Jeffrey Epstein

Rising inflation and continued authoritarian maneuverings at the White House

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

September 21, 2025

On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics postponed the release of the annual report on consumer expenditures—a key report for understanding inflation—without explanation. The BLS has been under stress since President Donald J. Trump fired its head, Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, after the July jobs report showed far weaker hiring statistics than expected as well as a downgrade for previous months. Officials at the BLS said the new report will be “rescheduled to a later date.”

This weekend, Dan Frosch, Patrick Thomas, and Andrea Peterson of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ending its annual report on household food security. Those reports began in the 1990s to help state and local officials distribute food assistance. Last year’s report found that 18 million U.S. households experienced food insecurity during 2023. In a statement, the Department of Agriculture said: “These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.”

Colleen Hefflin, an expert on food insecurity, nutrition, and welfare policy at Syracuse University, told the Wall Street Journal reporters: “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.” Whitney Curry Wimbish of The American Prospect reported last week that food banks across the country are seeing more visits even as immigrants are staying away from them out of concern that their information might be shared or that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might show up.

Nutrition scholar Lindsey Smith Taillie of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health told the reporters: “I think the only reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance, because it basically allows you to pretend like we don’t have this food insecurity problem.” The budget reconciliation law the Republicans passed in July cuts funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by about 20%, or $186 billion through 2034, the largest cuts to SNAP in its history.

This news got less attention last week than the administration’s apparent determination to silence its critics. Although, as Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times pointed out on Thursday, Trump promised in his second inaugural address to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” what he appeared to mean was that he intended to free up right-wing activists to spread disinformation about elections and Covid-19.

Now, in the wake of the murder of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, as Peter Baker pointed out today in the New York Times, the administration has cracked down on the media and political opponents under the guise of tamping down words that could cause political violence. But, as Baker notes, Trump is making it clear that he is trying to stop speech that criticizes him and his administration. Last week alone, he called for people who yelled at him in a restaurant to be prosecuted and for comedians who made fun of him to be taken off the air, and he sued the New York Times.

On Friday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that covering the administration negatively is “really illegal.” He went on: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.” As Baker notes, Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, who wrote the chapter of Project 2025 that covers the FCC, has complained that many broadcasters have a liberal bias and that they do not serve the public interest as the FCC requires.

That attempt to control information is showing clearly at the Pentagon. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threw out long-standing media outlets who had been covering the Pentagon, including NPR, the New York Times, and NBC News, and brought in right-wing outlets including Newsmax and Breitbart. On Friday the Pentagon said it would revoke press credentials for any journalists who gather information, even unclassified information, that the Pentagon has not expressly authorized for release. Hegseth has been on a crusade to figure out who is leaking negative stories about him and defense issues under his direction, and he seems to have decided to try to stop their publication rather than the leaks themselves.

Although Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the changes “basic, common-sense guidelines to protect sensitive information as well as the protection of national security and the safety of all who work at the Pentagon,” Washington Post reporter Scott Nover noted that this position is a “sharp departure” from decades of practice. Until this year, the Pentagon held two televised question and answer sessions a week (and, in my observation, the journalists who covered the Pentagon were excellent).

The National Press Club also weighed in on Friday’s changes. “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting,” said club president Mike Balsamo. “It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”

On Friday the Pentagon referred to the White House questions about a strike on a third Venezuelan boat that Trump announced on social media. “On my orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump posted. Trump said three men, whom he called “narcoterrorists,” were killed. He said the military showed him proof that the men in the boats were smuggling drugs, but he has not shared that evidence with lawmakers or the public.

As Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal on September 17, military lawyers and officials from the Defense Department are concerned that decision makers in the Pentagon are ignoring their warnings that the administration’s strikes on the vessels Trump claims are bringing drugs to the U.S. are illegal.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post recalls that when he took office, Hegseth purged from the military the judge advocate generals, who are supposed to advise leaders on the rule of law and whether orders are legal. In February, calling the top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief,” he fired them. Earlier this month, he announced he was moving as many as 600 JAG officers to serve as immigration judges.

Also on Friday, Trump announced that companies employing skilled workers who hold temporary H-1B visas would have to pay a $100,000 fee for their entry into the U.S. beginning Sunday. This set off a mad scramble as workers outside the country on business trips, vacations, or family visits rushed to get back into the U.S. before the new rule took effect. Not until Saturday did the administration clarify the new rule does not affect those who already hold visas.

