions about our own lives, our communities, and our nation in the present.
History is different from commemoration. History is about what happened in the past, while commemoration is about the present. We put up statues and celebrate holidays to honor figures from the past who embody some quality we admire.
The Columbus Day holiday began in the 1920s, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan tried to create a lily-white country by attacking not just Black Americans, but also immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. This was an easy sell in the Twenties, since government leaders during the First World War had emphasized Americanism and demanded that immigrants reject all ties to their countries of origin. From there it was a short step for native-born white American Protestants to see anyone different from themselves as a threat to the nation.
The Klan attacked the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. Klan members spread the rumor that one became a leader of the Knights of Columbus by vowing to exterminate Protestants and to torture and kill anyone upon orders of Catholic leaders.
To combat the growing animosity toward Catholics and racial minorities, the Knights of Columbus began to highlight the roles those groups had played in American history. In the early 1920s they published three books in a “Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions” series, including The Gift of Black Folk by pioneering Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois.
They also turned to an old American holiday. Since the late 1860s, Italian Americans in New York City had celebrated a “Columbus Day” to honor the heritage they shared with the famous Italian explorer. In the 1930s the Knights of Columbus joined with media mogul Generoso Pope, an important Italian American politician in New York City, to rally behind the idea of a national Columbus Day. In 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aware of the need to solidify his new Democratic coalition by welcoming all Democratic voters, proclaimed Columbus Day, October 12, a federal holiday. In 1971 the day became unfixed from a date; it is now the second Monday in October.
The Knights intended for Columbus Day to honor the important contributions of immigrants—and Catholics—to American society. But in the 1960s a growing focus on the lives and experiences of Indigenous Americans forced a reckoning with the choice of Columbus as a standard bearer. Currently, seventeen states and the District of Columbia use the official holiday to celebrate Indigenous history. Some Oklahoma tribal members simply use the day to honor their tribe.
As society changes, the values we want to commemorate shift. In the 1920s, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because celebrating an Italian defended a multicultural society. Now, though, he represents the devastation of America’s Indigenous people at the hands of European colonists who brought to North America and South America germs and a fever for gold and God. It is not “left-wing arson” to want to commemorate a different set of values than the country held in the 1920s.
What is arson, though, is the attempt to skew history to serve a modern-day political narrative. Rejecting an honest account of the past makes it impossible to see accurate patterns. The lessons we learn about how society changes will be false, and the decisions we make based on those false patterns will not be grounded in reality.
And a society grounded in fiction, rather than reality, cannot function.
—
Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/columbus-day-2025/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2101-columbus-day
https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/columbia/2020/july/kofc-racial-equality.html
October 11, 2025
October 11, 2025
Spent the day with family and friends as we said goodbye to yet another summer.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo “Gracie (more water)” by Peter Ralston]
Notes:
You can find Peter at his studio in Rockport, Maine, or here: https://ralstongallery.com/
October 10, 2025
All of President Donald J. Trump’s lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize came to naught today as the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s prize to María Corina Machado of Venezuela. Machado has led a movement to challenge Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro. The committee cited “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
When she learned of the award, Ms. Machado responded “This is an achievement of a whole society. I am just, you know, one person. I certainly do not deserve this.”
White House communications director Steven Cheung responded: “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin said the committee’s “credibility has largely been lost,” prompting Trump to thank him on social media.
That Trump and his loyalists are standing with the autocrat Putin rather than democracy is clearer every day.
Federal agents in Chicago have been targeting journalists, and yesterday, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis granted a two-week temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents in Chicago from “[d]ispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, threatening or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a Journalist, unless Defendants have probable cause to believe that the individual has committed a crime.”
Today, masked border patrol agents pinned WGN-TV producer Debbie Brockman to the ground and arrested her after she recorded agents detaining a Latino man. The agents said she had been detained for “obstruction.” Later, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin accused Brockman of throwing “objects” at a Border Patrol vehicle and said she was arrested “for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.”
According to WGN, Brockman was later released without charges against her. But the agents accomplished their goal of terrorizing a journalist as a warning to others.
Yesterday a second Republican governor, Phil Scott of Vermont, opposed the administration’s deployment of federalized National Guard troops to Chicago and to Portland, Oregon. “I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” Scott said. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw January 6 a few years ago.”
ICE agents denied Illinois senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats, access to the Broadview, Illinois, ICE facility today, although Congress members have the right to conduct oversight. Durbin noted that this was their fourth attempt to access ICE facilities. “I’ve never had this kind of stonewalling by any presidential administration. Something’s going on in there that they don’t want us to see. I don’t know what it is, but all Americans should be asking the same question: ‘What is it? Can you justify it under the Constitution?’”
