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JFK Readers Guide: Assassination Books, Reports

Category:JFKOctober 15, 2014

A comprehensive new Readers Guide lists the most important books about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The list below prepared by the Justice Integrity Project (JIP) is continuously updated and is part of a larger JIP project to catalog films, other videos, organizations, events, and commentaries. That project is coordinated also with Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), on whose board JIP Editor Andrew Kreig serves.

More than 2,500 books are estimated to have been published in whole or part on the Kennedy assassination, according to Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) President James H. Lesar, who co-founded that non-profit in 1984.

The most significant of those books are listed below. The criteria for inclusion in the catalog was sales, expert citations, and similar impact. Inclusion is irrespective of whether the authors’ point of view criticized or defended such conventional interpretations as the 1964 Warren Commission report on the assassination.

From this broader list, we identify a handful of books recommended for the general reader who desires a current and authoritative view in one volume that includes analysis,

The larger catalog below is not meant for casual reading. Instead, it is intended as a reference source for readers looking for a specific book.

Other segments of the Readers Guide cover the most relevant films and other videos, research centers, and events. Additional installments provide interpretative columns. The guide also contains a listing of major official reports on President Kennedy’s death. In coordination with other researchers, the Justice Integrity Project plans similar Readers Guides for other major U.S. political assassinations, including the 1968 murders of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on the day he won California’s presidential primary.

As noted above, the main purpose of the catalog below is to list a wide array of relevant books regardless of viewpoint. But serious research ultimately leads to analysis. In that spirit, we recommend these books below for the general reader as an introduction to understanding the murder, the investigations, and their current implications.

The list below shows publishers and dates of most recent publication. Dates of previous editions are in parentheses.

Douglass, James, W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Touchstone, 2008.
Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Harper’s, 2015.
Marrs, Jim. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Basic, 2013 (Carroll & Graf, 1989).
McKnight, Gerald. Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why. University of Kansas, 2005.
Scott, Peter Dale. Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House. Open Road Media, 2018. (Forbidden Bookshelf, 2015).
Belzer, Richard and David Wayne, Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.
Newman, John M. Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK. Skyhorse, 2008 (1995).
Prouty, L. Fletcher. JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Skyhorse, 2013 (Carroll and Graf, 1996).
DiEugenio, James with an introduction by Oliver Stone. JFK Revisited. Skyhorse, 2022.

The books each argue that Kennedy was the victim of a plot by Kennedy opponents in government and their private sector allies who were so powerful and adept that they largely avoided exposure by official bodies, the most important of which were themselves constrained from pursuing their probes. The manipulation of official investigations and news coverage was typically by operatives pursued their roles with scant understanding they were playing a limited role in a larger plan. Thus, alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald would be best understood as a government asset working through intermediaries and without knowledge that he would ultimately be designated as a patsy.

A separate category is for books about general themes beyond the JFK assassination that nonetheless contained important JFK-assassination related findings that keep the following prominent and widely respected within the JFK assassination research community:

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Talbot, David. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. Free Press, 2007.
Mellen, Joan. A Farewell To Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And the Case that Should Have Changed History. Skyhorse, 2013.
Evica, George Michael. A Certain Arrogance: The Sacrificing of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Manipulation of Religious Groups by U.S. Intelligence, TrineDay, 2011. (Originally published in a more heavily annotated edition by Xlibris, 2006.)
Morley, Jefferson. The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton St. Martin’s, 2017.

Serious researchers, citizen and professional alike, should have access to the conventional government story, claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone assassin. That argument’s core document is the 1964 Waren Commission Report, as amplified by numerous best-selling books that are each shown to be misguided by solid scientific, witness and documentary evidence undermining the official story. One notable monument to that official theory was, because of its 1,612-page length and extensive citations useful also to those who reject the book’s thesis:

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Norton, 2013 (2007).

Regarding our list of the most recommended JFK assassination books:

First: these each advocate a point of view and can provide a one-volume overview of vital evidence on the assassination, including revelations about flaws in the official investigations, even if a reader has no time to read an additional book.

Second, each of the authors has substantial academic or parallel professional expertise in the research, with the exception of the Belzer-Wayne author team that accomplishes similar results by extensive citations. Third, books are not included if they primarily argue that a specific person orchestrated a plot or pulled a trigger. Such books can be highly worthwhile, of course, but are inherently limited by lack of subpoena power, cross-examination, and other research tools whatever their evidence. More than half a dozen individuals, for example, can plausibly be described as shooters or getaway drivers (several by their own account) but the key issue is the plausibility of the Warren Commission’s conclusion of one shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, and not the varied alternatives.

Finally, most of the books, aside from Prouty’s, encompass much of the recent research, which experts estimate as including four million pages of declassified documents. Prouty is included primarily because of is insider status as a pioneering whistleblower. By the same standard, others such as the late New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison could have been included. But ultimately the more recent and more comprehensive critiques seem the best place for the general reader to start.

For somewhat similar reasons, several compelling books that contain extreme conclusions are omitted from this list of the few most recommended books for first-time general readers. Thus, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK published in 1992 by Peter Dale Scott is worth serious consideration but is best understood after study of more general works.

doug horne Similarly, Inside the Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB): The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK is a five-volume work that represents an enormous and authoritative civic service by Douglas P. Horne (at left), the former AARB chief analyst for military records.

But that five-volume series is not recommended for a general reader trying to get initial bearings in the field. The same thing can be said for a number of other important works, including Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy by Vincent Michael Palamara, who provided case studies of all relevant Secret Service key personnel. Another in this category of expert works is the multi-volume Where Angels Tread Lightly study of the assassination by John M. Newman, at left, a history professor with high level Army Intelligence and National Security Agency experience. Newman is one of the most expert researchers ever to write books about the John Newman assassination.

The authors selected above had varied backgrounds that equipped them for their work.

James Douglass, shown in a file photo at right, is a longtime peace activist and accomplished research scholar whose JFK and the Unspeakable is often described as “the best” introduction to the topic by critics of conventional news coverage.

In the Douglass account, the one-time World War II combat hero Kennedy helped save the nation from nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis and was on track to resolve the Vietnam War and similar Cold War crises in ways that would have saved millions of lives. Douglass shows that Kennedy’s actions persuaded persuaded powerful U.S. interests, however, that the president was traitor who needed to be killed.

The late Air Force Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, shown at right, holds several distinctions as a whistleblowing expert who was in a rare if not unique position to anticipate the Douglass argument before Prouty’s death in 2001. Prouty was World II combat pilot entrusted with a variety of sensitive missions in both Army and Air Force operations.

Prouty went on to serve as the top liaison during the Republican Eisenhower administration’s Defense Department Joint Chiefs of Staff to the CIA regarding covert operations. Later, Prouty held the same post with the Joint Chiefs throughout the Democrat Kennedy’s administration, thereby placing him in the information loop of sensitive operations that included regime change, revolution, assassinations and propaganda.

In 1973, Prouty wrote The Secret Team, one of the first exposés of the CIA. The book documented how the agency functioned more as an operational unit of America’s elite private sector interests than for the American public’s elected officials. Prouty’s 1996 book JFK argued more specifically that the CIA and its allied interests murdered Kennedy in 1963 to change America’s foreign policy.

In JFK and the Unspeakable, author James Douglass cited interviews by Prouty late in life to show Prouty held a rare vantage point by having been designated in the 1950s by longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles to “create a network of subordinate focal point offices in the armed services, then throughout the entire U.S. government. Each office that Prouty set up was put under a “cleared” CIA employe. That person took orders directly from the CIA but functioned under the cover of his particular office and branch of government.”

Douglass continued:

The consequence in the early 1960s when Kennedy became president was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through the entire U.S. government. It was accountable to no one except the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy [technically forced out via resignation in November 1961 along with two top Dulles deputies], the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms became this invisible government’s immediate commander. No one except a tight inner circle of the CIA even knew of the existence of this top-secret intelligence network, mush less the identity of deep-cover bureaucrats.

Historian Gerald McKnight, a longtime professor at Hood College in Frederick, MD, wrote in Breach of Trust a devastating appraisal of the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the evidence that Kennedy was murdered in a well-orchestrated conspiracy.

McKnight’s book, like the others noted above and below, built on a vast number of courageous previous researchers. They included pioneering authors Mark Lane, who visibly advocated for Oswald’s legal rights and new investigations in 1967, and Sylvia Meagher, who indexed and systematically debunked the Warren report’s 26 volumes of exhibits in another pioneering book first published also in 1967.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a medical school professor and prominent coroner, is among the medical and other scientific experts prominent in disputing Warren Report evidence.

Other materials came from the more than four million declassified documents unearthed by, among others, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, former House Select Committee on Assassinations researchers Gaeton Fonzi and Robert Groden, Harold Weisberg, Bernard Fensterwald and his law partner James Lesar, Joan Mellen, Jefferson Morley, and others too numerous to mention, along with such popular authors as Dick Russell, Jim Marrs, Jesse Ventura, James DiEugenio, and Richard Belzer. Each has written important books focused squarely on the killing and cover-up. Many others have written more general works that make important contributions on the assassination research. They are included in the catalog below, but not in the recommended list above.

Our list near the top of this column of the most recommended general works on the JFK assassination fails to include most of the breakthrough pioneer works. This is not to disrepect their work. Led by Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher, Fred J. Cook and Harold Weisberg, among others, they bravely and expertly overcame powerful and at times viscious forces to bring truths to light. For purposes of this guide, however, the general reader is probably best served by more recent books that include new findings.

Important also are books focusing on specific suspects and institutions, such as that by longtime GOP consultant Roger Stone’s best-seller (with Mike Colapietro) The Man Who Killed Kennedy making the case for Lyndon Johnson’s guilt, and Oswald and the CIA, by Dr. John M. Newman, a longtime professor and former military intelligence office who once served as assistant to the director of the National Security Agency.

The biggest sales and media coverage, however, has gone to the Warren report and its defenders. The report is available online for free (including at the AARC and Mary Ferrell sites), and in multiple print editions. Most notable among its defenders in book form during its first years after publication was William Manchester in 1967. Later came Gerald Posner (1993), Vincent Bugliosi (2007) and, more recently, James Swanson (2013) and Bill O’Reilly (2013).

No survey of the research history of the JFK case would be complete without a mention of the role of official whistleblowers. Some have written compelling books, and in the aggregate they have made possible the work of all other researchers.

Among the most important and committed to public disclosure have been, in alphabetical order, FBI agent Don Adams, Secret Service officer Abraham Bolden, Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, Navy autopsy medical corpsman James Jenkins, CIA executive Victor Marchetti, Army Special Forces Lt. Col. Daniel Marvin, CIA/KGB double-agent Richard Nagell, Air Force Sgt. Robert Vinson, and CIA finance officer James Wilcott and his wife, Elise, a CIA secretary working in Japan with her husband when he helped pay Oswald while the latter was operating on a super-sensitive CIA-military spy assignment.