Friday was a busy day. Trump also told reporters in the Oval Office that he wanted the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, “out” after Siebert declined to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued the Trump Organization for fraud, for allegedly committing mortgage fraud. Siebert also declined to prosecute former FBI director James Comey, who refused to kill the investigation into the relationship between members of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives, for allegedly lying to Congress.

Siebert was Trump’s own pick for the job and is a well-regarded career prosecutor. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted in Civil Discourse, Siebert managed to win the support of both the Virginia Republican Party and the senators from Virginia, both of whom are Democrats. His refusal to prosecute indicates there was not enough evidence to convict a defendant; Vance notes that’s the standard a prosecutor must meet to seek an indictment.

On Friday night, Seibert resigned.

On Saturday morning, Trump posted on social media: “He didn’t quit, I fired him!” In the evening, he posted on social media a missive that appeared to be intended as a direct message (DM) to Attorney General Pam Bondi. It read: “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’… We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT.”

In other words, Trump wants to use the power of the government to punish those he considers his enemies. As Joyce White Vance puts it: “[L]et’s be clear about what Trump wants. He wants to turn us into a banana republic where the ability to prosecute people becomes a political tool in the hands of the president. That means he wants to exercise the ultimate power to put down any opposition to his rule.” She recalled the comment attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin: “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime.”

A report from Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MSNBC yesterday showed what a politicized justice system looks like. They reported that FBI agents last year caught Tom Homan—now Trump’s “border czar”—on video accepting $50,000 in cash from agents posing as business executives after he promised he could help them win government contracts for border enforcement in a second Trump administration. The FBI had opened an investigation after someone told them Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for contracts under a future Trump administration.

After obtaining the evidence, the FBI and the Justice Department waited to see whether Homan would provide the aid he offered once he joined the new administration. But the case stalled as soon as Trump took office, and after FBI director Kash Patel recently asked for a status update on the case, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation.

The reporters say that when asked about it, the White House, the Justice Department, and the FBI all dismissed the investigation as politically motivated and baseless.

While Trump tries to silence his critics, Russia is taking advantage of U.S. inaction to test the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On Friday, three Russian jets entered the airspace of Estonia. Italian fighters stationed in Estonia as part of NATO’s new Eastern Sentry operation responded and forced the Russian jets out. As Poland did last week after Russian drones and jets entered its airspace, Estonian officials requested consultations with the North Atlantic Council under Article 4 of NATO’s treaty.

High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, who hails from Estonia, called Russia’s incursions over Estonia an “extremely dangerous provocation.”

“We will not shop at your stores; Will not tune into your TV and radio stations; Will not use your services!”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

September 19, 2025

Today U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday threw out the $15 billion lawsuit President Donald J. Trump filed on September 15 against the New York Times for defamation. The judge, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, called the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible” and took Trump’s lawyers to task for using a legal complaint as a public forum for abusive language.

Noting that the two defamation counts followed eighty pages of praise for Trump and allegations against the “hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady,'”—an old nickname for the New York Times—he set a forty-page limit on any amended complaint.

The administration’s pressure on ABC to fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel is very unpopular, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, with people polled by YouGov on September 18 seeing it as an attack on free speech.

That unpopularity showed today when podcaster and senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) celebrated Kimmel’s firing but called the threat of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to retaliate against ABC “unbelievably dangerous.” Cruz called Carr’s threats “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

He explained: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”

Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted that three new polls out this week show Trump’s approval rating dropping and commented that voters don’t like “[t]his dictator sh*t.” AP-NORC observed that Republicans are growing pessimistic about the direction of the country. While the share of all American adults who say the country is off track has increased 13 percentage points since June, from 62% to 75%, the biggest change has been among Republicans. In June, 29% of Republicans were concerned about the direction of the country; now that number is 51%.

Most American adults think Trump has gone too far with his tariffs, his use of presidential power, and sending troops into U.S. cities.

Democratic lawmakers this week have reflected the growing opposition to Trump and his administration. Today in The Contrarian, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote that Trump’s attacks on Chicago aren’t really about stopping crime. Instead, Trump is creating chaos and destabilizing the country in order to erode our democratic institutions and cement his power.

