Giuliani

When I Loved New York

by
Sarah Kendzior

Will Mamdani bring back the city I remember? Can anyone?

By Sarah Kendzior | November 6 2025

I unpacked a box in the basement and photographed the remains of a life.

A notebook from the New York Daily News, where I earned $40,000 a year in my first job out of college: a job that later became an unpaid internship and now is probably done by AI. A Nokia cell, used for making calls: what else could a phone do? A card for a video store in Astoria, where I paid $900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

And the object that shifts Before to After: a keychain adorned with the flag, the Statue of Liberty, and God Bless America. I don’t know where I got it. But I know when: September 12, 2001. I attached it to my purse and wore it without irony, for a time.

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At the Daily News, I worked in the “web room” with the other twentysomethings. Our job was to put a replica of the print paper online. This was a monotonous task performed between the hours of 7 pm and 3 am, but I didn’t complain. A job was a job. The nights left my days free to explore New York City, and I did so with abandon.

I rode subways to every borough, getting off at random stops just to see what was there. I experienced everything firsthand because no other experience was possible: Google Streetview was not there to deter or entice. The streets of New York were paved in serendipity.

In 2002, I felt the ground shift: the march of corporate CHUD out of the sewers into the boardrooms. New York’s criminal underground had risen to the top. The FBI, which had investigated transnational organized crime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, abandoned that pursuit after 9/11 for a narrow focus on Islamic terrorism.

Ordinary New Yorkers paid the price in both freedom and in cash, as prices rose to reflect the white-collar crime economy. The New York I loved was vanishing. It was destroyed not in a day by the 9/11 attacks, but over years by post-9/11 greed: the soaring costs of rent, public services, entertainment, and more.

The city was pricing its diverse residents out when not surveilling them on baseless grounds. The anonymity of the crowd was replaced by the ubiquity of the police. A corrupt mayor, Giuliani, asked for elections to be canceled so he could stay in power. Unsuccessful, he helped install a billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, as his replacement.

That was when I decided to leave. I took a souvenir: my Daily News co-worker, who I married after we quit.

* * *

Everyone who lived in New York City has a variation on the “why I left” tale. But my time there was unusually tumultuous: 2000-2003. I had one “normal” year and two years dominated by the worst attack on US soil in history. I worked at a tabloid that both documented sacrifice and normalized corruption. I captioned photos of firefighter funerals and I uploaded Iraq War propaganda.

I still explored the city. But now subway signs told me to report on strangers, to view New Yorkers not with curiosity but suspicion. I felt plutocrats grasping at my grief, gathering it like clay for the foundation of a new city — a worse city.

It was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2000. One of my main tasks at the Daily News was posting photos. We had three divisions: news, features, and sports. Everyone worked on all three, except for me, after I guilelessly inserted a photo of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill where baseball guy Paul O’Neill was supposed to be. “SARAH IS NOT ALLOWED ON SPORTS!” became the mantra of every night manager.

Despite my well-deserved ban, there was a sports story that caught my interest. Baseball player John Rocker made headlines in 2000 for insulting the 7 train and the people who rode it — and then New York City itself.

“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners,” he said. “You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there.”

“But that’s the best thing about New York!” I exclaimed to my coworkers, and it remains true. I have never experienced the incredible diversity of languages and cultures and food in such a compact space, especially in Queens, my favorite borough. It’s why I thought I would never leave.

I had to, though. I could not afford to stay on my salary. I moved to one fallen imperial capital — Istanbul — and then another — St. Louis. I wondered if New York would buckle under its corrupt excess and join them as a fellow city of faded grandeur. I wondered if it would allow the dignity of ruins. I wanted proof I had not invented the New York in my mind.

When I returned in the 2010s, New York had transformed into bland rows of luxury stores and banks. When I returned in 2022 to do a book event at The Strand, it was a fledgling technocracy of QR codes and digital currency.

The city’s tangible quality, the literal feeling of New York, had been scrubbed clean, eliminated like newsprint. I hid in The Strand, an old store surrounded by old books, like it was a holy bunker.

I returned one last time in 2023 to see my daughter play violin at Carnegie Hall. Behind me were rows of seats named after the oligarchs I condemned in my books.

Maybe this is why the media doesn’t grasp the depth of corruption, I thought. The bad guys bought the whole town.

* * *

On Tuesday, I woke at 3 am to discover that Zohran Mamdani was mayor. His win was attributed to blue-collar, young, and immigrant voters. People who will be here for the future regardless of whether overlords have deemed them worthy of one. People who have no choice but to fight for that future with all they’ve got.

