ICE

Trump searches for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 25, 2025

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president’s actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city’s sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

Trump summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 16, 2025

Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.

This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.

Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.

As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan—and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.

In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.

That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.

It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.

As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”

After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.

At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.

A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.

The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.

Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.

In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.

The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”

Trump’s press conference showed a badly weakened president with rapid mental deterioration

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 11, 2025

President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.

In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in [the] top 10 dangerous cities in [the] U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.

If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.

Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.

The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.

Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.

Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions…while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”

The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.

This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.

This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”

The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”

Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.

Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”

Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.

But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.

Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.

Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W[alter] R[eed]!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”

Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.

“[A] lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.

Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.

And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of autocrats was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.

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.