Each of these onetime government law enforcement, military, or intelligence personnel courageously stepped forward, as did others, to contribute important information to solving the mystery of who killed Kennedy and, more importantly, the consequences for the nation and world. For nearly all, their contributions were ignored, trivialized, suppressed — or even altered in apparent obstruction of justice for the murder investigation. Much of the power of the Douglass book comes from his deft and relentless assemblage of these blockbuster revelations ignored elsewhere. One of the Douglass chapters has more than 900 endnotes, virtually all involving on-the-record information.

Vital collections of records are maintained at government sites, as well as those private collections listed below. The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), based in Washington, DC, is located directly across the street from the Justice Integrity Project’s offices. NARA is the nation’s official record keeper. JFK researchers, for example, may search the NARA online database of recently declassified and still-classified records from the Kennedy assassination investigations.

Even what is intended to be a comprehensive list below of hundreds of books (out of the universe of more than two thousand) is necessarily selective. We seeks, however, to include leading works of whatever viewpoint that are frequently cited or regarded as important in the community of experts. Special emphasis is on newer materials and those considered classics.

The criteria is intended to encompass important books that may include only a small amount of material on the assassination if that material is unique or otherwise of important research value.

This list was originally included in a 013 compilation on this site that also included a Readers Guide to JFK-related events, videos and archives. For ease of access and updates, non-book research resources are in separate listings.

Several special markings are attached to certain books to help readers place the works in a larger context. For example, a special notation designates where the books were new as of 2013. Other markings indicate inclusion of the book or author on speaker faculties of experts in the field, etc.

Any such compilation is a work in progress. Therefore, we welcome any corrections, additions or other updates. These may be sent via Info [at] justice-integrity.org. Additionally, our intention is to work with other researchers conduct a poll on “the best” JFK assassination books and videos in important genres.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Justice Integrity Project Readers Guide To JFK Assassination

By Andrew Kreig, JIP Editor, CAPA Board member and Associate Editor and Board member of The Indicter

What follows are excerpts from our Project’s so-far 38-previous segments of a “Readers Guide” to the assassination begun in 2013 to underscore both the 50th anniversary of the death and its continuing relevance, particularly slanted media, government, and academic treatment of the death that serves as a Rosetta Stone to similar slanted coverage sensitive matters extending through the decades to today’s news.

The Justice Integrity Project cooperates with Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) and The Indicter, each of which investigates suspected political assassinations around the world.

In the Readers Guide below, a red asterisk (*) denotes major articles in the series. Other articles may be regarded as more routine or duplicative treatments sometimes covering specific events.

At right is a photo by this editor in Dallas showing Dealey Plaza. The Texas Book Depository Building where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald worked is behind the row of trees. The car in the center lane is near the location of President Kennedy’s limo at the time of his fatal shooting. The “X” mark is repeatedly painted on the street by author and photographic expert Robert Groden as reminder of the horrific crime that Dallas authorities seek to expunge by removing the X.

Project Launches JFK Assassination Readers’ Guide, Oct. 16, 2013.
Project Provides JFK Readers Guide To New Books, Videos, Oct. 26, 2013. This is a list of new books and films in 2013.
Disputes Erupt Over NY Times, New Yorker, Washington Post Reviews of JFK Murder, Nov. 7, 2013. *
Self-Censorship In JFK TV Treatments Duplicates Corporate Print Media’s Apathy, Cowardice, Nov. 7, 2013.
‘Puppetry’ Hardback Launched Nov. 19 at DC Author Forum on ‘White House Mysteries & Media,’ Nov. 19, 2013.
Major Media Stick With Oswald ‘Lone Gunman’ JFK Theory, Nov. 27, 2013.
JFK Murder Scene Trapped Its Victim In Kill Zone, Nov. 30, 2013.
Project Lists JFK Assassination Reports, Archives, Videos, Events, Nov. 2, 2013. *
JFK Murder, The CIA, and 8 Things Every American Should Know, Dec. 9, 2013. *
JFK Murder Prompts Expert Reader Reactions, Dec. 19, 2013. Reactions to our Dec. 9 column.
Have Spy Agencies Co-Opted Presidents and the Press? Dec. 23, 2013. *
Don’t Be Fooled By ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Smears, May 26, 2014. *
Experts To Reveal Secrets of JFK Murder, Cover-up at Sept. 26-28 DC Forum , Sept. 5, 2014.
Washington Post Still Selling Warren Report 50 Years Later, Sept. 22, 2014. *
JFK Experts To Explode Myths, Sign Books In DC Sept. 26-28, Sept. 24, 2014.
Former Cuban Militant Leader Claims CIA Meeting With Oswald Before JFK Killing, Sept. 27, 2014. *
JFK Readers Guide: Assassination Books, Reports, Oct. 15, 2014. *
Former House JFK Murder Prober Alleges CIA ‘Lied,’ Seeks Hidden Records, Oct. 18, 2014. *
The JFK Murder ‘Cover-up’ Still Matters — As Does C-SPAN’s Coverage, Nov. 11, 2014. *
JFK, Nov. 22 and the Continuing Cover-Up, Nov. 24, 2014. *
JFK Assassination Readers Guide To 2013-14 Events, Nov. 28, 2014. *
CIA, Empowered by JFK Murder Cover-up, Blocks Senate Torture Report, Dec. 1, 2014. *
Nearly Too Late, Public Learns of Bill Moyers’ Conflicts Over PBS, LBJ, Jan. 2, 2014.
Why Bill O’Reilly’s Lie About JFK’s Murder Might Matter To You, March 17, 2015.
Free Videos Show Shocking Claims About CIA, JFK Murder Probes, June 29, 2015.
Pioneering Black Secret Service JFK Guard Abraham Bolden Warns Of Current Lessons, July 22, 2015.
Understanding Hollywood-Style Presidential Propaganda From JFK To Trump, Aug. 18, 2015.
Beware Of Wrong Conclusions From New CIA Disclosure On Oswald, Sept. 28, 2015.
The JFK Murder Cover-Up: Your Rosetta Stone To Today’s News, Nov. 29, 2015.
Austin Kiplinger, David Skorton: Two Civic Giants Going And Coming, Dec. 15, 2015.
Trump Alleges Rafael Cruz Tie To JFK Murder Suspect Oswald, May 3, 2016.
Revelations Confirm Proof Of JFK, RFK Murder Cover-ups, Nov. 25, 2016.
Top Experts To Assess JFK Murder Records, Revelations March 16, March 8, 2017.
Speaker Program For March 16 Forum On Secret JFK Records, March 8, 2017.
JFK Experts Advocate Compliance With Records Deadline, March 8, 2017.
At CAPA Forum, JFK Experts See Need, Momentum For Assassination Records Release, March 23, 2017.
Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald-JFK Fake News, April 26, 2017.
JFK Birthday Prompts Inspiration, Art, Advocacy, Snark, June 2, 2017.
Deep State Killed JFK For His Cuba Policy, Peace Advocacy, Experts Say, June 13, 2017.
Newly Released JFK Murder Files Prompt Disputes, ‘Jigsaw’ Solutions, Aug. 4, 2017.
CAPA Challenges Warren Report Defenders Sabato, Shenon, Sept. 22, 2017.
Trump Plans Release Of Suppressed JFK Records, Oct. 21, 2017.
Trump Backs Off Promise To Release All Suppressed JFK Documents Today; Permits Partial Release, Oct. 26, 2017.
More JFK Murder Records Released On Nov. 9, Nov. 10, 2017.
TV Star John Barbour Premieres New JFK Documentary In DC With Free Screenings, Lectures, Nov. 13, 2017.
Two Major Annual JFK Research Conferences Launch Friday In Dallas, Nov. 15, 2017.
DC, Dallas Nov. 22 Events Mark JFK Murder, Official Cover-up, Nov. 22, 2017
Assessing Newly Released JFK Records, Alec Baldwin’s Slam of NBC Cover-up, Dec. 19, 2017.
DC ‘Big Event’ Boosts Pressure To Disclose Suppressed JFK Records, March 16, 2018.
Trump Postpones Some JFK Documents At Deadline For Three Years, Releases Others, April 26, 2018.
Trump Suppresses JFK Murder Records, Violates Pledge, Bows To CIA, Deep State, May 1, 2018.
Rights Pioneer’s Obit Prompts Disputes Over JFK Murder Half-Truths, May 29, 2018.
Poppy’s Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half-Truths History (four-part series on life, legacy of George H. W. Bush), published from Dec. 9 through Dec. 14, 2018, with link to first installment).
Kennedy and King Family Members and Advisors Call for Congress to Reopen Assassination Probes, Jan. 20, 2019.

Recommendations From Others:

Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2015 Books, Staff report, Jan. 1, 2016. Several books of interest to our readers were published in 2015. Here are eight of the more notable ones:

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by David Talbot. The author of the acclaimed Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years has written here a decidedly unflattering portrait of CIA spymaster Allen Dulles, who along with his brother Foster defined an era of coup-driven foreign policy. Talbot paints a portrait of Dulles as a leader in the anti-Kennedy national security camp even while out of office, building on the theme first developed in Brothers. In this book, Talbot argues the case for Dulles as leader of the plan to assassinate JFK.

Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House, by Peter Dale Scott. Scott is one of the pre-eminent thinkers and writers on the JFK assassination and its “deep politics,” and this book is in some ways the culmination of his thoughts on the case. This e-book continues where Deep Politics II left off in its analysis of Oswald, Mexico City, and the handling of the Oswald files. It then turns in new directions, looking at previously-ignored gaps in military records on Oswald, exploring the deep enmity between Kennedy and his military team and the evidence for coup-planning on their part, and making connections to the Watergate affair. The title of the book harkens to Scott’s notion that the overt government is paired with, and at times overshadowed by, a “deep state”.

John F. Kennedy’s Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis – and a New Analysis of the Harper Fragment, by Dr. David W. Mantik. This e-book by JFK medical expert David Mantik makes the case that the Harper fragment, found in Dealey Plaza after JFK’s assassination, was occipital bone. Mantik uses this conclusion to challenge the interpretation of autopsy photos as indicating a single head shot from behind, and makes the argument for shots from the right-front of the presidential limousine.

Selected JFK Assassination Books

Editor’s Note: Books are arranged by the main author’s last name and with their most recent publisher. Parenthetical marks indicated the original publication date, for some books. Books published or republished since 2013 are denoted with this sign: ##.