I turned on his victory speech. Mamdani immediately mentioned Eugene Debs, the socialist politician, and I laughed, thinking, Oh, he’s gonna get shit for that!

By chance, I had spent the afternoon eating Halloween candy and binge-watching Family Ties, because I’ve apparently decided to live up to the ideal of adulthood I had when I was six. The Family Ties episode was about how Alex P. Keaton, young Republican, learned to appreciate and defend the speeches of Eugene Debs, even though Debs was a socialist. I wondered if a show with this plot could air now. I wondered if Bari Weiss was burning Family Ties reels on the Paramount lot.

I closed my eyes, hoping the relief of a Cuomo-less political world would lull me to sleep, but was jolted by Mamdani’s shout-out to “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.” I had never heard an American politician mention Uzbeks outside the confines of terrorism. It was a welcome change.

You may think I’m focusing on trivialities. Of course I am: he’s been the mayor-elect for twelve hours. I learned the hard way, through Obama and “The Squad” and every other charismatic sell-out, that actions matter more than words. Election Day is but a day. The structural stranglehold of the mafia state can undo the will of the people. When Mamdani is in office, I will judge him by his deeds.

What right do you have to judge, Missouri yokel? the political cult may scoff. For one, New York is an international city. I would like to see if Mamdani makes good on his promise to, for example, arrest war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit.

But mostly I want New Yorkers to get what’s theirs: affordable housing, accessible food, free transportation, and respect.

Respect for ordinary people is the main quality stripped away from New York in the decades I was gone. In those decades, New York uplifted a large number of extremely corrupt characters: Trump, Giuliani, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Bernard Kerik, Eric Adams, and Jeffrey Epstein, to name a few. They were given glory that they did not deserve.

They made headlines — or with teams of PR professionals replacing media, the headlines made them. But the regular people who have long made New York a dynamic place were denied opportunity. They were overwhelmed with the struggle for survival and sneered at by the politicians who are supposed to serve them.

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani treated New Yorkers with respect. His behavior was greeted with shock, and then appreciation. Whether it translates into policy remains to be seen, but it translated into votes — and, hopefully, into a cultural shift that goes far beyond one politician.

* * *

Dick Cheney, whose shadow loomed over the New York I inhabited, died the morning Mamdani was elected. It felt like an omen of transformation, as did the annihilation of the Cuomo dynasty. A new chapter to end the dark prologue of the 21st century.

But I cannot let myself believe it. It’s too early. I’m packing my longing away with my Nokia and my notebook and my 9/11 keychain and my extinct video store card from the now expensive Astoria, home to wealthy professionals like Mamdani.

Much as my old job turned into unpaid labor, my $900 Astoria apartment now rents for around $3000. To my shock, this is considered cheap in some New York circles. Mamdani was criticized for living in a $2300 a month Astoria apartment allegedly meant for poor people. I cannot fathom how any poor person could afford a $2300 apartment. In this way, I am content to be an outsider to New York.

But I am not an outsider to the corruption crisis: no American is. I know what it’s like to dream and what it’s like to be betrayed.

Look into the crowd at the Mamdani rallies and you see glimmers of the old New York, a skyline of light shining in their eyes. You see that gleam and don’t know if it will turn to triumph or tears, and that’s the trick.

I want Mamdani to be the man they believe he is. I want New Yorkers to be the people they dream of being. I can picture a better world even if I am uncertain. I pack that vision away with my mementos too — not because I don’t believe in its promise, but because I want to keep it safe.

What is New York’s past, if not possibility?

* * *

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Fallout from DeSantis’ cruel campaign stunt

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

September 16, 2022

The big story in the news over the past couple of days is that Florida governor Ron DeSantis chartered two planes to fly about 50 migrants, most of whom were from Venezuela, to Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts.

The story is still developing. Although DeSantis is the governor of Florida, the migrants appear to have come from Texas, and it currently appears that they were lured onto the planes—paid for with taxpayer money—with the false promise of work and housing in New York City or Boston. In addition, there are allegations from a lawyer working with the migrants that officials from the Department of Homeland Security falsified information about the migrants to set them up for automatic deportation. As I write this, it is not clear what their actual status is: have they applied for asylum and been processed, or are they undocumented immigrants?

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says, none of it adds up.

None of it, that is, except the politics. DeSantis apparently dispatched the migrants with a videographer to take images of them arriving, entirely unexpectedly, on the upscale island, presumably in an attempt to present the image that Democratic areas can’t handle immigrants (in fact, more than 12% of the island’s 17,000 full-time residents were born in foreign countries, and 22% of the residents are non-white). But the residents of the island greeted the migrants; found beds, food, and medical care; and worked with authorities to move them back to the mainland where there are support services and housing. In the meantime, there are questions about the legality of DeSantis chartering planes to move migrants from state to state.