Pritzker warned that Trump “has become increasingly brazen and deranged in his rhetoric and his actions” and that the things he “is doing and saying are un-American.” In contrast, Pritzker held up as a model “our collective Midwestern values of hard work, kindness, honesty and caring for our neighbors,” and urged people to “be loud—for America.”

Yesterday Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) spoke at the Center for American Progress. He, too, outlined the administration’s attacks on the rule of law and blamed “billionaires padding their stock portfolios and buying up politicians,” “self-interested CEOs cynically dialing up the outrage and disinformation on their social media platforms,” and “politicians who saw more value in stoking grievance than solving problems” for creating the conditions that ushered Trump into the presidency.

Schiff called for restoring American democracy through legislation, litigation, and mobilization. He noted that Democrats have just introduced a package of reforms to put into law the norms Trump has violated. Democrats have also introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision permitting unlimited corporate money to flow into elections. While this legislation almost certainly won’t pass in a Republican-dominated Congress, he noted, it would force a debate.

He also noted that Democrats are conducting oversight, demanding accountability for wrongdoing and attacks on the rule of law, and are creating a record. Their victories, he noted, have been “modest,” but they have, for example, managed to force the administration to rehire employees at the National Weather Service and succeeded in preserving U.S. Department of Agriculture field offices in California.

Litigation has been more successful, Schiff said. Since January, plaintiffs have brought more than 400 suits against the administration, and courts have halted the administration’s policies in more than 100 of them. Wrongly fired civil servants have been reinstated, funding has been restored to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deportation flights have been grounded, Trump’s tariffs have been struck down.

“Ultimately, though,” Schiff said, “the most powerful check on Trump’s authoritarianism is not Congress. It is not the courts. It is the American people.”

And that was the rallying cry of Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) in Congress yesterday.

Crow, who entered Congress in 2019, is a former Army Ranger who completed three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

In his speech, Crow warned that Trump is tearing down the walls of our democracy and called out “some of our most elite and powerful individuals and institutions” for “failing to defend our democracy.” He noted that “[s]ome of our nation’s most powerful law firms have bent the knee. Some of our finest universities are buckling. Some of the most powerful CEOs have capitulated. And some of the largest media companies are simply surrendering.”

“If those with power and influence want to sell off our rights and freedoms to enrich themselves, then Americans should make it clear that cowardice and greed will fail them,” he said.

“We will not shop at your stores. We will not tune into your TV and radio stations. We will not send our kids and our money to your universities, or use your services if you are going to enable our slide to authoritarianism.”

Crow contrasted those elite failures with “the courage we’ve seen from everyday citizens”:

Coach Youman Wilder, who stood up to ICE agents when they started interrogating kids on a baseball diamond in Harlem. A schoolteacher in Twisp, Washington, who joins protests against cuts to Medicaid and SNAP every Saturday because, she says, “Democracy only works if we work it.” Massive demonstrations across the nation in April. Parents in Washington, D.C., patrolling schoolyards to protect the rights of students and other parents as ICE agents are raiding and the National Guard is on the streets. Journalists around the country “reporting the truth, despite threats to them and their family.”

“There is courage everywhere we look,” Crow said. “We have not yet lost our power. “

He continued: “Now is the time…for us to stand with all those defending democracy.

“Defending free speech.

“Defending freedom of religion.

“Defending due process.

“Defending the rule of law.

“Defending the right of schoolchildren to learn without fear of being shot.

“Defending government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

“As a young paratrooper, leading an infantry platoon in the invasion of Iraq,” he said, he was responsible for young men: “Black, White, Asian, Hispanic. From the North, from the South, East, and West. From farms and from cities. Rich and poor.

“When I think of America, I still think of those young paratroopers. How we came together, despite our differences, we served together, we fought together, we found great strength in one another.

“That is America.”

“There’s a tradition in the paratroopers,” he said, “that the leader of the unit jumps out of the plane first and then the others follow.”

He concluded: “I’m ready to jump.”

