Donald Trump

Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model, attacking Europe and aligning with Putin

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 13, 2026

On April 12, the day of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.

The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.

Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.

Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.

Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.

It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.

But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.

Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”

Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.

Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.

But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.

Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 6, 2026

“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”

Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.

Today was another surreal day in the second Trump administration.

At the traditional White House Easter Egg roll this morning, Trump, whose right hand was swollen and covered with makeup after his weekend away from the cameras, stood with First Lady Melania Trump on a White House balcony, accompanied by a human-sized Easter Bunny. The columns of the White House stood festooned in soft red, white, and blue plaid over the crowd of young children and their parents in festive pastel clothes excited for the day’s events. The band played “Hail to the Chief.” After a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Trump told the audience that “it’s a day where we celebrate Jesus, it’s a day where we celebrate religion, and it’s an honor to be the president of the United States.” Then things veered off course. He continued: “Our country is doing so well like it has never done before. You’ll see that very shortly, and things that we’ve done have not been done before. We’ve broken every record on the stock market, we’ve broken every record on our military.”

And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”

While the children were rolling their eggs along the ground with spoons, Trump spoke to reporters, telling them about Iran, “If it were up to me, I’d like to keep the oil. I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand.” He suggested that attacking Iran’s infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime because “they killed 45,000 people in the last month. More than that. It could be as much as sixty. They killed protesters. They’re animals, and we have to stop them, and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

He claimed again that former presidents are telling him they wish they had done what he did in attacking Iran; all four living ex-presidents have denied speaking to him. Sitting with children drawing pictures, he told them they could sell his autograph on eBay for $25,000. He signed their pictures, and while he signed, he told the children that former President Joe Biden was “incapable of signing his name” so he had aides follow him around with an autopen machine.

A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”

The celebratory speeches about the war compared a rescued airman to Jesus Christ and gave a great deal of detail about the rescue operation, but they didn’t deliver much information to the journalists packed into the room about negotiations or goals or the president’s ultimatum that Iran must agree to his demands by 8:00 tomorrow night or face “obliteration.”

Trump reiterated: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.” He said that while the regime governing the country has changed—meaning its leadership, because the actual regime is still in power—that his reason for undertaking the war was not regime change, but rather to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

He assured the journalists that he has had a plan all along. “I saw somebody said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have a plan.’ I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, Here’s my plan, we’re going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we’re going to do this, and then we’re gonna, and if you don’t do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is…. Every single thing has been thought out by all of us. But I can’t reveal the plan to the media. So, you know, but we’re just thrilled by the success of this operation.”

Trump has said Iranians are upset when the strikes stop, and a reporter challenged him to explain “Why would they want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power?” He answered: “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. The Iranians have, and we’ve had numerous intercepts—’Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing! Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding, and when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, “Please come back, come back, come back!’”

After noting he was responsible for the killing of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, he added: “I did one other but this one was not picked up. Osama bin Laden—If you read my book, I said you’ve got to take him out one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book. To be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.”

A special operations team located and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. Trump’s frequent claim that his book called for a raid against Osama bin Laden has been just as frequently debunked as a lie.

Today was an exhausting day as Americans seem to have little choice but to pay attention to a man who is bizarrely threatening what appear to be war crimes against Iranians while spinning wild tales. The members of both chambers of Congress are away for another week and Republican leaders are showing no sign of calling them back, leaving the American people to face whatever Trump has in mind for tomorrow on our own.

In contrast to Trump’s vision of government according to the whims of a single man, no matter how bonkers those whims might be, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—who, as a naturalized citizen, is not eligible for the presidency—is illustrating what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Mamdani’s videos about governing New York City inform New Yorkers about what their government does. At the same time, though, they lift up and honor the workers who make the wheels of government turn. During his campaign, Mamdani promised his administration would see to it that potholes got filled, and as the road maintenance workers made the trip to fill the 100,000th pothole of the year, he tagged along. The video humanized the process and dignified work that often doesn’t get attention.

Another video today about the 311 call center in New York City that helps residents find resources to help solve everything from where to recycle a mirror to how to get an apartment repaired featured Tangie Williams putting a face to the people in the center as she coached Mamdani himself through a call. Williams told Mamdani that the calls that “tug at my heart” are elderly people who have no family and need both to be heard and to access help, which she provides with evident joy.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 1, 2026

Today, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president attended oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area, alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to observe arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara, a case under which Trump hopes to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case argued before the court today grew out of Trump’s executive order of January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.

Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.

The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”

But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.

In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.

When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.

But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned about Black Americans—there were only 4,272 Black Americans in California in 1870, while there were almost half a million white Americans—but wanted no part of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society.

Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country’s early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designed to clarify that Afro-Caribbeans and Africans—imported to be enslaved—would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only “free white persons” to become citizens.

In the late nineteenth century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins, using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage, and intermarriage.

As late as 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.

The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind upheld the argument that only “free white persons” could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens. After the Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about fifty South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.

Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.

Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.

Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.

The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”

In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”

But one judge after another has sided against him on this issue, and he apparently showed up at the Supreme Court today to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.