There are two big stories behind DeSantis’s move.

First is that the Republicans are on the ropes over the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision and the capture of the party by its MAGA wing. That slide into radical extremism means the party is contracting, but it is not clear at all that base voters will show up in the midterms without former president Trump on the ballot.

Rallying voters with threats of “aliens” swamping traditional society is a common tactic of right-wing politicians; it was the central argument that brought Hungary’s Viktor Orbán into his current authoritarian position. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have been bussing migrants to Washington—about 10,000 of them—saying they would bring the immigrant issue to the doorsteps of Democrats. Now DeSantis is in on the trick.

Immigrants are nothing new to northern cities, of course. The U.S. is in a period of high immigration. Currently, 15% of the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., are foreign born, only slightly less than the 16.8% of the population of Texas that is foreign born. About 29% of the inhabitants of Boston come from outside U.S. borders, as do 36% of the inhabitants of New York City.

In the lead-up to the midterms, Republicans have tried to distract from their unpopular stands on abortion, contraception, marriage equality, and so on, by hammering on the idea that the Democrats have created “open borders”; that criminal immigrants are bringing in huge amounts of drugs, especially fentanyl; and that Biden is secretly flying undocumented immigrants into Republican states in the middle of the night. Beginning in July, they began to insist that the country is being “invaded.”

In fact, the border is not “open.” Fences, surveillance technology, and about 20,000 Border Patrol agents make the border more secure than it has ever been. That means apprehensions of undocumented migrants are up, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recording more than 3 million encounters at the border since January 2021. Those high numbers reflect people stopped from coming in and are artificially inflated because many who are stopped try again. CBP estimates that about 27% of those stopped at the border are repeat apprehensions.

Although much fentanyl is being stopped, some is indeed coming in, but through official ports of entry in large trucks or cars, not on individual migrants, who statistically are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. And the federal government is not secretly flying anyone anywhere (although, ironically, DeSantis is); U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sometimes moves migrants between detention centers, and CBP transfers unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services. These flights have been going on for years.

The second story is the history of American immigration, which is far more complicated and interesting than the current news stories suggest.

Mexican immigration is nothing new; our western agribusinesses were built on migrant labor of Mexicans, Japanese, and poor whites, among others, in the late 19th century. From the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it without restrictions. But in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, putting a cap on Latin American immigration for the first time. The cap was low: just 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually.

After 1965, workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal. In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the U.S. and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.

Then, in the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work in the American Southeast. This immigration boom had passed by 2007, when the number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States began to decline as more Mexicans left the U.S. than came.

In 2013 a large majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, backed a bill to fix the disconnect caused by the 1965 law. In 2013, with a bipartisan vote of 68–32, the Senate passed a bill giving a 13-year pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, who would have to meet security requirements. It required employers to verify that they were hiring legal workers. It created a visa system for unskilled workers, and it got rid of preference for family migration in favor of skill-based migration. And it strengthened border security. It would have passed the House, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring it up for a vote, aware that the issue of immigration would rally Republican voters.

But most of the immigrants coming over the southern border now are not Mexican migrants.

Beginning around 2014, people began to flee “warlike levels of violence” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, coming to the U.S. for asylum. This is legal, although most come illegally, taking their chances with smugglers who collect fees to protect migrants on the Mexican side of the border and to get them into the U.S.

The Obama administration tried to deter migrants by expanding the detention of families, and it made significant investments in Central America in an attempt to stabilize the region by expanding economic development and promoting security. The Trump administration emphasized deterrence. It cut off support to Central American countries, worked with authoritarians to try to stop regional gangs, drastically limited the number of refugees the U.S. would admit, and—infamously—deliberately separated children from their parents to deter would-be asylum seekers.

The number of migrants to the U.S. dropped throughout Trump’s years in office. The Trump administration gutted immigration staff and facilities and then cut off immigration during the pandemic under Title 42, a public health order.

The Biden administration coincided with the easing of the pandemic and catastrophic storms in Central America, leading migration to jump, but the administration continued to turn migrants back under Title 42 and resumed working with Central American countries to stem the violence that is sparking people to flee. (In nine months, the Trump administration expelled more than 400,000 people under Title 42; in Biden’s first 18 months, his administration expelled 1.7 million people.)

The Biden administration sought to end Title 42 last May, but a lawsuit by Republican states led a federal judge in Louisiana to keep the policy in place. People arriving at the U.S. border have the right to apply for asylum even under Title 42.