To understand at a glance a general measure of book themes, we note with a red asterisk those authors included in a leading conference assembling primarily critics of the official Warren Commission report. james kelleher custom

Beginning in mid-2017, Professor James J. Kelleher began assisting the Justice Integrity Project in updating this list and similar lists of the most important books regarding the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. James J. Kelleher received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California Santa Barbara. He was Department Chair until his retirement at the College of the Canyons in Valencia, California. He also taught at CSU Los Angeles, CSU Northridge, and CSU Dominguez Hills. He is a co-author of Governing California in the Twenty-First Century and author of He Was Expendable: National Security, Political and Bureaucratic Cover-Ups in the Murder of President John F. Kennedy.

Abrams, Dan and Fisher, David. Kennedy’s Avenger: Assassination Conspiracy, and the Forgotten Trial of Jack Ruby. Hanover Square, 2021.

Adams, Don. A From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle: A Report to the Public from an FBI agent involved in the official JFK assassination investigation. TrineDay, 2012.

Albarelli, H. P., Jr. A Secret Order: Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronicity in the JFK Assassination. TrineDay, 2013. Menninger, Bonar. Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK. CreateSpace, 2013.

hp albarelli jr cover coup __________ Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK. Skyhorse, 2021. (Previous edition: Coup in Dallas: Who Killed Kennedy and Why? Skyhorse, 2018)

Anderson, Christopher. Those Few Precious Days: The Final Years of Jack With Jackie. Gallery, 2013 (1998).

__________ The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved. Gallery, 2014.

Anson, Robert Sam. “They’ve Killed the President! The Search for the Murderers of John Kennedy. Bantam, 1975.

Armstrong, John. JFK: The Dead Witnesses. Consolidated Press International, 1995.

__________ Harvey and Lee. Quasar, 2003.

Associated Press. The Torch Is Passed: The Associated Press Story of the Death of a President. Associated Press, 1963.

Attwood, William. The Twilight Struggle: Tales of the Cold War. Harper Collins, 1987.

Ayers, Bradley E. Zenith Secret: A CIA Insider Exposes the Secret War Against Cuba and the Plot that Kiiled the Kennedy Brothers. Vox Pop, 2007.

Aynesworth, Hugh. JFK: Breaking the News. International Focus, 2003.

__________ November 22, 1963: Witness to History. Brown, 2013.

Ayton, Mel. Questions of Controversy: The Kennedy Brothers. University of Sunderland, 2001.

__________ The JFK Assassination: Dispelling the Myths. Woodfield, 2002.

Ayton, Mel and Von Pein, David. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald’s Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media, 2014.

Baden, Michael. Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner. Ivy, 1989.

Bagley, Tennent H. Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. Yale University, 2007.

Baker, Judyth Vary. Me and Lee: How I Came To Know and Love Lee Harvey Oswald. TrineDay, 2010.

__________ David Ferrie: Mafia Pilot, Participant in Anti-Castro Bioweapon Plot, Friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and Key to the JFK Assassination. TrineDay, 2014.

Baker, Judyth Vary and Edward Schwartz. Kennedy and Oswald: The Big Picture. TrineDay, 2017.

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.

Russ Baker cover Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Anchor, 2002.

Barney, Mel. Four Wars. Merit, 2012 (Kindle).

Bartholomew, Richard (Foreword: Ed Tatro). The Deep State in the Heart of Texas. Say Something Real Press, 2018.

Becker, Don. The JFK Assassination: A Researcher’s Guide. 2010.

Beddow, David T. A Ferrie Tale. Archway, 2019.

Belin, David. November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury. Quadrangle, 1973.

__________ Final Disclosure: The Full Truth About the Assassination of President Kennedy. Scribner’s 1988.

Belli, Melvin M. with Maurice C. Carroll. Dallas Justice: The Real Story of Jack Ruby and His Trial. David McKay, 1964.

Richard Belzer Dead Wrong cover Belzer, Richard and David Wayne, Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.

Belzer, Richard and David Wayne. Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country’s Most Controversial Cover-Ups. Skyhorse, 2013 (2012).

Benson, Michael. Encyclopedia of the JFK Assassination. Checkmark, 2002.

Benson, Michael. Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination: An A to Z Encyclopedia. Citadel, 1993.

Beschloss, Michael R. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963. HarperCollins, 1991.

__________ Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

__________ Reaching for Glory: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1964-1965. Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Bethelll, Tom. The Electric Windmill: An Inadvertent Autobiography. Regnery Gateway, 1988.

Biles, Joe G. Gthe Arrogance of Ignorance: Essays on the HSCA and the Show Trial. Processed, 2000.

Bird, Kai. The Chairman. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Bishop, George. Witness to Evil. Dell, 1971.

Bishop, Jim. The Day Kennedy Was Shot. Harper Perennial, 2013 (1968).

Bissell, Richard. Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. Yale University, 1996.

Blaine, Gerald and Lisa McCubbin. The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence. Gallery, 2010.

Blair, Joan and Clay Jr. The Search for JFK. Berkley, 1976.

Blakey, G. Robert and Richard Billings. The Plot To Kill the President. Times Books, 1981.

__________ Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. Berkley Books, 1992.

Bloomgarden, Henry S. The Gun: A Biography of the Gun that Killed John F. Kennedy. Grossman, 1975.

Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Common Courage, 2004.

Abraham Bolden book cover, The Echo from Dealey Plaza Blumenthal, Sidney and Harvey Yazijian, eds. Government By Gunplay. New American Library, 1976.

Bohrer, John R. The Revolution of Robert Kennedy: From Power to Protest After JFK. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Bolden, Abraham. Echo from Dealey Plaza: The true story of the first African-American on the Secret Service and his search for justice after the JFK assassination. Crown, 2008.

Bojczuk, Jeremy. 22 November 1963: A Brief Guide to the JFK Assassination. Boxgrove, 2014.

Bowen, Russell S. The Immaculate Deception: The Bush Crime Family Exposed. America West, 1991.

Bradlee, Benjamin C. Conversations With Kennedy. Norton, 1975.

Braxton, C. Fenway. The Plot to Kill Lee Harvey Oswald. 2014.

Brener, Milton. The Garrison Case: A Study in the Abuse of Power. Clarkson Potter, 1969.

Brennan, Howard L. and J. Edward Cherryholes. Eyewitness to History: As Seen by Howard Brennan. Texian, 1987.

Bringuier, Carlos. Red Friday: November 22nd, 1963. Chas. Hallberg, 1969.

Brinkley, Alan. John F. Kennedy. Times Books, 2012.

Brogan, Hugh. Kennedy. Pearson Education, 1988.

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__________ JFK Assassination Research, Records And Resources: An Online Goldmine Of Researcher’s Information. Kindle, 2018.

__________ JFK: Beyond A Question Of Conspiracy: An Investigation And Revision Of History. Kindle, 2018.

__________ Miami, Chicago, Tampa And Dallas Four Plots Of Conspiracy To Assassinate JFK: An Investigative Report From JFK Beyond A Question Of Conspiracy. Kindle, 2018.

__________ Project Northwoods, Operation Mockingbird And The Assassination Of JFK, MLK And RFK: An Investigative Report. Kindle, 2018.

__________ The Defense Investigation Of Lee Harvey Oswald and The School Book Depository Building. Kindle, 2018.

__________ Wall Of Secrecy: Inside The JFK Assassination: How James Angleton & William Harvey Set Up An Assassination Team Inside The CIA, Kindle, 2018.

__________ ALTERED! The Zapruder Film: An Investigative Report. Kindle, 2017.

__________ JFK Assassination Witnesses: -Accounts And Locations Of Shots Fired An Investigative Report. Kindle, 2017.

__________ Lee Harvey Oswald: Portrait Of A Patsy And US Intelligence Agent: A/K/A: Leon Oswald, Lee Henry Oswald, O.H. Lee, Leon Henry, Alex Hidell, Harvey Lee. Kindle 2017.

__________ Silenced! Strange Deaths Of People Who Knew Too Much About The JFK Assassination. Kindle, 2017

Josiah Thompson Thompson, Josiah. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. Bernard Geis Associates, 1967.

__________ Last Second in Dallas. University Press of Kansas, 2020.

Thornley, Kerry W. The Idle Warriors. Illuminet, 1991.

Titovets, Ernst. Oswald: Russian Episode. Eagle View Books, 2020 (Privately published in 2010 and 2014).

Toplin, Robert Brent. History by Hollywood JFK: Fact, Fiction, and Supposition, University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Trask, Richard B. That Day In Dallas. Yeoman, 1998.

__________ Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy. Yeoman, 1994.

__________ National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film Yeoman, 2005. Trento, Joseph J. The Secret History of the CIA. Forum, 2001.

Trost, Cathy and Susan Bennett. President Kennedy Has Been Shot: The Inside Story of the Murder of a President. Sourcebooks, 2003.

Turner, William. Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA, and other Tails. Penmarin, 2001.

Turner, William W. and Jonn G. Christian. The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: A Searching Look at the Conspiracy and Cover-up 1968-1978. Random House, 1978.

Twyman, Noel. Bloody Treason: On Solving History’s Greatest Murder Mystery, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Laurel, 1997.

United Press International and American Heritage Magazine. Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy. American Heritage, 1964.

Vaccara, Stefano and Robert Miller (Translator). Carlos Marcello: The Man Behind the JFK Assassination. Enigma, 2013.

Veciana, Antonio and Carlos Harrison with foreword by David Talbot. Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots against Castro, Kennedy, and Che. Skyhorse, 2017.

Ventura, Jesse and Dick Russell and David Wayne. They Killed Our President: 63 Facts That Prove a Conspiracy to Kill JFK. Skyhorse, 2013.

Ventura, Jesse, Russell, Dick. American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us. Skyhorse, 2013.

Jesse Ventura They Killed Our President Cover

Ventura, Jesse and Dick Russell. American Conspiracies: The Card Set. Skyhorse, 2013.

Ventura, Jesse. 63 Documents That the Government Doesn’t Want You To See. Skyhorse, 2012.

Ventura, Jesse. Lies, Lies and More Lies That the Government Tells Us. Skyhorse, 2010.

Wagner, Robert A. The Assassination of JFK: Perspectives Half a Century Later. Dog Ear Publishing, 2016.

Waldon, Lamar and Thomas Hartmann. Legacy of Secrecy. The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination. Counterpoint, 2008.

Waldon, Lamar and Thomas Hartmann. Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK. Carroll & Graf, 2005.

Waldon, Lamar. Watergate: The Hidden History. Counterpoint, 2012.

Waldron, Lamar. The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination. Counterpoint, 2013.

Walsh, Kenneth. Air Force One: A History of Presidents and Their Planes. Hyperion, 2004.

Walton, Richard J. Cold War and Counterrevolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy. Viking, 1972.

Warren Commission Report, Government Printing Office, 1964 and St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Watts, Steven. JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier. Thomas Dunne, 2016.

