fascist

ICE recruiters echo the language of Nazis

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 6, 2025

Members of the House of Representatives are back in their districts for August, and on Monday, Republican Mike Flood of Nebraska held a town hall in Lincoln. A woman asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay, and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that by the end of Flood’s town hall, “chants of ‘Vote him out!’ threatened to drown out his closing comments.”

The Politico reporters also said that Republicans maintain they aren’t worried about their angry constituents and dismiss the town hall pushback as astroturfed and not reflective of real voter sentiment.

Maybe. But with the political tide running strong against the administration, that position sounds like posturing.

Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the same day that numbers from that bureau showed a dramatic slowdown in the economy seems to have awakened businesspeople who were willing to back Trump to the reality that he’s pulling down the economy. Today Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook expressed concern about the jobs numbers, suggesting that the big revisions in them “are somewhat typical of turning points” in the economy.

At the same time, the administration’s immigration policies are deeply unpopular and unlikely to improve as Americans learn more about them. Today a report by Hatzel Vela of NBC South Florida went national as a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”

Florida is running the Everglades detention facility in expectation of reimbursement by the federal government. Immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out that, unlike the federal government, the state of Florida “can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.”

Also today, the GEO Group, a private prison and services provider, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to echo the language of Nazis, posting today, “Serve your country! Defend your culture.” It does not appear that people are rushing to sign up. The administration has worked hard to recruit new agents, offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and help repaying student loans. Today, it eased requirements for new recruits, removing age limits and posting “no undergraduate degree required!” David Dayen of The American Prospect noted today that probationary employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs.

As concerns grow about the economy and immigration policy, which were Trump’s strongest suits, Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2026 election by a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas to carve out five more Republican seats in Congress has given Democrats a platform to call attention to MAGA’s attempt to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters. And they have seized the opportunity, calling the Republicans out in interviews and on social media.

At least fifty Democrats have left the state to deny the Republicans a quorum—the minimum number of people necessary to hold a vote—that would let them jam through a new voting map. Yesterday Texas governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to let him expel the leader of the House Democrats, Representative Gene Wu, from the legislature, saying Wu had abandoned his office. According to Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune, legal experts disagree. She quotes Charles Rhodes, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Missouri law school. “I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” he said. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”

Yesterday Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators—a wild overreach of federal power—and Trump told reporters the FBI might have to get involved.

David Petesch of Shaw Local, a paper in Illinois, reported that a bomb threat early this morning at the hotel where the Texas lawmakers are staying in Illinois forced them to evacuate. After the threat was cleared, the Democrats said: “We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred. “We are grateful for [Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker], local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.” On social media, one lawmaker blamed Texas Republicans for the threat. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down,’” Representative John Bucy III said. He added: “Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”

Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that the administration is now turning to a plan to redistrict Indiana, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to meet with Republican lawmakers there. But, as Lafond notes, Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine congressional seats. Indiana state representative Matt Pierce, a Democrat, told the Indy Star that the attention to redistricting Indiana shows that the White House is worried about 2026.

Those concerns are unlikely to be relieved by the news today that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cancelling at least $500 million worth of awards and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. These vaccines include those that addressed covid and were being explored for protection against HIV transmission and cancer.

And then there are the Epstein files, Trump’s appearance in them, and the administration’s attempts to change the subject.

Yesterday Democrats on the House Oversight Committee used a legislative maneuver to force its chair, James Comer (R-KY), to issue subpoenas for the Department of Justice records on the Epstein investigation, along with subpoenas for former government officials connected to the case. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) posted that the DOJ now has two weeks to release the files to the committee. She wrote: “It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.”

On Tuesday, Trump defended the fact that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, had met with a lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker who obtained victims for Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Maxwell herself. “[W]hatever he asks would be totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters. “And I think he probably wants to make sure that, you know, people that should not be involved or aren’t involved are not hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, outlets reported today that top administration officials, including Vance, Blanche, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, were scheduled to meet at the vice president’s residence Wednesday to coordinate the administration’s Epstein strategy. Notably, they appear to be meeting without President Trump.

The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, issued a statement saying: “We understand that Vice President J.D. Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify.”

After news of the meeting leaked, a source told Nandita Bose of Reuters that the meeting had been canceled.

Today, reporters noticed that the online United States Constitution, maintained by the Library of Congress, was missing parts of Article I, the part of the Constitution that lays out the rights and duties of Congress. Parts of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10 were gone.

Those include Congress’s control over the District of Columbia, Congress’s power to make the laws, the promise that habeas corpus would not be suspended, the stipulation that no money can be used by the government unless Congress has appropriated it, the requirement that no president can accept gifts from foreign countries, and the specification that only Congress can levy tariffs.

Officials said the deletions were “due to a coding error,” and by the end of today the missing sections were restored.

Trump: “I’ve stopped six wars … I’m averaging about a war a month”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

July 31, 2025

On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I’m averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won’t go into it very much, because I don’t know the final numbers yet. I don’t know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They’ve been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”

Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”

Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.

The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.

And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.

It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy.”

Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that the European Union appears to have promised private investments of $600 billion in the U.S.—an empty promise because the government cannot compel private investment—and pledged to buy $750 billion of U.S. energy, mostly from oil and gas, over three years. Krugman calls this pledge nonsense. Among other things, it would require significant increases in infrastructure capabilities, which couldn’t be built in three years even if anyone wanted to, which is unlikely given that Europe is switching to renewable energy quickly.

There also seems to be significant daylight between what Trump is claiming and what Japan says about their agreement, which was thrown together in just over an hour on Tuesday. Japan’s negotiator said the $550 billion investment was not “a target or commitment” but an upper limit, and Japanese officials said that “no written agreement with Washington” was made—“and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”

Meanwhile, Trump appears to be trying to exert his will by fiat, announcing new tariff rates tonight just hours before the self-imposed deadline of August 1. Today, after a federal appeals court heard a challenge to Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that Congress, not the president, is the only body the Constitution empowers to enact tariffs, the White House announced a base tariff rate of 10% on countries to which the U.S. exports more goods than it imports, with a 15% rate for countries that export more to the U.S. than they import. About a dozen countries—including Canada—will have even higher rates.

Before Trump started his trade war, U.S. tariff levies stood at about 2.4%.

Part of Trump’s determination to demonstrate his power is likely coming from the continuing unraveling of his involvement in the affairs of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to try to cast himself as the protector of girls from Epstein, but his suggestion that he had turned on his friend after Epstein had hired 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000 immediately attracted attention to the actual timeline of the friendship between the two men. It showed that their friendship lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, it was in 2002 that Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “[t]errific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Members of Giuffre’s family said in a statement yesterday: “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side…no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”

Tonight Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Epstein was taking girls from Mar-a-Lago.

“Trump is on the List! Now with cane sugar!”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

July 21, 2025

On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.

Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.

American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”

Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.

And then there are the Epstein files.

A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.

As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.

You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.

On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”

But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”

Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”

On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.

Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.

Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”

At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.

Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.

Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.

“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”

Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”

On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last Thursday, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”

Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.

Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.

American households will see $3,000 increase in the cost of goods due to Trump’s tarrifs

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

July 10, 2025

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.

On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.

But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.

The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.

Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.

On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.

Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can’t meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they’re doing, that are doing a good job, but you can’t do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it’s a very good way. It’s a better way. It’s a more powerful way.”

On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.

While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”

Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.

On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”

Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.

Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”

Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.

Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.

Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”