Later, Wang described what it was like to argue in court today. She explained, it’s “a nerve-wracking experience to argue any case in the Supreme Court, and especially one as weighty as this one, where the president of the United States is taking aim at a cherished American tradition and individual right of citizenship based on your birth in this country. I myself am a Fourteenth Amendment citizen because my parents had not yet naturalized when I was born. So I walked in today with the spirit of my parents and so many people’s ancestors in that first generation of Americans—whether they naturalized or not, I consider them all Americans. They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“Trump may have sold out our national security to enrich himself”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

March 25, 2026

Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “It wasn’t nuclear-related, it was oil and gas-related,” he added.

Today Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” or, as one put it: “stuff blowing up.”

Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump’s allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called their observation “an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” but officials noted that briefings tend to focus on U.S. successes rather than Iranian actions.

The story of corruption in the Trump administration broke open after Trump fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as stories about contracting irregularities have leaked into the media. The suspicious timing of trades in S&P 500 and oil futures on Monday about fifteen minutes before Trump announced his team had been negotiating with Iran—although it hadn’t—has raised public accusations of insiders trading on national security information and thereby endangering Americans.

Yesterday Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in response to a disclosure the Department of Justice (DOJ) had made, likely inadvertently. As part of the Republicans’ attempt to smear special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents when he left office after his first term, on March 13 the DOJ provided the House Judiciary Committee with documents related to Smith’s investigation.

Raskin noted that some of those documents potentially violate the gag order Judge Aileen Cannon placed on that material as part of the attempt to keep it from public scrutiny. This suggests, he wrote, that the DOJ appears to take the position “that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.”

The documents also “include damning evidence” against Trump. The documents show that highly classified documents from his time in office were mingled with material from after he left, suggesting he illegally retained documents.

The documents the DOJ provided to the committee, Raskin wrote, “suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

A prosecutor’s memorandum provided to the committee by the DOJ suggested that “the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”

Raskin noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now–White House chief of staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that at about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and a state-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had “classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.”

Raskin wrote: “It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”

Raskin asked the DOJ to answer questions about what was on the classified map Trump showed people on his plane, which documents Trump retained were important to his businesses, which family members knew what was in the classified documents, which document was so sensitive that only six people had access to it, whether any of the documents Trump stole or showed to others related to plans for war in the Middle East, and which, if any, foreign actors tried to access—or succeeded in accessing—the documents. He gave it a deadline of March 31 to answer these questions, and a deadline of April 14 to produce “all remaining investigative files” from Smith’s investigations.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project noted that when Trump left office in 2021, his businesses were mainly real estate and hospitality and he had massive amounts of debt coming due. At the time, he had no interests in crypto and Trump Media didn’t exist.

Today the DOJ announced a settlement with right-wing activist Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security official who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operative and ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn worked to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election to say Trump won.

In 2023 Flynn sued the DOJ for $50 million in damages, claiming he was wrongly prosecuted because of his association with Trump. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2024, but Flynn’s lawyers renewed their case when Trump was reelected, and the DOJ engaged in negotiations. Today’s settlement notice did not specify a financial amount but said there will be a payment of “settlement funds.” Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported this evening that the amount was approximately $1.2 million.

In the New York Times yesterday, Lauren McGaughy reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is urging Republicans in state legislatures to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot, especially if one or both of the chambers in Congress flip to the Democrats in 2026. Texas House Republican Caucus chair Tom Oliverson told McGaughy that legislatures like that of Texas “can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.” Miller has called, for example, for Texas to pass a bill to end public education for undocumented children despite the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down such a law.

But Democrats are also working at the state level to expand their own vision of equality before the law and government protection of ordinary people, including in places like Minnesota, where officials yesterday sued the Trump administration for access to information about shootings by federal officers, including the shootings that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Those state-level efforts to defend everyday Americans resonate tonight because today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 147 workers, mostly girls and women, died either from smoke inhalation or from their fall as they jumped from high factory windows after their employer had locked the fire escape to prevent them from stealing the blouses they were making.

The horrors of that day led New Yorkers to demand the government stop such workplace abuses. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” recalled Frances Perkins, a young social worker who witnessed the tragedy. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”

Perkins joined a committee charged with investigating working conditions in New York, including long hours, low wages, the labor of children, and so on. It worked with a Factory Investigating Commission set up by the New York State legislature that examined working conditions around the state. They found children working in factories, women bending over poisonous chemicals, and overcrowded factories that workers could not escape in case of emergency.

New York City politicians like Al Smith cheered on the “do-gooders” but remained convinced that only political changes could make the deep and lasting changes to society necessary to improve the lives of everyday Americans. He worked to build a coalition to create those changes, and managed to usher 36 new laws regulating factories through the state legislature in three years.

Lawmakers in other states began to write similar measures of their own, and when voters elected New York’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, the nation was ready to take such legislation national. Roosevelt brought Frances Perkins with him to Washington, where as secretary of labor she helped to usher in unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor.

Perkins later mused that the state efforts that led to national changes might have helped in some way to pay the debt society owed to those whose suffering brought horrified awareness that something in the nation had gone horribly wrong. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American