Weberman, Alan Jules with Michael Canfield. Coup D’Etat In America: The CIA and the Assassination of JFK. Quick American, 1992 (originally Third Press, 1975).

Weberman, Alan Jules. The Oswald Code: The Secrets of Oswald’s Address Book. CreateSpace, 2014.

Wecht, Cyril H. (shown at right), Mark Curriden, and Benjamin Wecht. Cause of Death. Onix, 1996.

Wecht, Cyril and Sewald, Jeff M. The Life and Deaths of Cyril Wecht: Memoirs of America’s Most Contoversial Forensic Pathologist. Exposit Books, 2020.

Wecht, Cyril and Kaufmann, Dawna. The JFK Assassination Dissected. Exposit Books, 2021.

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007.

__________ Enemies: A History of the FBI. Random House, 2012.

Weisberg, Harold. Oswald In New Orleans. Canyon, 1967.

__________ Case Open: The Omissions, Distortions and Falsifications of ‘Case Closed.’ Carroll & Graf, 1996.

__________ Never Again! The Government Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.

__________ Oswald in New Orleans: A Case for Conspiracy with the CIA. Skyhorse, 2013.

__________ Post Mortem: The Classic Investigation of the JFK Assassination Medical and Ballistics Evidence and Cover-Up. Skyhorse, 2013.

__________ Whitewash I: The Report on the Warren Report. Skyhorse, 2013.

__________ Whitewash II: The FBI–Secret Service Cover-Up in the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.

__________ Whitewash III: The Photographic Whitewash of the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.

__________ Whitewash IV: The Top Secret Warren Commission Transcript of the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.

Wemhoff, David A. John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition: How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church. Fidelity, 2015.

Wilkens, Tommy and Hilde. Walking the Razor’s Edge: The Dutchman and the Baron. 2019

Willens, Howard P. History Will Prove Us Right. Overlook, 2013.

Williams, Joe. The Grassy Knoll Report. Amazon.com Digital Services, 2013.

Williams, John Delane. Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination. TrineDay, 2019.

Wills, Garry and Ovid Demaris. Jack Ruby: The Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Kennedy. Ishi, 2011 (1994, 1968).

Wilson, Eric. The Spectacle of the False-Flag: Parapolitics from JFK to Watergate. Punctum, 2015.

Wise, Dan and Marietta Maxfield Wise. The Day Kennedy Died. Naylor, 1964.

Wofford, Harris. Of Kennedys And Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties. University of Pittsburgh, 1992.

Wolfenstein, Marth and Kliman Gilbert, eds. Children and the Death of a President: Multi-Disciplinary Studies. Doubleday, 1965.

Wrone, David R. The Freedom of Information Act and Political Assassination. Foundation Press, University of Wisconsin, 1978.

__________ The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination. University Press of Kansas, 2003.

Wyden, Peter. Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story. Simon & Schuster.

Yazijian, Harvey and Sid Blumenthal. Government by Gunplay: Assassination conspiracy theories from Dallas to today. New American Library, 1976.

Zachry, K. W. and Peterson, Sara. The Lone Star Speaks. Bancroft Press, 2020.

Zapruder, Alexandra. A Personal History of the Zapruder Film. Twelve, 2016.

Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and the Shaping of Collective Memory. University of Chicago, 1992.

Zirbel, Craig I. The Texas Connection: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Wright, 1991.

Major Official Reports

1998

Assassination Records Review Board, Final Report and Records Index. Available here via National Archives and Records Center.

1996

Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City [aka “Lopez Report”], House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), written in 1978 by Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez. Declassified in 1993 and more fully in 1996. Available here via the Mary Ferrell Foundation.

1979

Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Final Report and Appendix to Hearings Before the Select Committee To Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, 95th Congress, Volumes I-XII. House Report No. 95-1828.U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979, with accompanying 12 volumes on the JFK portion of the probe. The Final Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) presents the HSCA’s findings in the murders of both President John F. Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The report is available here via the History Matters archive, which provides this summary: “The HSCA found a “probable conspiracy” in the JFK assassination, but was unable to determine its nature or participants (other than that Oswald was still deemed to have fired all the successful shots). In the King case, the HSCA similarly found that James Earl Ray assassinated Reverend King, but that there might have been a small-scale conspiracy involved.”

1976

Final Report: Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, Select Committee To Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, United States Senate (“Church Committee). Senate Report No. 94-755. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976.

1975

Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of the Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (“Church Committee), Senate Report No. 94-465. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975.

Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (“Rockefeller Commission). Manor Books, 1975.

1972

The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam, Senator Gravel Edition (five volumes). Beacon, 1972.

1964

Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, center in the photo at left, and individually at right, led the seven-member commission. Warren, a former governor of California, is shown at left presenting their report in 1964 to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s successor.

Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy [aka “Warren Commission Report”] and 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964, available here via the Mary Ferrell Foundation.

The Warren Commission Report: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964.

Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964 (26 volumes).

Warren Commission Executive Session Transcripts. Originally confidential, and published by various outlets, 1964.

1961-63

Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963. Government Printing Office, 1962-1964.

Catching Our Attention on Related News

Salon, JFK assassination: CIA and New York Times are still lying to us, David Talbot, Nov. 6, 2012. Fifty years later, a complicit media still covers up for the security state. We need to reclaim our history. We’ll never know, we’ll never know, we’ll never know. That’s the mocking-bird media refrain this season as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of America’s greatest mystery – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson hijacked a large chunk of her paper’s Sunday Book Review to ponder the Kennedy mystery. And after deliberating for page after page on the subject, she could only conclude that there was some “kind of void” at the center of the Kennedy story.

Further reading: There is a wealth of useful information about the Kennedy assassination available online. But before a beginner wades into these thickets, it’s best to start with some of the best books on the subject.

1. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. Written by a deeply thoughtful Catholic peace activist, this book portrays Kennedy as a Cold War martyr -– a leader who sacrificed his life to save the world from the nuclear holocaust that was being threatened by his national security team.
2. The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know About the Assassination of JFK by Gaeton Fonzi.
3. Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why by Gerald McKnight.
4. Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA by Jefferson Morley.
5. Oswald and the CIA by John Newman.
6. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot.
7. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott.

Editor’s Note: David Talbot, the founder of Salon, authored the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. He is working on a book about the legendary CIA director Allen W. Dulles.