If they can tell you what to say, what to think – there is nothing they can’t do

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

September 17, 2025

This evening, John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum, and Brooks Barnes of the New York Times reported that ABC was pulling the television show of comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air. The suspension is allegedly over his comments Monday about the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, although Chris Hayes of All In pointed out that after CBS pulled Stephen Colbert, another political comedian, off the air in July, President Donald Trump told reporters that comedians Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel would be “next. They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going.”

Kimmel has one of the top late-night television shows, attracting younger viewers in the 18-49 year old demographic. He delivers monologues that skewer President Donald J. Trump and the administration. His YouTube channel, which replays his show, has more than twenty million subscribers.

During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”

Kimmel then played a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very good. And by the way right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about for 150 years and it’s gonna be a beauty.”

On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr explained: “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…’We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore…because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.'”

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.

Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”

Exactly two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, on September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the men we know now as the Framers signed their final draft of a new constitution for the United States, hoping it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in delegates’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.

The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the thirteen new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.

The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.

And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”

The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union,” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.

A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.

In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”

Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

But after their experience throwing off the yoke of what they considered an overly powerful king, those concerned about creating too powerful a national government worried the new government would endanger individual liberty. They demanded that the framers of the new government enumerate the ways in which it could not intrude on the rights of the people.

In 1789 the new Congress passed ten amendments to the Constitution, and the states ratified them the same year. Taken together, the amendments were known as the Bill of Rights.

The first of those amendments prohibits the government from intruding on the basic liberties that enable individuals to challenge it. It prohibits the government from establishing a state religion or infringing on the right of individuals to publish whatever they wish, to assemble peacefully, or to ask the government to remedy unfair situations.

It prohibits the government from infringing on the right of individuals to speak freely, without fear of government retaliation.

Americans take their First Amendment rights seriously. In April 2025, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 92% of Americans thought it was important “that the media can report the news without state/government censorship.”

Kimmel’s suspension has produced an uproar. Comedian Paul Scheer noted that Kimmel is off the air but Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, who recently called for killing homeless Americans by “involuntary lethal injection,” is still employed. The union that represents the musicians on Kimmel’s show called the suspension “a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression,” adding: “These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.” The Writers Guild of America posted: “The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other—to disturb, even—is at the heart of what it means to be a free people…. If free speech applied only to ideas we like, we needn’t have bothered to write it into the Constitution…. Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth.”

On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.” On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “[I]f they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.” He pointed out that in 2023, Brendan Carr himself posted: “Free speech is…the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned of a coming campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents.”

From England, where he is on a state visit, Trump posted: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what needed to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT”Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, the Framers signed their names to the blueprint for a new government established by “We the People of the United States.” The next day, James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his diary that a lady had asked delegate Benjamin Franklin whether the convention had established a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”

Fox New host on the homeless: “Just kill them.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

September 13, 2025

President Donald J. Trump has been trying to remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook from the board of governors, alleging she lied on a mortgage application by claiming two homes as primary residences, which could garner a lower interest rate. Yesterday Chris Prentice and Marisa Taylor of Reuters reported that documents show that, in fact, Cook told the lender who provided a mortgage that a property in Georgia for which she was obtaining a loan would be a “vacation home.”

It appears the documents that director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte used to accuse her of mortgage fraud were standardized forms that her personal application specifying the house was a second home overrode. It also appears that Cook never applied for a primary residence tax exemption for the Georgia home and that she referred to the home on official documents as a “2nd home.”

In contrast, Reuters reported last week that unlike Cook, Pulte’s own father and stepmother claimed primary residence tax exemptions for two homes in different states. When that news broke, one of the towns in which they reside removed their primary residence exemption and charged them for back taxes.

Trump hoped to use the allegations against Cook to advance his control of the Federal Reserve. Now the revelation that those allegations appear to be false highlights the degree to which this administration is attempting to achieve control of the country by pushing a false narrative and getting what its officers want before reality catches up. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) pioneered this technique in the 1950s when he would grab media attention with outrageous statements and outright lies that destroyed lives, then flit to the next target, leaving fact checkers panting in his wake. By the time they proved he was lying, the news cycle had leaped far ahead, and the corrections got nowhere near the attention the lies had.

While McCarthy eventually went down in disgrace, the right wing adopted his techniques of controlling politics by creating a narrative. Spin turned into a narrative that denigrated opponents as anti-American, and then into the attempt to construct a fictional world that they could make real so long as they could convince voters to believe in it. In 2004, a senior advisor to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernable reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But once you have untethered the political narrative from reality, you are at the mercy of anyone who can commandeer that narrative.

