Jeffrey Epstein

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.”

My Friend Leatherface

by

 

Remembering a creative conservationist as plutocrats take a chainsaw to Texas.

By Sarah Kendzior | Aug 19, 2025
 

We pulled into Bastrop around noon. This is a bad move: everyone knows you don’t go to a rundown gas station in small-town Texas unless you’re looking for trouble. We were, so we walked right in.

The Gas Station is the only major surviving site from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the 1974 low-budget classic by Austin director Tobe Hooper, who cast local unknowns in leading roles and filmed in rural areas near the city. An exploration of human savagery more artistic than its title implies, the film tells the tale of road-trippers who stumble upon a family of sadistic cannibals. It is visceral, violent, and at times, beautiful.

The final shot — masked killer Leatherface twirling his chainsaw in the haze of the rising sun, unpunished and unexplained — is cinematic poetry. A light so lovely, it makes the darkness feel worse. It is a very American story.

I was in Austin on book tour and I wanted to see The Gas Station. Now I could, thanks to an unexpected break. An NPR host had blown me off for the second time after making me wait for his call like a 1950s schoolgirl. I was annoyed but had hours to kill and knew just the place for killing.

My husband and I set off for Bastrop, letting the capital fade from view. Austin was unrecognizable from my last visit in 2018. Tech oligarchs had built a skyline of skyscrapers that loomed like landing pads for bad ideas. Driverless cars zipped through bitcoin-bathed streets. The conspiracy theorists work for right-wing think tanks and nobody there is slacking. On the outskirts lurks Tesla, where a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk rips through Austin’s famed weirdness and affordability.

I didn’t want to feel scared, so I headed to the site of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

* * *

Today The Gas Station is a barbecue joint that sells horror memorabilia. I had read it had items from the original Chainsaw, but that is no longer the case. They had them once, the owner said, but then the Californians ruined everything.

The Californians ruined everything is a phrase I was hearing a lot in Texas.

The owner explained that an entertainment corporation had forced them to transform their TCM pilgrimage site into a generic chop shop due to an alleged copyright infringement, despite the store’s connection to the original film. He spoke with the aloofness of someone used to greeting the disappointed.

“You can get barbecue,” he said with a shrug, gesturing at the cannibal-themed menu. “Or whatever.”

“I’m sorry this happened,” I said. “This is a national landmark. You should get to revive it. I’ve wanted to come here a long time. I used to write for Fangoria.”

He did a double take. We started talking. You hear about the coldness of Americans, but everyone warms up when you love what they seek to preserve.

I’d spent my book tour road trip getting pleasant surprises: swag from the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame after I asked about neglected outlaw singer Sammi Smith; a print from the daughter of a Cherokee artist after I showed her a photo I’d taken of an obscure painting by her father in a museum years ago, and told her of my search for a copy, which she made for me in her studio. When your interests are strange, no one is a stranger.

The Gas Station owner regaled me and my husband with tales of the venue’s glory. He brought us out back to reveal a prop severed head in which he showed great pride. He mentioned Gunnar Hansen, the University of Texas graduate student who took what he thought would be a quick and amusing gig playing Leatherface, only to have it dominate his life. Hansen passed away at 68 in 2015.

“Leatherface was my phone friend!” I exclaimed.

“Who?”

“Leatherface! I mean, Gunnar,” I said. “When I was in college, I was supposed to interview him about Chainsaw. But we ended up talking about everything. Carl Jung and horror literature and the collective unconscious. Ocean life and ecology. He could recite Moby Dick. He made me want to go to Maine.”

“I proposed to you in Maine,” my husband interjected. “Maybe that should be your top memory of Maine.”

“It is,” I said. “But I was 20 and didn’t know anything. Leatherface gave me life advice.”

I had gotten Gunnar Hansen’s phone number through a friend of a friend from Lubbock. He agreed to speak to me, even though I had nowhere to publish my piece, and ended up using it for a college class in non-fiction writing. A former graduate student in English, Hansen didn’t mind. For one week in 1999, I called him multiple times for “follow-up questions”. That was a front: I wanted to keep talking. He understood things I was only beginning to grasp.

I wondered what I would be like in middle age, and I decided that if I was like Gunnar Hansen, I’d be doing just fine.

* * *

He could have cashed in early, but he didn’t care. When Chainsaw brought him fame, Hansen — the only Melville scholar to have his own action figure with a detachable severed head — quit acting. Inspired by the John McPhee essay “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” he moved to the Maine woods to live in seclusion. He left university life behind as well. Hansen was wary of academia and Hollywood, describing them as industries where you’re expected to give pat answers to please bad people. He sought creative freedom above all.

“I wanted to write,” he told me. “That’s all I ever really wanted to do. If I was going to struggle and suffer and starve to try and develop my skill, I’d rather do it as a writer than as an actor.”

Over the next two decades, Hansen wrote five books, including poetry and travelogues about ecologically vulnerable regions of the United States. When I spoke to him in 1999, his most recent book, Islands at the Edge of Time, about East Coast barrier islands, had received a glowing review on a new book vendor called Amazon. The title of the review was “Leatherface Goes Island-Hopping.”