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News Reports

October 2025 News
Editor’s Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and October 2025 news and viewsNote: Excerpts are from the authors’ words except for subheads and occasional “Editor’s notes” such as this. Oct. 31The Parnas Perspective,BREAKING: Judge Orders Trump Administration to Use Contingency Funds to Cover SNAP, Aaron Parnas, Oct. 31, 2025. In a stunning, last-minute ruling this afternoon, a federal judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump Administration’s plan to suspend Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for roughly 42 million Americans, ensuring that millions of families will continue to receive vital food assistance next month despite the ongoing government shutdown. (Details below.) South Korea presented President Trump with a crown during his trip to Asia this week, pleasing and flattering him according to news reports, with some commentators suggesting that the presentation was intended also to mock his vanity and obtain concessions on trade policies.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 30, 2025 [King for a Day — or More], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 31, 2025. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) continues to try to pin the upcoming catastrophic lapse in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding on the Democrats.But with the U.S. Department of Agriculture sitting on $6 billion in funds Congress appropriated for just such an event, the Treasury finding $20 billion to prop up Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina, Johnson refusing to bring the House into regular session to negotiate an end to the government shutdown, and President Donald J. Trump demanding $230 million in damages from the American taxpayer, bulldozing the East Wing of the White House to build a gold-plated ballroom that will dwarf the existing White House, and traveling to Asia, where South Korean leadership courted him by giving him a gold crown and serving him brownies topped with edible gold, blaming any funding shortfall on Democrats is a hard sell.According to a Washington Post–ABC survey, more Americans blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats by a margin of 45 to 33, and Trump’s approval rating continues to move downward, with the presidential approval average reported by Fifty Plus One at 41.3% approval and 55.1% disapproval, a –14 split. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted on October 24 that polls show Americans now trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy well.Trump ran in 2024 with a promise to bring down inflation, which was then close to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2.0%; now core inflation is at 3%, having gone up every month since April. Halloween candy—on people’s minds today—is at 9.8% inflation and costs 44% more than it did in 2019. Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell sure sounded like he was describing stagflation—a condition when the economy stagnates despite inflation—when he said yesterday: “In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside, and risks to employment to the downside, a challenging situation.”Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that while the stock market has done well this year, a better economy is going to “start flowing through to working Americans next year.”Meanwhile, on Tuesday, in a rambling and disjointed speech in Japan, Trump told U.S. military personnel that he is federalizing National Guard troops and sending them into Democratic-led cities “because we’re going to have safe cities.” In the same speech, Trump repeatedly attacked former president Joe Biden and insisted yet again that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. (It was not.)When asked by a reporter later to clarify his remarks, Trump referred back to the Insurrection Act, saying that if he invoked it, “I’d be allowed to do whatever I want. But we haven’t chosen to do that because we’re…doing very well without it. But I’d be allowed to do that, you understand that. And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”In fact, a president can invoke the accurately named Insurrection Act only in times of insurrection or rebellion. Neither of those conditions exists.But the administration is working hard to create the impression that they do. Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the videos the Department of Homeland Security has been publishing to demonstrate the administration’s triumph over crime in U.S. cities as its agents work “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals” have been doctored. They do not represent current actions, but rather are a hash of video from different states and different times.When the reporters asked the White House about the misleading footage, spokesperson Abigail Jackson told them that “the Trump administration will continue to highlight the many successes of the president’s agenda through engaging content and banger memes on social media.”There are signs the administration is not just trying to give the impression that Americans are rioting, but is trying to push them to do so.Aaron Glantz of The Guardian reported yesterday that on October 8, Major General Ronald Burkett, who directs the Pentagon’s National Guard bureau, ordered the National Guard in all the states, U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia to form “quick reaction forces” trained in “riot control.” Most states are required to train 500 National Guard personnel, for a total nationwide of 23,500. The forces are supposed to be in place by January 1, 2026.In his order, Burkett relied on an executive order Trump signed on August 25, calling on the secretary of defense to “immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order,” and “ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”In August, the administration planned for two groups of 300 troops to be stationed in Alabama and Arizona as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force.” Now that number is 23,500, and the troops will be in every state and territory.The establishment of a domestic quick reaction force to quell civil disturbances at a time when there are no civil disturbances that can’t be handled easily by existing law enforcement suggests the administration is expecting those conditions to change.That expectation might have something to do with Monday’s story from Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner that the White House is reassigning ICE field officers and replacing them with officers from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Greg Wehner and Bill Melugin of Fox News reported that the shift will affect at least eight cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Philadelphia, El Paso, and New Orleans.White House officials, presumably led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has said the administration intends to carry out “a minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, are frustrated by the current pace of about 900 a day. So those officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, special government employee and Noem advisor Corey Lewandowski, and Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol sector chief who has been overseeing the agency’s operations in Los Angeles and Chicago, have decided to ramp up those deportations by replacing ICE officials with far more aggressive CBP leaders.Tripling arrests will likely bring pushback.Michael Scherer, Missy Ryan, and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic reported today that political appointees Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have moved onto military bases.The designs of the anti-immigrant leaders in the administration dovetail with Trump’s political designs. Trump has talked a lot about serving a third term in the presidency, most recently talking about it to reporters on Air Force One earlier this week. The Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution prohibits a third term, but Trump ally Stephen Bannon told The Economist last week that “Trump is going to be president in ‘28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” Bannon claimed, “There’s many different alternatives” to get around the Twenty-Second Amendment. Trump keeps “Trump 2028” campaign hats on bookshelves outside the Oval Office.Janessa Goldbeck, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation, told Guardian reporter Glantz that Burkett’s recent order shows “an attempt by the president to normalize a national, militarized police force.” Such a force has not just military but also electoral power: it could be used in Democratic-led states to suppress voting. In a worst-case scenario, Goldbeck said, “the president could declare a state of emergency and say that elections are rigged and use allegations of voter fraud to seize the ballots of secure voting centers.”Today, Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles has “initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew” over his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and participation in activities surrounding Epstein. Andrew will be stripped even of his title of “prince” and will be forced to leave the home he has shared for more than 20 years with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, at Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion located in Windsor Great Park. The palace said: “These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.”Today Jim Acosta reported that survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise have written a letter to Speaker Johnson demanding that Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) be sworn into office. Voters elected Grijalva on September 23, but Johnson has steadfastly refused to swear her in. Grijalva has said she will provide the last signature necessary on a discharge petition to force a vote on the public release of the Epstein files, an outcome that threatens to expose how and why Trump was named in those files.The survivors write that Johnson’s “continued refusal to seat her is an unacceptable breach of democratic norms and a disservice to the American people. Even more concerning to us as survivors, this delay appears to be a deliberate attempt to block her participation in the discharge petition that would force a vote to unseal the Epstein/Maxwell files. The American public has a right to transparency and accountability, and we, as survivors, deserve justice. Any attempt to obstruct a vote on this matter—by manipulating House procedure or denying elected members their seats—is a direct affront to that right and adds insult to our trauma.”News UpdatesThe Parnas Perspective,BREAKING: Judge Orders Trump Administration to Use Contingency Funds to Cover SNAP, Aaron Parnas, Oct. 31, 2025. In a stunning, last-minute ruling this afternoon, a federal judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump Administration’s plan to suspend Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for roughly 42 million Americans, ensuring that millions of families will continue to receive vital food assistance next month despite the ongoing government shutdown.The emergency decision by U.S. District Judge John McConnell halts the administration’s attempt to freeze the nation’s largest anti-hunger program and compels the government to use contingency funds to keep SNAP operating through November. The ruling represents a major setback for the White House’s efforts to curtail spending amid the shutdown and a critical lifeline for one in eight Americans who rely on the program.At nearly the same hour in Boston, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a related opinion finding that the administration’s refusal to release SNAP contingency funds was likely unlawful. While she stopped short of issuing an immediate order requiring partial payments, Judge Talwani signaled that the USDA has both the authority and the obligation to sustain the program. She demanded a government response by Monday on whether it intends to do so.“It’s hard for me to understand that this is not an emergency,” Talwani said during the hearing. “When there is no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits, the government must act lawfully and equitably.”A Historic Crisis for America’s Safety NetToday’s rulings mark a pivotal moment in the escalating standoff over SNAP funding. This is the first time in the program’s history that the nation has faced the real possibility of benefits running out entirely.SNAP, which provides about $8 billion in monthly nutrition aid, is a cornerstone of the federal safety net, helping low-income families, seniors, and individuals with disabilities put food on the table. Reports in October warning that SNAP funds could dry up by November 1 triggered alarm across the country, as states, food banks, and advocacy organizations scrambled to prepare for a potential lapse in aid.Some states even announced emergency measures to temporarily fund their own SNAP equivalents, an extraordinary step underscoring the depth of the crisis.The administration argued it could not use a $5 billion contingency reserve to sustain benefits, reversing a pre-shutdown USDA plan to tap those funds. The plaintiffs, a coalition of 25 states and the District of Columbia, countered that not only could those funds be used, but that federal law requires it, citing an additional $23 billion reserve that could be legally accessed to keep the program running.The Stakes AheadWhile today’s decision ensures that some level of benefits will be paid next month, the exact amount and duration remain unclear. What is certain is that the ruling has once again positioned the courts as a critical check on executive power and as a guardian of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.This fight is far from over. The outcome will shape how future administrations navigate shutdowns and determine whether millions of Americans can depend on the programs that keep them fed.New York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: President Says Abolishing Filibuster Would Let Republicans End Shutdown, Staff Reports, Oct. 31, 2025.Where Things Stand
- Government shutdown: President Trump called on Senate Republicans late Thursday to eliminate the filibuster in order to force an end to the government shutdown. The move would strip away a longstanding Senate rule that means most legislation needs 60 votes to pass rather than a simple majority. Both parties have sought to curtail use of the filibuster in recent years but have stopped far short of eliminating it. Read more ›
- Air travel: The administration warned there would be an air travel meltdown next month if the government shutdown continued, predicting chaos as controllers miss additional paychecks and the busy holiday season begins. Read more ›