In the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday, the radical right is working to distort the country’s understanding of what happened. Long before any information emerged about who the shooter was, the president and prominent right-wing figures claimed that “the Left,” or Democrats, or just “THEY,” had assassinated Kirk.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted an attack on his political opponents on social media: “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.

Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world. Briefly, they claimed Robinson had been “radicalized” in college. Then, when it turned out he had spent only a single semester at a liberal arts college before going to trade school, MAGA pivoted to attack those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media.

This morning, Miller posted: “In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov[ernmen]t workers, even [Department of Defense] employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who just months ago was a key figure in the White House, reposted a spreadsheet of “people who’ve said vile things” about Kirk’s murder. Over the list, he wrote: “They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children.” “So far, teachers and professors are by far the most represented,” the author of the list wrote.

Across the country, educators have been suspended or fired for posting opinions on social media that commented on Kirk’s death in ways officials deemed inappropriate. Legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted that “Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is ‘allowed’ to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police.”

The deliberate attempt to create a narrative centering around “us” and “them” and to mobilize violence against that other was on display today when Musk told a giant anti-immigrant rally in the United Kingdom: “You’re in a fundamental situation here…where whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that’s the truth.”

Of course, that is not the truth. It is a classic case of dividing the world into friends and enemies—a tactic suggested by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt—and inciting violence against newly identified enemies by claiming it is imperative to preempt them from using violence against your friends. Miller has vowed to use the power of the government not against the far right, where the violence that killed Kirk appears to have originated, but against MAGA’s political enemies. Flipping victims and offenders, he called his political opponents “domestic terrorists” and warned: “[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

Where that kind of rhetoric takes a society showed on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends Friday, when host Brian Kilmeade suggested the way to address homelessness was through “involuntary lethal injection. Or something. Just kill them.” When asked “why did we have to get to this point,” he answered: “we’re not voting for the right people.”

And that’s the heart of it. The radical right is frustrated because a majority continues to oppose them. According to Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, Trump’s job approval rating is just 42.3% with 53.6% disapproving, and more people disapprove of all of his policies than approve of them. Unable to control the country through the machinery of democracy when it operates fairly and afraid voters will turn them out in 2026, Republicans are working to make the system even more rigged than it already is: just yesterday, Missouri lawmakers approved a mid-decade gerrymander to turn one of the state’s two Democratic seats into a Republican one.

Right now, Trump and his loyalists control all three branches of government, but Trump is not delivering what his supporters believe his fictional vision of his presidency promised. Trump telegraphed great strength and vowed he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with a single phone call, for example. When he failed to get any buy-in at all from Russia’s president Vladimir Putin for his proposals, Trump threatened to impose strong new sanctions against Russia. This afternoon he backed away from that altogether, saying he would issue sanctions on Russia only after all NATO nations stopped buying oil from Russia and placed 50% to 100% tariffs on China. “This is not TRUMP’S WAR (it would never have started if I was President!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s WAR,” he posted.

This latest retreat from his threats against Russia after all his previous empty threats makes Trump’s claims of strength ring hollow. Russia is increasing its attacks on Ukraine, and today NATO member Romania scrambled jets when a Russian drone breached its airspace. Polish and NATO aircraft were deployed today to protect Polish airspace as well.

As Trump’s narrative falters on this and so many other fronts, MAGA is moving to the violence of the far right to achieve what he cannot. In that, they are fueled by the right-wing disinformation machine that is whitewashing Kirk’s racism, sexism, and attacks on those he disagreed with and instead portraying Kirk simply as a Christian motivational speaker attacked by a rabid left wing. Trump’s vow to award Kirk the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously reinforces that image.

The refusal of Republican lawmakers to challenge MAGA’s creation of its own reality has opened the way for believers to try to put that world into place through violence. Their victory would end the rule of law on which the United States was founded and base the government on the whims of an authoritarian cabal.

It would make the United States a country in which people who stand in the way of the regime—people like Lisa Cook—would be at the mercy of hostile officials who allege they are committing crimes in order to get rid of them.

Fox host sets off uproar with ‘just kill them’ comment about mentally ill homeless people