Nandita Bose, Jana Winter, Jeff Mason, Tim Reid, and Ted Hesson of Reuters reported on Thursday that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is playing a central role in the administration’s crackdown on opponents. The administration is threatening to target funding behind what the administration calls “domestic terror networks,” those it claims embrace “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got into the act of attacking the administration’s opponents today, claiming that the Democratic senators holding out for the extension of the premium tax credits so that healthcare premiums don’t skyrocket—a position supported by 78% of Americans—are taking that position only because they’re afraid of anti-Trumpers. Johnson called the October 18 No Kings rally a “hate America rally” of “[t]he antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists…. It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes,” he said.
Majority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) joined in, calling those who are taking a stand against Trump’s destruction of the nation’s constitutional checks and balances “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, saying it “is set to hold…a hate America rally in [Washington, D.C.] next week.” Legal scholar David Noll noted that it’s “interesting that if you say the [C]onstitution creates a separation of powers systems in which there are no kings, they think you hate [A]merica.”
Josh Dawsey reported in the Wall Street Journal today that administrative officials joke about ruling Congress with an “iron fist” and that Trump ally Steve Bannon has compared Congress to Russia’s largely ceremonial Duma.
Today House speaker Johnson announced he would cancel another week’s session, making four weeks he has kept House members from their jobs. Johnson first sent the members home on September 19. Staying out of session means not working on the budget that is overdue or hammering out the necessary appropriations bills. It means not working on figuring out a way to extend the healthcare premium tax credits that Democrats are demanding.
It also means not swearing in Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who won election on September 23 and who will provide the 218th vote on a discharge petition to trigger a vote on a measure requiring the release of the files the government has on the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The administration is trying to ram its will through Congress. Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the shutdown on Democrats, sending automatic out-of-office email replies that blame Democrats for the shutdown, for example, in violation of the Hatch Act that prohibits using government resources for partisan purposes. As the shutdown drags on and most Americans blame Republicans, their efforts to shift the blame are ratcheting up. Now the administration has posted a video at airport Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines featuring Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem saying that operations are impacted because “Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government.”
Immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick commented: “Can you think of a single movie in which there is a video from the government denouncing its political opponents playing on a loop in public spaces in which that government was the good guy?”
Natalie Allison and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post reported yesterday that members of the administration have not engaged with Democrats at all to negotiate an end to the shutdown. Tonight the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson, Meryl Kornfield, and Jacob Bogage reported that the administration has begun another round of firings to put more pressure on the Democrats, although legal analysts say such layoffs are illegal. Trump told reporters they were laying off “people that the Democrats want.”
Labor unions sued preemptively to prevent the layoffs after Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought threatened he would use a shutdown to slash more of the government.
Among the duties of Congress Trump has taken into his own hands are tariff duties, authority for which the Constitution gives solely to Congress. Nonetheless, Trump is continuing to monkey with tariff rates. This morning he posted on social media that “[s]ome very strange things are happening in China!” China is the world’s largest producer of the rare earth minerals necessary for a wide range of manufacturing, including robotics, electric vehicles, and electronics. Yesterday, Chinese officials restricted exports of the minerals. In his post, Trump threatened to retaliate against China and suggested that there was no reason to go through with an upcoming meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping.
Trump’s threat sent stock prices tumbling.
After the stock market closed for the day, Trump posted on social media again, saying he would impose tariffs of 100% on products from China beginning on November 1. This levy is on top of current tariffs. Stocks fell further in after-market trading.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10/10/world/nobel-peace-prize
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571.42.0_3.pdf
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-deserved-the-nobel-prize-says-vladimir-putin/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/10/rare-earth-trump-china-tariff.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-china-tariffs
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/10/trump-trade-tariffs-china-software.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/stock-market-trump-tariffs.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/10/investing/us-stock-market
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/politics/trump-xi-china-tariffs-rare-earth.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/10/trump-xi-china-meeting/
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-second-term-policies-gifts-494731c7?mod=hp_lead_pos3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/09/trump-government-shutdown-democrats-negotiations/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/30/labor-unions-sue-omb-opm-00589170
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October 10, 2025
October 9, 2025
October 9, 2025
Today Trump appointee Lindsey Halligan did what President Donald J. Trump placed her at the position of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to do: deliver an indictment of New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud. The previous U.S. attorney there, Erik Seibert, refused to take either the James case or a case against former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress to a grand jury for an indictment, believing there was not enough evidence to convict.