Earlier this month, Mr. Thune dismissed the idea of changing the filibuster to end the shutdown.The president said in a late-night Truth Social post that it was time for G.O.P. leaders “to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’” and get rid of the longstanding rule that means most Senate legislation needs 60 votes to pass rather than a simple majority.The Parnas Perspective,Trump Stuns Advisors by Calling for Nuclear Testing and Urges Republicans to Abandon Filibuster Late-Night Rant,Aaron Parnas, Oct. 31, 2025. FBI says it thwarted a terrorist attack, SNAP expires tomorrow.Overnight, Donald Trump stunned even his own advisers by calling for renewed U.S. nuclear testing, the first since 1992, while also unleashing a late-night, all-caps tirade demanding that Republicans abolish the filibuster. In breaking overnight news, the FBI says it foiled a potential terrorist attack planned for Halloween weekend.If you read that and had to do a double take, you’re not alone.On a personal note, thank you for making this the best job in the world. Because of you, millions of people are seeing our reporting today. And it’s not just Democrats. Republicans, Independents, and everyday Americans have reached out to say they’re watching, sharing, and relying on us to make sense of this moment.This isn’t an echo chamber. It’s a national movement for truth and accountability, built by all of you. But I can’t do it alone. Let’s build on this momentum and reach every household in America. Subscribe today to support this mission and help us keep growing.SubscribedHere’s what you missed:President Trump stunned advisers by announcing on social media that the U.S. would resume nuclear testing after a 33-year hiatus, citing China and Russia’s capabilities; the abrupt declaration—made en route to a summit with Xi Jinping—lacked Pentagon coordination, drew skepticism from military officials, and sparked concerns it could violate treaties and reignite global nuclear tensions.California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized President Trump’s call to restart U.S. nuclear weapons testing as “weakness masquerading as strength,” accusing Trump of ignorance about which agency oversees testing and of embarrassing the U.S. in talks with China’s Xi Jinping; Newsom said the move was performative and politically motivated rather than a genuine show of strength.Amid the month-long government shutdown, President Trump urged Senate Republicans to invoke the “nuclear option” and abolish the filibuster to pass funding without Democratic support, as the stalemate over health care tax credits continues to stall government operations and cost the U.S. billions.May be a Twitter screenshot of text that says ‘Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump ….BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT THE DEMOCRATS HAVE GONE STONE COLD “CRAZY,” TH CHIC IS CLEAR INITIATE THE “NUCLEAR OPTION,” GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’As the government shutdown enters its 30th day, major airports like Orlando International and Reagan National faced multi-hour ground delays due to severe air traffic controller shortages, with unpaid FAA staff stretched thin and airlines urging Congress to end the shutdown to protect aviation safety.As enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire amid the government shutdown, Americans face steep premium hikes averaging 114% — with increases exceeding 175% in some states — deepening political standoff as Democrats demand subsidy extensions before reopening the government and Republicans refuse to negotiate until the shutdown ends.Amid the month-long government shutdown, the Trump administration announced it will pay U.S. military members Friday using $5.3 billion redirected from Defense Department funds, while Democrats and Republicans remain deadlocked over extending Affordable Care Act subsidies and broader government funding.FBI Director Kash Patel announced that federal agents thwarted a potential terrorist attack in Michigan planned for Halloween weekend, arresting multiple suspects allegedly plotting a violent act. Patel praised law enforcement for their vigilance and commitment to protecting the homeland, noting that further details will be released as the investigation develops.Trump-appointed Judge Carl Nichols praised two prosecutors suspended for calling the Jan. 6 attack a “riot” during the sentencing of Taylor Taranto, a pardoned Capitol rioter later convicted on weapons charges, while criticizing the Justice Department’s move to sideline them and suggesting their original memo could be unsealed.The FBI fired veteran agent Aaron Tapp, who oversaw parts of Jack Smith’s Trump-related investigations, in what sources describe as part of the Trump administration’s political purge of the bureau; the move follows other senior officials’ lawsuits alleging FBI Director Kash Patel has politicized the agency to punish those tied to probes of Trump.Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem refused Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s request to suspend immigration enforcement in Chicago over Halloween, despite public outrage after agents used tear gas during a neighborhood parade; Noem defended ongoing operations as necessary for safety, while residents and a federal judge condemned the use of chemical agents near children.After Kim Kardashian questioned the authenticity of the 1969 moon landing, NASA’s acting chief Sean Duffy publicly rebuked her, affirming that the U.S. has landed on the moon six times and plans to return under Trump’s Artemis program, while also inviting her to attend a future launch amid renewed NASA–Trump administration tensions.Stephen Miller has consolidated control over U.S. immigration policy by directing daily State Department calls and staffing key roles with ideological allies, effectively transforming the department into a hardline “anti-immigration machine” that prioritizes deportations, visa revocations, and refugee limits while sidelining career diplomats.Actor Harrison Ford condemned Donald Trump’s rollback of climate protections, calling his fossil fuel expansion and attacks on science “criminal” and warning that the president’s policies endanger the planet, while urging global action to protect nature and accelerate clean energy transitions.A new poll shows 56% of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to build a $300 million privately funded ballroom—nearly twice the size of the White House—despite his earlier promise not to alter existing structures.Egypt’s long-delayed $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum—billed as the world’s largest archaeological museum devoted to a single civilization—will officially open near the Giza pyramids on Saturday, showcasing over 50,000 ancient artefacts including colossal statues and Pharaohs’ treasures, and is expected to boost tourism and Egypt’s economy after years of delays and disruptions.U.S. Governance, PoliticsNew York Times,Trump Officials Move Into Military Residences in D.C. Area, John Ismay and Hamed Aleaziz, Oct. 31, 2025 (print ed.). Quarters 8 at Fort McNair in Washington, situated along the Anacostia River, has traditionally been the home of the Army’s vice chief of staff. But at the beginning of President Trump’s second term, it was vacant.The general promoted to the vice chief’s position had opted to remain on a different base nearby, across the Potomac. That provided an opening for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to claim it.As Mr. Hegseth settled into the home, which an Army history notes is guarded by two Revolutionary War-era cannons, other Trump officials also took up residence at housing built and designed for senior admirals and generals in the Washington area.A handful of White House officials have lived in military housing in the past, but it appears to be unusual for several cabinet members and other officials to move into military quarters in such a short amount of time.Three former residents of Quarters 8 expressed frustration that a senior officer was not living at the home, which they said would cause a ripple effect and make it more difficult for admirals and generals posted in the area to find affordable housing.“It’s a great place,” said retired Army Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, who lived in Quarters 8 when he served as the Army’s vice chief of staff in the early 1990s. “It’s like one out of the movies — you have that spiral staircase and you’re right over a riverbank.”The trend of Trump administration officials taking over military residences in the region was reported earlier by The Atlantic.Soon after he was sworn in as secretary of state, Marco Rubio moved in a couple doors down from his Pentagon counterpart. Mr. Rubio lives there mostly alone; his family has opted to stay in Florida, according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, lives in “a government representation facility” owned by the Coast Guard and is “paying fair market rent,” according to Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.Daniel P. Driscoll, the Army secretary, has also moved into military housing, as has the Navy secretary, John Phelan, whose home in Washington was damaged in a fire in May, according to a congressional staff member who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.During Mr. Trump’s first term, only Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, were known to have lived for a time in military housing.There is precedent for an elected official to take over military quarters. In 1974, Congress authorized the vice president to reside at the Naval Observatory, which for 40 years had been the official home of the chief of naval operations. (Since then, the Navy’s top admirals have typically lived in Tingey House, a historic property across town at the Washington Navy Yard.)At McNair, the Army vice chief of staff’s residence at Quarters 8 sits in the middle of a row of 15 military homes that have long been assigned to the three-star generals on the Army’s senior staff at the Pentagon, as well as a number of generals commanding the post-Sept. 11 wars.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved into a home at Fort McNair traditionally reserved for the Army’s vice chief of staff. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others also now live in military housing.New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge to Rule on Emergency Funding for Food Stamps, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Oct. 31, 2025. More On Where Things Stand:
- Food stamps: A judge is set to rule Friday on whether the Trump administration must reverse course and continue to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, during the government shutdown. Without a last-minute intervention, the decades-old safety net program that now aids roughly 42 million people is set to run out of funds on Saturday. Read more ›
- Government shutdown: President Trump called on Senate Republicans late Thursday to eliminate the filibuster in order to force an end to the government shutdown. The move would strip away a longstanding Senate rule that means most legislation needs 60 votes to pass rather than a simple majority. Both parties have sought to curtail use of the filibuster in recent years but have stopped far short of eliminating it. Read more ›
- Air travel: The administration warned there would be an air travel meltdown next month if the government shutdown continued, predicting chaos as controllers miss additional paychecks and the busy holiday season begins. Read more ›
New York Times, Despite Trump’s Call, Thune Remains Opposed to Changing the Filibuster, Carl Hulse, Oct. 31, 2025. The Senate majority leader is unwilling to pursue the “nuclear option” to blow past a Democratic filibuster and reopen the government.President Trump late Thursday renewed his call to eliminate the filibuster to force through legislation ending the government shutdown, but his plea is unlikely to get much traction among the Republicans who control the Senate.Many Republicans, particularly more senior members, fear that any weakening of the signature Senate rule that requires most legislation to win 60 votes would backfire spectacularly if Democrats regained control. They worry it could lead to a deluge of progressive legislation they would be unable to block, including statehood for the District of Columbia and with it two new Democratic senators.Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, has made preserving the legislative filibuster a central tenet of his tenure, though he has already weakened it with a rules change to speed confirmations and by stretching the reach of special filibuster-proof tax and spending bills, among other steps.Earlier this month, Mr. Thune reiterated that he would oppose a change that would enable Republicans to bulldoze past Democratic opposition and pass a stopgap spending bill on a simple majority vote. But he has come under mounting pressure from some on the right, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.A Thune spokesman said on Friday that, “Leader Thune’s position on the importance of the legislative filibuster is unchanged.”Even if he tried to get rid of the filibuster to appease Mr. Trump, Mr. Thune might lack the votes to do so. Multiple Senate Republicans have indicated an unwillingness to overturn the 60-vote legislative threshold using what is known as the “nuclear option,” in which the majority party changes the chamber’s rules with a simple majority, party-line vote.Mr. Trump was adamant as he returned from his trip to Asia, urging Mr. Thune and his colleagues to act.“It is now time for the Republicans to play their “TRUMP CARD,” and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.Under the current rules, at least 60 senators must agree to a final vote on any major legislation, including a spending bill that would reopen the government. Republicans hold 53 seats, and three Democratic-aligned senators have consistently joined them in voting to advance a stopgap spending bill, while one of their own, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, has repeated voted no. Without more defections, Republicans remain short of the 60-vote margin, prompting Mr. Trump’s push to rewrite the rules.Advocates of doing so have argued that the change could be written narrowly to cover specific bills. But in reality, any change in the filibuster rules in the Senate, which operates according to precedent, would effectively end it for all bills. Opponents have suggested it would be a drastic move for such a limited win as a stopgap spending bill.The president pushed multiple times during his first term to neuter the filibuster when Republicans controlled Congress. But Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who was the majority leader at the time, refused. Mr. McConnell had made deploying the filibuster against Democrats a hallmark of his career.Senate Democrats in 2022 sought to end the 60-vote threshold on election-related measures but came up short when two of their members, Senators Joe Manchin III of West of Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, sided with Republicans against changing the rules.More Global News New York Times,Executions and Mass Casualties: Videos Show Horror Unfolding in Sudan, Declan Wals, Sanjana Varghese and Pranav Baskar, Updated Oct. 31, 2025. Evidence of atrocities emerging from the city of El Fasher stoked fears that the Sudanese region of Darfur is plunging, once again, into a cycle of genocidal violence.With dozens of bodies scattered around him, against a backdrop of burning vehicles, a sole survivor begged for his life.A Sudanese paramilitary commander known as Abu Lulu leaned over the man, listening to his desperate pleas. But he had little time for them.Standing up, Abu Lulu ignored the man’s imprecations, casually shot him dead, and kept walking.The execution, depicted in a video circulating online and verified by The New York Times, was one of numerous scenes of violence to emerge from the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher since it was captured by paramilitaries last weekend.Videos and witness accounts show trenches filled with bodies, and fighters with the paramilitary force — the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F. — hunting down civilians as they flee.The images of these and other atrocities have set off global outrage and stoked fears that the region of Darfur is plunging, once again, into a cycle of genocidal violence of the kind that made the Sudanese region a focus of global politics two decades ago.At the United Nations and in Western capitals, officials issued statements on Thursday condemning the R.S.F., which has been battling Sudan’s military since the country plunged into a ruinous civil war over two years ago, and recently declared its own parallel government.Some called for punitive measures against its main foreign backer, the United Arab Emirates.In Washington, congressional leaders renewed calls for a pause on arms sales to the Emirates until it stops arming the paramilitary. In London, the government faced questions about reports that British-made military equipment was being used by the R.S.F.At an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Tom Fletcher, the top U.N. humanitarian official, criticized member states for letting the crisis reach this point.