Hansen got used to being typecast. It never deterred him from his intellectual pursuits, and he did not view those pursuits as separate from his background in horror. When we spoke after the Columbine shootings, I asked him about media accusations that horror films fuel real-life murder. Hansen sighed. He said he’d been getting this question for decades from people who didn’t like the answer.

“People go after horror films not because they’re violent, but because a lot of times horror films have values that contradict normal values,” he said. “That’s why people are so outraged. When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, it was much more explicit than Chainsaw Massacre. No one raised a complaint about the explicit violence in a film that, to some degree, was aimed at kids. But when Chainsaw came out, Johnny Carson gets on TV and says that he’s offended that it didn’t get an X rating for its violence.

“What’s happening is that we’re going after these films not because of their violence. We see the violence as something we can hang on to. We’re offended by horror movies because we’re middle Americans who don’t want to see things in which the values are not the same. The vision in horror films is often very dark. We want to have a movie that tells us that everything’s okay.

“A horror film does not pretend that death is not horrifying. It does not pretend that violence is not bloody, grotesque, and painful. What’s irresponsible are the films that show violence with no ramifications.”

Hansen saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a rule-breaker: a movie of “impolite horror” that refused to offer clarity or resolution. He saw a similar ambiguity in his favorite book, Moby Dick, which he encouraged me to read once a year.

“There’s the deep unconscious that the sea represents, if you want to be Freudian about it,” the Texas Chainsaw Massacre star explained. “Or, as Jung said, the lake in the valley of the unconscious. At the same time, it’s a tragedy about Ahab. There are so many different things going on but what worked particularly for me was that it was dipping into the idea that there was this mass of unknowability. It’s this huge book that has all these seams in it.

“Sometimes you read something and you feel that everything is polished as smooth as a stone. I never had that feeling with Moby Dick. The book was bigger than the author. It was like he had lost control over it, and that’s what I loved about it.”

When I used a quote from Moby Dick as an epigraph in my book They Knew — a book I structured as a non-fiction horror story to convey the pain of the political moment in a palatable way — I thought of Gunnar Hansen.

* * *

He told me to see the wilderness before it was too late. In 1999, I had barely traveled, and he encouraged me to explore the country, to visit his beloved Maine, to cherish fragile lands. He worried about the future my generation would inherit. When I look back on our chats, we were two people obsessed with death because we loved life.

Gunnar Hansen made me feel normal. It was normal to love Moby Dick and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was normal to abhor violence and watch horror for entertainment, in the hope that somehow the entertainment would convey the grief in the American air, even in that glorious illusion of 1999, the sole year I could be called an optimist.

I never spoke to him after that week. Sometimes you have a brief encounter and it shapes your life without you realizing it. A gentle man famed for playing a serial killer taught me I never had to choose one way to live or to be. I could be of the world, and that was enough.

You’re not a contradiction in terms when you’re the one writing the terms. It’s a lesson I wish younger people — sorted into boxes not only by social pressure, but by panopticon data miners — understood through experiences beyond life as prey.

If the seas shall rise, let the mass of unknowability rise too.

* * *

In 2013, Hansen, who started making horror cameos in the late 1980s but kept his movie persona separate from his writing, published an amusing tell-all called Chain Saw Confidential. Chapter One begins: “Call me Leatherface.”

But his description of Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s ending sounds like a 2025 news report, if 2025 still had news:

“The monster goes unpunished. He is still there, still capable of returning. The normality, the predictability of the world is gone. There is no punishment. There is no relief of suffering. There is no justice. There is no order. Without justice and order, how can we have meaning? It is all nothing. This is the real horror.”

Hansen died of pancreatic cancer before Trump took office, autocracy spread worldwide, and climate catastrophes devastated the lands he loved. He died before a technofascist belief in human disposability became mainstreamed into global politics: an extinction racket that shuns even the pretense of valuing life.

He died before Trump started talking up Hannibal Lecter. Trump ignored fellow cannibal Leatherface: Leatherface is too impolite, too raw in his menace. Gunnar Hansen feared the polished villains. I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the plutocrats who destroy the natural world to build an AI facsimile.

On our last night in Texas, my husband and I drove the same Austin streets that Hansen did a half century ago in an America that had hit its peak without knowing it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre mocked the idea that Americans were free, but the film felt free — ruthlessly, frantically free, like it was gathering a dark truth before the means to share it were foreclosed.

The sequels and remakes that followed heralded the narrowing of vision that led to our current dystopia: movies made by robots to pander to the unimaginative.

Near the Congress Avenue Bridge, a crowd was growing. We joined them as dusk fell. I liked the night because I couldn’t read the QR codes. I liked the night because I could pretend Austin was old Austin, and it was 1999, and the future lay before me instead of behind me.

Then it happened: hundreds of thousands of bats emerged from under the bridge. The bats were resolute in flight, impervious to tech lord transformations. The crowd cheered. Here was nature, unrepentant. Here was a timeless symbol of horror stories engendering our shared humanity. Austin felt good again, alive again.

There’s a crack in the dystopia. That’s how the night gets in.

* * *

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Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

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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.”