Seibert resigned in the face of Trump’s fury at his decision, and Trump replaced him with Halligan, a former aide and Trump’s personal lawyer. It is not clear that Halligan holds her position legally, but she has now delivered the indictments Trump demanded.
Trump bears a grudge against Comey for his pursuit of an investigation into the relationship between members of Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—a relationship two subsequent investigations proved. He bears a grudge against James for successfully suing the Trump Organization for fraud.
The Department of Justice is supposed to be nonpartisan, and it certainly is not supposed to be an arm of presidential lawfare. Nonetheless, Trump has been perverting it to protect his loyalists and persecute his perceived enemies. On September 20, Trump posted on social media a message apparently intended privately for Attorney General Pam Bondi—such a communication is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, by the way—demanding prosecution of Comey, James, and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA). “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!,” he wrote.
Just five days later, Halligan delivered an indictment of Comey. The former FBI director appeared at his arraignment in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, yesterday. He pleaded not guilty and asked for a jury trial. Comey’s lawyers told the judge they will be challenging the charges as vindictive and selective prosecution. They will also be challenging Halligan’s appointment as U.S. attorney as “unlawful.”
Now Trump has secured an indictment of Attorney General James. She responded in a statement, saying: “This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system. He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding, all because I did my job as the New York State Attorney General.
“These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost. The president’s actions are a grave violation of our Constitutional order and have drawn sharp criticism from members of both parties.
“His decision to fire a United States Attorney who refused to bring charges against me—and replace them with someone who is blindly loyal not to the law, but to the president—is antithetical to the bedrock principles of our country. This is the time for leaders on both sides of the aisle to speak out against this blatant perversion of our system of justice.
“I stand strongly behind my office’s litigation against the Trump Organization. We conducted a two-year investigation based on the facts and evidence—not politics. Judges have upheld the trial court’s finding that Donald Trump, his company, and his two sons are liable for fraud.
“I am a proud woman of faith, and I know that faith and fear cannot share the same space. And so today I am not fearful, I am fearless, and as my faith teaches me, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. We will fight these baseless charges aggressively, and my office will continue to fiercely protect New Yorkers and their rights. And I will continue to do my job.”
The Trump administration’s attempt to consolidate power by claiming a vast conspiracy is trying to undermine the government appears to be too much for increasing numbers of Americans. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday showed that Trump’s approval rating fell after the president’s speech to the nation’s top military officials. In his rambling remarks, Trump claimed the U.S. faces “a war from within” and suggested the military should use cities as “training grounds.”
The poll said that 58% of American adults think the president should deploy troops only to areas with external threats, while 25% disagree. Eighty-three percent of adults think the military should remain politically neutral. That number includes 93% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans. Only 10% of the adults polled disagreed that the military should remain politically neutral. That number included 5% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans.
Federal judges are standing firm against the administration’s overreach. Today U.S. District Judge April M. Perry stopped the federal deployment of 200 National Guard troops from Texas and another 300 from Illinois in and around Chicago, Illinois, for two weeks. “I have found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois,” Perry said.
She pointed to the refusals by grand juries—including one Tuesday night—to indict protesters accused of assaulting law enforcement, and said they cast doubt on the Department of Homeland Security’s “credibility and assessment of what is happening on the streets of Chicago.”
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Donald Trump is not a king—and his administration is not above the law. Today, the court confirmed what we all know: there is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago.”
Earlier in the day, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis granted a two-week temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents from “[d]ispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, threatening or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a Journalist, unless Defendants have probable cause to believe that the individual has committed a crime.” Federal agents in Chicago have been targeting journalists.
Both Governor Pritzker and California governor Gavin Newsom have asked Republican governors to take a stand against the administration’s attacks on state sovereignty, even as Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has permitted soldiers from the Texas National Guard to be deployed in Illinois. Pritzker and Newsom have threatened to leave the National Governors Association, a bipartisan organization founded in 1908 to enable governors to work together outside of partisanship, if it did not speak up about the unlawful deployment of federal troops in their states.
Today, in an interview with J. David Goodman of the New York Times, current chair of the National Governors Association Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma said the association could not weigh in because it is “an educational organization under I.R.S. code.”
But Stitt went on to criticize the federal deployment of troops in Illinois, making him the first Republican governor to question that deployment. Stitt noted that once such a precedent is established, future presidents could use it against Republican states. He said: “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
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Notes:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-attorney-plans-resign-amid-pressure-trump-after/story?id=125750006
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487574/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487574.67.0_2.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571.42.0_3.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/us/politics/oklahoma-governor-national-guard.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/us/politics/oklahoma-governor-national-guard.html
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