“I have found the limits of my ability and the U.N.’s authority,” he said, calling on member states to “stop arming” the R.S.F.’s campaign, without naming the country responsible, widely assumed to be the Emirates. (The Emirates has denied backing either side in the conflict.)Responding to mounting outrage, the R.S.F. leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, made a speech shared on social media in which he conceded that his troops had committed some abuses, and pledged to hold responsible “any soldier or officer who committed a crime.”The R.S.F. later said it had arrested Abu Lulu, the commander who had been filmed shooting the injured man.But the paramilitary denied a shocking allegation from the World Health Organization, which said that 460 people had been killed at a hospital in El Fasher on Tuesday.Although the W.H.O. did not specify who had carried out the killings, they had occurred days after the R.S.F. seized El Fasher, breaking an 18-month siege that reduced starving residents to eating animal feed.In a statement, the R.S.F. said it “categorically denied” those allegations, which it said were part of an “intensive propaganda campaign” with “no connection to reality.” On Thursday, the group released a video purporting to show the hospital, saying it countered claims of the attack. In the footage, not many patients can be seen in the disheveled building.Mr. Fletcher’s remarks added to a pile of U.N. reports over the past 18 months about what is widely considered to be the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis — a civil war that has forced 12 million people from their homes, spread famine across the country and killed as many as 400,000 people, by some estimates. In this photo illustration, the front page of the Times newspaper with an image of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is seen on October 31, 2025 in Windsor, England. King Charles III has started the formal process of removing the Titles, Styles and Honours of his brother, who will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. Mr Mountbatten Windsor will also surrender the lease on Royal Lodge, where he has lived since 2004, and move to private accommodation. The historic move follows allegations of sexual abuse linked to the former prince’s relationship with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. (Photo Illustration by Ming Yeung/Getty Images)Morning Shots via The Bulwark,For One Day at Least, Long Live the King, William Kristol, right, Oct. 31, 2025. King Charles III shows us—but, really, congressional Republicans—what actual accountability looks like when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein.I am no longer a proud Republican. But like almost all Americans I remain a proud republican. Indeed, I’m more convinced now than ever before that, as Federalist No. 39 put it, “the general form and aspect” of our government ought to be “strictly republican.” As James Madison explained:It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.So: No Kings! Not then! Not now!But you can be a good republican and still give a foreign king credit where credit is due. So let me offer an American tip of the hat to King Charles III. As you probably know, yesterday Charles stripped his brother Andrew of the title of prince—and also of the titles His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killyleagh. The king also evicted Andrew from the Royal Lodge near Windsor Castle.This belated but just act was prompted by the publication of the posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life earlier this year at age 41. It is a sadly posthumous victory for Giuffre, but it is a victory nonetheless. The lesson is that new evidence, or renewed attention to old evidence, about Epstein’s awful crimes can have an effect. As Giuffre’s brother, Skye Roberts, said, “Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage.”If only the truth and courage of this “ordinary American girl” could prevail here in the United States! It is humiliating that we are failing to live up to the example of our monarchical cousins across the Atlantic.It’s too much to hope our current president will be moved by any appeal to what is right. But we do also have a legislative branch of the government as well. Yet the Speaker of the House continues to refuse to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva more than five weeks after her election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. Speaker Johnson swore in two newly elected Republicans earlier this year during pro forma sessions. But he won’t swear in Grijalva during a pro forma session now.Why? Because Grijalva would be the critical 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a House vote on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, something Donald Trump opposes.This is a disgrace. But it is a reminder how much Trump doesn’t want those files released. And it’s also a reminder that the Republican party is now a full co-conspirator in the coverup. Epstein has become a Republican problem, not simply a Trump problem.There are so many instances of Republican complicity in the Trump administration’s authoritarianism that it can be a challenge to keep attention on Republican complicity in covering up Epstein’s crimes. But it’s all of a piece. The Trump administration is committed across the board to these practices: No Accountability. No Truth. No Justice. They have applied these practices to U.S. military actions, to the administration of the Department of Justice, to the executive’s expenditure of appropriate funds—and to the release of the Epstein files.Could the example of the British monarch jolt Republicans free from their pathetic servility to their king, Donald Trump? Could King Charles the Third shame Mike Johnson the First into action? Or have we fallen so far from the republican spirit of the nation’s founding that we cannot now even live up to the standard of a British king?More On U.S. Governance Paul Krugman via Substack,Political-Economy Commentary: Too Cruel Too Soon, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 31, 2025. How Republicans messed up on Project 2025.Federal funding for SNAP, the nutritional aid program still often referred to as food stamps, ends tonight. This will have catastrophic impacts on 42 million Americans, the great majority of them children, elderly or disabled.Millions more Americans are about to discover that health insurance has become vastly more expensive, in many cases unaffordable.Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections. For example, draconian work requirements for Medicaid — which would effectively throw millions off the program, largely by imposing paperwork burdens low-wage workers can’t overcome — weren’t scheduled to take effect until the end of 2026.Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.I guess it’s possible that Republicans will manage to limit the political damage by claiming — completely falsely — that the suffering about to hit millions is being caused by Democrats who want to lavish benefits on illegal immigrants and pay for sex change operations. That’s not hyperbole. Here’s the banner currently at the top of the Agriculture Department’s SNAP data page — its data page!In the past it would have been unthinkable to display political propaganda, let alone grotesquely dishonest propaganda, on government data sites. But we’re in a new world.We’ll just have to see how all this plays politically. But it’s clear that Republicans messed up badly on the implementation of Project 2025. Immense cruelty was always part of the plan, but policy wasn’t supposed to get this cruel, this soon.So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)Start with health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, enacted under Barack Obama, allows Americans to buy insurance plans through a regulated Marketplace in which insurers cannot discriminate based on medical history — that is, you can still get coverage if you have a preexisting condition. To make the Marketplace work, the ACA subsidizes premiums, on a sliding scale that depends on your income.As originally created, however, the ACA was underpowered: The subsidies were too small. The Biden administration helped fix that, making the subsidies bigger and also eliminating a sudden cutoff of subsidies for families above a relatively modest income. Right now 24 million Americans get their health coverage through the Marketplace, the vast majority of them subsidized.But the enhanced subsidies only extended through 2025, so the system faces an imminent cliff. The out of pocket cost of health insurance for 2026 is soaring — 114 percent on average, according to KFF, and much more for some families. This cost surge reflects both the loss of subsidies and a selection effect: Relatively healthy people, facing sharply higher premiums, will decide to go without coverage. This will worsen the risk pool, and the expectation that this will happen is leading insurers to increase their pre-subsidy premiums.So millions of Americans are about to feel both desperate and angry over their loss of affordable health insurance coverage. Which raises an obvious political question: Why didn’t Republicans try to do what they’re doing on Medicaid and backload this pain until after the midterm elections, extending enhanced subsidies for another year?I very much doubt that this was a strategic decision on their part. My guess is that they simply stumbled into this crisis, because senior Republicans in Congress and their advisors just don’t understand how the Affordable Care Act works, and never have. After all, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his membership in a political cult depends on his not understanding it.I mean, Republicans are currently promising to offer a superior alternative to Obamacare, any day now, which is actually kind of funny in a gallows-humor way. After all, they’ve been making the same promise, year after year, ever since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, and have consistently come up empty, because they’ve never understood why the ACA works the way it does. And all indications are that they were blindsided by the current catastrophe. Everyone who knows anything about health policy saw this coming — but none of those people work for the G.O.P.In fact, administration officials still seem to be in denial about what’s happening (no, KFF hasn’t retracted its estimate): A screenshot of a social media post AI-generated content may be incorrect.The health care disaster has, in turn, played a crucial role in the government shutdown.There are actually many Trump administration actions that Democrats could, with justification, have cited as reasons not to support continued funding for the federal government unless Republicans make some concessions. But the Democrats have chosen to make their stand over health care, and polling suggests that they have chosen very good ground. The government shutdown, in turn, has led to a cutoff of funds for SNAP. So the premature outbreaks of cruelty are all connected.But why don’t Republicans cut their losses by postponing the food stamp and health care crises? The Trump administration could provide immediate relief on SNAP by releasing the program’s $5 billion contingency fund — in fact, withholding that money is almost certainly illegal. Beyond that, Congress could restore SNAP funding with a standalone bill, which would have bipartisan support. And the whole shutdown could be ended if Republicans would just temporarily extend enhanced ACA subsidies, pushing the pain past the midterms.So why isn’t any of this happening?The refusal to release SNAP contingency funds could reflect a deeply cynical political calculation — Democrats care when people go hungry, we don’t, so let’s use SNAP recipients as hostages. But I doubt that it’s that calculated. Instead, it reflects a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need.This visceral dislike is also a large part of the reason Republicans won’t agree to a standalone bill that maintains SNAP funding, a bill that would easily pass. The same goes for modifying the budget to temporarily maintain health insurance subsidies. Democrats would have a hard time rejecting such a deal, even though it might help Republicans politically. But again, it would help Americans in need, and the G.O.P. just hates doing that.But there’s a further problem. Passing either a SNAP bill or a revised budget would require calling the House of Representatives back into session, which would in turn make it impossible for Mike Johnson, right, the speaker, to keep stalling the swearing-in of Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election more than 5 weeks ago. And here’s the thing: Once sworn in, Grijalva would provide the decisive signature to trigger a vote in the House to release the Epstein files.The idea that Johnson’s unprecedented refusal to swear in a duly elected member of Congress reflects his determination to protect pedophiles sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s looking more and more like the only coherent explanation of his actions. And if he believes that the House must be kept closed to maintain his stonewalling, that prevents any resolution of the nutrition and health care crises.In any case, the political strategy behind Republicans’ policy agenda appears to have gone completely off the rails. The plan was to mask the true harshness of this agenda by delaying much of its cruelty, with the worst effects not hitting until after the midterms. Instead, severe nutrition and health care crises are happening right now. And I have no idea how they’ll be resolved. Lincoln Square Media,Chicago Joins the Ranks of Thermopylae, Waterloo, Lepanto, and the Normandy Beaches, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Oct. 31, 2025. The Windy City is now the decisive battleground for American freedom.Donald Trump has smashed political norms, destroyed the institutions that might provide oversight, and claimed unprecedented powers for himself. This successful autocratic breakthrough in Washington now threatens the freedom of Americans throughout the country. Now his efforts to overturn the protections Americans have enjoyed since our founding have brought us to a crisis point.Chicago is now the decisive battleground for American freedom. The crisis is here, it is now, and upon the outcome everything depends.The democratic institutions and norms that have, since our founding, protected us from monarchical whims are nearly gone.The federal government has become a subsidiary of Trump Inc., the laws that would prevent this takeover go unenforced. There is no investigation into the widespread corruption and self-dealing. The U.S. Supreme Court has said the president is above the law. The Congress of the United States will not even meet. The consequences are real, they are dangerous.SubscribedIn the past days we have seen previously unimaginable examples of the power of the United States weaponized against political opposition. Today, the Justice Department ignores laws like the Hatch Act so that the Administration can use government websites for political propaganda. Here’s what the Department of Agriculture’s website says:Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times not to fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.This is, of course, both a lie and illegal. It is also common. Across government agencies during this shut down, government resources, paid for by taxpayers, are now vehicles for Republican propaganda.Donald Trump has boasted about that he wants to see his enemies indicted. And, despite a lack of evidence and over the objection of career prosecutors, his Attorney General Pam Bondi is going down the list and making indictments. This week, congressional Republicans vowed to strip Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, of his citizenship and deport him.Tyrants frequently threaten to strip rival candidates of citizenship and deport them. Until now, this would have been unthinkable in the United States. Today, Republican can make that threat with impunity. Tyrants use government resources for their own partisan purposes. Tyrants arrest their opponents. Now, the President of the United States does too.Similarly, in the past few days we have seen the kind of self-dealing and corruption we used to expect only in autocracies like Russia. A convicted felon makes a $2 billion Trump cryptocurrency transaction and gets a pardon. The Pentagon awards a major contract to a company financially linked to Don Trump jr. Trump himself asks his own appointees — his former personal lawyers — to approve a $230 million payout to himself.The institutions and norms that long protected us from using the power of government for partisan ends and for using government for personal enrichment stand now in shreds. Even the White House itself is no longer protected, but treated by the government as the personal property of the President, who, without permission or notice literally