There are a lot of moving pieces in the immigration debate: migrants need safety, the U.S. needs workers, our immigrant-processing systems are understaffed, and our laws are outdated. They need real solutions, not political stunts.

Biden’s “Building a Better America” despite the “radicalized” GOP

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

August 24, 2022

Yesterday’s elections suggest that American voters are concerned about the past year’s radicalization of the Republican Party. In a special election for a seat in the House of Representatives in a New York state swing district, the 19th congressional district, Democrat Pat Ryan beat his Republican opponent. Pundits looked at the race as a bellwether (named for the wether, or castrated sheep, fitted with a bell to indicate where the flock was going), and most thought the Republican would win, as he was a strong candidate and the midterm election in a president’s first term usually goes to the opposite party.

Ryan’s opponent emphasized inflation and crime, but Ryan told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: “We centered the concept of freedom…. When rights and freedoms are being taken away from people,” Ryan told Sargent, they “stand up and fight.” The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of two months ago overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights was a key sign of the erosion of freedom. Ryan told Sargent that “ripping away reproductive rights from tens of millions of people” was “visceral.”

So, too, are gun safety and threats to democracy. “There’s sort of this power grab of the far, far right,” Ryan told Sargent. “It’s just wildly out of step with where the vast majority of Americans are.”

This is the fourth special election since the Dobbs decision that has shown at least a two-point movement toward the Democrats. A referendum on preserving abortion rights in Kansas also went to those in favor of them.

Tom Bonier, who runs the political data firm TargetSmart, noted that women have outregistered men to vote since the Dobbs decision by large margins: 11 points in Ohio, for example. And a Pew poll released yesterday shows that 56% of voters say that the right to abortion is very important to them for their midterm votes, up from 46% before the Dobbs decision.

The trend is clear, but so is the reality that a number of states are operating under extreme Republican gerrymanders—some, like those in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio, still in force although the state judges have said they are illegal—that will give Republicans a structural advantage.

Biden administration officials are currently touring the country to call attention to how the administration is “Building a Better America.” In 35 trips to 23 states, they will “make clear that the President and Congressional Democrats beat the special interests and delivered what was best for the American people.” They are emphasizing the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the gun safety law, and so on. They are urging Americans to unite not by party, but against the extremism on display in the leadership of the current Republican Party. “Every step of the way, Congressional Republicans sided with the special interests—pushing an extreme MAGA agenda that costs families.”

Since the 1980s, Republicans have argued for cutting public programs because they cost too much money, while also arguing that tax cuts for the wealthy would pay for themselves by expanding the economy, thus increasing tax revenues. It has never worked—when government computers showed that President Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut would explode the deficit, the budget director simply reprogrammed them—but that has not stopped the Republicans from passing repeated tax cuts for the wealthy, one as recently as December 2017.

Republicans have warned that the massive investment the Democrats have made in the country during Biden’s term would rack up enormous deficits. But, in fact, today the Office of Management and Budget forecast that this year’s budget deficit will decline by $1.7 trillion, the single largest drop in the deficit in U.S. history. (The record deficit was $3.13 trillion in 2020, during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.) This number is simply a benchmark, and the deficit remains at $1.03 trillion, but it suggests that numbers are currently moving downward.

Today, Biden announced another key change in American policy, this time in education. The Department of Education will cancel up to $20,000 of student debt for Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the federal government and up to $10,000 for other borrowers. Pell Grants are targeted at low-income students. Individuals who make less than $125,000 a year or couples who make less than $250,000 a year are eligible. The current pause on federal student loan repayment will be extended once more, through the end of 2022, and the Education Department will try to negotiate a cap on repayments of 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from the current 10%.

The Department of Education estimates that almost 90% of the relief in the measure will go to those earning less than $75,000 a year, and about 43 million borrowers will benefit from the plan.

Opponents of the plan worry that it will be inflationary and that it will not address the skyrocketing cost of four-year colleges. But its supporters worry that the education debt crisis locks people into poverty. They also note that there was very little objection to the forgiveness of 10.2 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans issued as of July 2022, with $72,500 being the average dollar amount forgiven.

The administration’s plan is a significant pushback to what has happened to education funding since the 1980s. After World War II, the U.S. funded higher education through a series of measures that increased college attendance while also keeping prices low. Beginning in the 1980s, that funding began to dry up and tuition prices rose to make up the difference.

A college education became crucial for a high-paying job, but wages didn’t rise along with the cost of tuition, so families turned to borrowing. Many of them choose the lowest monthly repayment amounts, and some put their loans on hold, meaning their debt balances grow far beyond what they originally borrowed. The shift to “high-tuition, high-aid” caused a “massive total volume of debt,” Assistant Professor of Economics Emily Cook of Tulane University told Jessica Dickler and Annie Nova of CNBC in May. Today, around 44 million Americans owe about $1.7 trillion of educational debt.

Because of the wealth gap between white and Black Americans—the average white family has ten times the wealth of the average Black family—more Black students borrow to finance their education.

Canceling a portion of student debt is a resumption of the older system, ended in the 1980s, under which the government funded cheaper education in the belief it was a social good. In his explanation of the plan, White House National Economic Council Director Bharat Ramamurti told reporters today that “87% of the dollars…are going to people making under $75,000 a year, and 0 dollars, 0%, are going to anybody making over $125,000 in individual income.” He told them it was “instructive” to compare this plan “to what the Republican tax bill did in 2017. It’s basically the reverse. Fifteen percent of the benefits went to people making under $75,000 a year, and 85% went to people making over $75,000 a year. And if you zoom in even more on that, people making over $250,000 a year got nearly half of the benefits of the GOP tax bill and are getting 0 dollars under our [plan].”

The dark money party

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

August 23, 2022

Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.

The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times. 

Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”

This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.

Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors. 

“I’ve never seen a group of this magnitude before,” Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. “This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections.” Our campaign finance system, he said, gives “wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine.”

It’s an interesting revelation at this particular juncture, when the Republican Party is splitting over former president Donald Trump. Today, a Colorado state senator switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party because he refuses to support the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. “I cannot continue to be a part of a political party that is okay with a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen,” Kevin Priola wrote. “We need Democrats in charge because our planet and our democracy depend on it.” Priola has thrown in his lot with those Republicans like Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Priola has voted with Democrats in the past, although he voted with the Republicans 90% of the time. His switch will make it more difficult for Republicans to retake control of the Colorado Senate. Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, tweeted that he was proud to welcome Priola to the Democratic Party. “We are a broad tent party, always seeking good ideas from the left and right to move CO forward. Senator Priola is a strong leader on climate issues & will hopefully be even more effective on the Democratic side of the aisle.” 

In contrast, Sean Paige, former spokesperson for the Colorado Republican Party, tweeted: “Kevin Priola a Democrat? Who knew, LOL? That’s been an open ‘secret’ at the Statehouse since I worked there. He’s beyond just a big phony; he’s a squirrely and calculating opportunist. But I’m glad, for his conscience, that he finally came out of the closet.” 

The new extremist Republican Party is driving away voters in part by this very sort of chaos. This afternoon, Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to stop the FBI from looking at the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago until a special master reviews them. But the filing appeared to have been less about the law than about asserting power over the Republican Party. While legal analyst Bradley Moss called it “just garbage” legally, it stated its political principle at the start: “President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run.”

The motion reiterated the arguments he has made since the search warrant was carried out; Moss mused, “[t]he more I read Trump’s motion, the more I am completely confused and shocked he got three lawyers to risk their law licenses by filing this thing.” 

Then, this evening, it turned out that the motion was likely intended to distract attention from a new story dropping from Maggie Haberman, Jodi Kantor, Adam Goldman and Ben Protess of the New York Times, who reported that Trump took more than 300 classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago and that he went through the boxes himself in late 2021, meaning he was aware that he had taken classified documents out of the White House.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 150 classified documents in January 2022, including intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI. Worried by the sheer number of those documents, the Department of Justice moved to get the rest. In June, Trump’s aides turned over a few dozen more, and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document asserting that, to the best of her knowledge, all the classified materials had been returned. They had not, of course, and on June 22 the Justice Department subpoenaed the security video tapes from the area, which showed people moving the documents. Hence the search warrant, which the FBI executed two weeks ago, finding yet more documents, including some in a closet in Trump’s office. Some had the highest possible level of classification. It remains unclear whether any U.S. documents remain at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, according to Andrew Desiderio of Politico, members of the Gang of Eight—the leaders of the House and Senate from each party, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees from both houses—want to know what was in those recovered files. 

Finally, today, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he will be retiring from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he has led since 1984, in December. Fauci has served seven presidents, and after his work on HIV/AIDS, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Nonetheless, today’s Republicans have tried to deflect blame for the nation’s poor response to the coronavirus pandemic from Trump to Fauci. After the announcement of the 81-year-old’s retirement, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) said: “It’s good to know that with his retirement, Dr. Fauci will have ample time to appear before Congress and share under oath what he knew about the Wuhan lab, as well as the ever-changing guidance under his watch that resulted in wrongful mandates being imposed on Americans.”