took a wrecking ball to it.There’s a way the light falls in the White House on autumn afternoons in Washington, thinning with the waning of the year, slanting, a dull gold the color of old parchment, that makes you feel you’ve slipped into a country where history isn’t past tense but a persistent whisper.And now, in this dangerous moment, Trump seeks to militarize American cities. He is fabricating a crisis that could end American democracy. If he succeeds, our streets will be militarized, and our courts will become places for political show trials. That’s why what’s happening in Chicago matters to everyone.Chicago is ground zero. The survival of American democracy is being decided here.Trump is using Chicago as a test to establish his right to send in the troops. Not just here, but as a first assault, into Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and San Francisco. Cities where political opposition remains strong.At the same time, Trump is using the resulting court battles to establish the primacy of partisan political truth over evidence and facts.In the courts and on the streets, lawful Chicagoans are resisting. Recall that as soon as ICE and CBP agents arrived in Chicago, Trump claimed the city was too dangerous for the government to carry out its mission and ordered up national guard troops to protectthem. Illinois and Chicago sued to block the troop deployment.Meanwhile, ICE began what Chicagoans now know is an aggressive campaign to provoke violence. Protestors and journalists were thrown to the ground and tear gassed. They sued, claiming the government violated their Constitutional rights to protest and to report.In court, the federal government said:Rioters … shot at agents with commercial artillery shell fireworks… The mob of rioters grew more hostile and violent, advancing toward agents and began throwing rocks and other objects at agents, including one that struck Chief Greg Bovino in the head. Border Patrol agents repeated multiple warnings to back up and that chemical agents would be deployed if warnings were ignored. Riot control measures were deployed, including by Chief Bovino, and arrests were made. Agents properly used their training. The use of chemical munitions was conducted in full accordance with CBP policy and was necessary to ensure the safety of both law enforcement and the public.Lawyers for the plaintiffs responded, in part:The statement is a lie. The statement fits two patterns the Plaintiffs have highlighted repeatedly in this case. First, the government is inventing exigencies that do not exist to justify its actions. Second, the government is perpetrating extreme violence against peaceful and innocent American civilians in order to provoke a reaction that the government then uses as an after-the-fact justification for the violence is has already used.For now, courts remain a place where disputes like these can be investigated, where the facts can be established. To weigh these competing claims, the judge heard sworn testimony and examined the evidence. The Trump administration’s lawyers told the court that several protestors were arrested on September 27 and that their arrest proves that ICE agents were in danger. In fact, all charges were dropped, and those arrested were let go because grand juries looked at the evidence and refused to indict. The government’s lawyers said the U.S. army attested that the National Guard was requested to secure a building, but under cross examination they retracted that statement. After hearing testimony and reviewing the evidence, the district court judge found the administration’s assertions to be false- in the polite language of the court, to be “unreliable,” and to reflect a “potential lack of candor.”The court stayed the use of National Guard Troops in Chicago.The Administration appealed. They lost. They appealed again, this time on an emergency basis, to the U.S. Supreme Court. In their filing before that court, the federal government repeats the claims that the District judge and the appellate court found to be not credible. Their filing reads, in part:In recent weeks, federal officers in Chicago have been threatened and assaulted, attacked in a harrowing pre-planned ambush involving many assailants, rammed in their government vehicles, shot at with fireworks and other improvised weapons, injured and hospitalized, and threatened in person and online -including by a $10,000 bounty for the murder of a senior federal official. Violent agitators have repeatedly obstructed access to a critical federal immigration facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal law enforcement agencies have been forced to operate under the constant threat of mob violence and to divert resources from enforcement efforts to protect federal agents and property. Local forces have failed to respond, or unaccountably delayed their response, even when federal agents face life-threatening violence. DHS has also been forced to reallocate resources from enforcing the Nation’s immigration laws in other regions to protect personnel federal facilities and on the streets of Chicago.The repetition of claims found to be false by a District Court and an Appellate Court is a tell. The Chicago case is not only about controlling our cities by military force. It is also about destroying what is left of judicial legitimacy.With stakes so high, many organizations have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court. One of those groups, The Steady State, was formed to uphold constitutional democracy over partisan politics. Its members are former U.S. national security professionals drawn from intelligence, defense, diplomacy and homeland security. Their brief focuses on the stakes of the decision. They wrote:
- … indicators of illegitimate uses of power included situations such as leaders searching for reasons to stretch interpretations of the law, and the magnification or exaggeration of events to justify an overreach of power — the very same types of indicators we are now similarly witnessing within our own country today. Amicus’ members have directly observed this phenomenon and its negative aftermath in a variety of countries, including:
- Russia, where military-style police suppress political protests under the guise of national security;
- China, where the Peoples’ Liberation Army has historically been deployed against student demonstrators, most notably during the crackdown at the Tiananmen Square massacre;
- Taiwan, where minor incidents of violence led to a state-run suppression of anti government protests and became a pretense for decades of martial law, from 1949-87;
- Turkey, where domestic military deployments have been used to crush opposition following mass protests;
- South Africa, where apartheid security forces previously repressed political opponents; after the end of the apartheid government, post-apartheid reform emphasized oversight to prevent military use for partisan political agendas;
- The Philippines, where armed forces are employed in campaigns against civil society actors under the pretext of anti-drug or anti-terror operations; and
- El Salvador, where US-trained military death squads terrorized the population during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. For the past several years, under the current Bukele administration, the security forces have been re-politicized and used to support human rights abuses against the general population.
In each of these examples, authoritarian leaders justified their actions as necessary for public safety, while, in fact, using military force to erode political freedoms and dismantle or corrode institutional checks on executive power.The clear message sent in this brief is that American is on the brink of losing what made it exceptional and on the verge of joining the ranks of the unfree.Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago a united population is holding the line. In defiance of a court order Trump administration continues to manhandle and gas peaceful protesters and journalists alike. According to one reporter, at least eight Chicago neighborhoods have been gassed in the past few days. On the ground, residents and journalists are documenting these attacks. The facts are getting out.If the United States Supreme Court ignores the facts and the evidence to deliver a partisan result for the Trump Administration, the edifice of law crumbles and force becomes the only law of the land.Here, now, we either stop them, or we fall to a long and dark tyranny.Edwin Eisendrath hosts “It’s the Democracy, Stupid” on Lincoln Square and “The Big Picture” on WCPT820 AM/ Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Immigration New York Times,The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices, Jodi Kantor, Oct. 31, 2025. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson are split over the best approach: investing in diplomacy inside the court or sounding the alarm outside.On a yearslong campaign to sway her conservative colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan, right, has mostly refrained from harshly criticizing them. But two years ago she briefly let her discipline slip.As they prepared to strike down President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s student loan forgiveness program, she blasted Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in a draft dissent she circulated within the court, according to several people familiar with the episode.But before the decision went public, she hit delete. Her final dissent was adamant, but the most heated passages never saw daylight, as she abided by a taboo among the justices against steaming publicly at colleagues or the institution.For years, as the court has moved right, Justice Kagan has agonized over whether to be more confrontational, confidantes say, and has mostly concluded that to be effective, she must be careful about rocking the boat.But in recent months, Justice Kagan’s liberal colleague, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, shown at left with a quotation from a recent dissent, has started warning the public that the boat is sinking.In one opinion after another, Justice Jackson has accused the right side of the court of favoring “moneyed interests,” and of “complicity” that enables “our collective demise.”At oral arguments, she has taken up far more speaking time than her colleagues, even though the court several years ago tucked timers into the justices’ imposing wood table to tally each of their ticking minutes, according to several people familiar with the devices.“I’m not afraid to use my voice,” she said at an event for lawyers in Indianapolis in July, describing her blistering dissents.Along with the senior liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the two jurists are in what people close to them describe as an existential dilemma over their lack of influence.Badly outnumbered, seated for the long haul of life tenure, Justices Kagan and Jackson in particular are divided on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sentenced to fail.Ever since Justice Jackson arrived in 2022, friction has been building: between her and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who are more aligned strategically, and between her and the rest of the court, according to more than a dozen associates of the justices, including both liberals and conservatives. They spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to share sensitive details about closely held conversations.The three liberal justices declined to comment. But increasingly, the tensions are spilling out in opinions, including in the most important case of last term. Justices Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett dueled so harshly that some liberal observers feared that Justice Jackson had alienated Justice Barrett, a key swing vote.Like many others across the left in the era of Donald J. Trump, the liberal justices are in a generational and philosophical struggle over whether to safeguard institutions from within or protest their decline. But unlike politicians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tradition-bound and decorous that closing an opinion “I dissent” instead of “I respectfully dissent” is considered a dramatic statement.Their differing approaches will now be tested in a term with vast consequences. The court has been granting Mr. Trump enormous — but mostly temporary — latitude. Climactic fights over his policies and power are just ahead. Next week, the justices will consider whether he can unilaterally impose tariffs.Justice Kagan’s approach goes like this: Even on a 6-to-3 court, the Democratic appointees can sometimes strategize their way into narrower rulings, smaller losses or even outright victory. To do so, the liberals must generally sway the chief justice and Justice Barrett. Admirers of Justice Kagan say she is prudent to show restraint, displaying her frustration only in flashes. Justice Jackson’s outspokenness could risk those votes, or further erode faith in a court that may yet stand up to Mr. Trump, they say.Justice Jackson, on the other hand, is aiming for an audience beyond the court, speaking to the public and history. Her proponents argue that Justice Kagan is the one taking risks — of missing the moment and lending cover to a court that is weakening democratic norms.As the court approaches the pivotal Trump questions, Justice Kagan is the one to watch, scholars and people close to her say.Her tone in recent private conversations has been despondent, they said. Because of her discipline, her words have special potential to critique the court, they said. Before she deleted the most vehement passages from her student loan decision, she circulated them to other justices — a warning, perhaps, of how scathing she could choose to be.Now, after many years of mulling, she must decide. The problem with waiting to speak frankly is that “over time you normalize what’s going on,” said Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School. She said it might be tempting to hoard influence and leverage for a “cataclysmic case.”But by the time that happens, she said, “it may be too late.”The Contrarian,Opinion: Lesser Known Undaunted Heroes, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 31, 2025. Ordinary Americans defend neighbors against MAGA brutality and lawlessness.This space usually features prominent, public figures who have distinguished themselves in their defense of the rule of law, democracy, decency, truth, and other values the MAGA regime attacks.But especially this week, the work of ordinary Americans standing up in defense of their neighbors in the face of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)’s harassment, brutality, and lawlessness underscored how critical grassroots defiance is to democracy’s survival. Individual parents, informal neighborhood groups, and larger cross-denominational groups around the country have literally and figuratively interposed themselves between migrants at risk of assault, detention and deportation, and the out-of-control ICE and CBP teams that have instilled fear and chaos in too many people.Chicago residents showed their mettle by literally blowing the whistle on abusive, illegal, and brutal immigration agents’ conduct. Lynn Sweet and other journalists reported on the fleet of Chicago locals who have been distributing and sounding plastic whistles (or beeping car horns) to warn immigrant neighbors and workers about ICE and CBP raids.They have used nothing more than cell phones and grit to record and circulate images documenting abusive tactics and potential violations of U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis’s TRO. The wealth of evidence (from citizen and professional journalists)—including stark images of CBP’s Chicago chief Gregory Bovino lobbing tear gas—helped raise public awareness and gave her fodder to interrogate him and other witnesses.Conveying the crucial role of infuriated neighbors, The Chicago Tribune recounted the experience of Brian Kolp, a former prosecutor with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, who was out drinking his coffee when he leapt into action at the sight of a vicious raid employing tear gas:He didn’t even have time to put on his shoes or change out of his Chicago Blackhawks pajamas, he said, drawing jeers from one of the agents.“I was calling them Nazis and Gestapo and telling them to [expletive] off, because that’s exactly what they are,” Kolp said. “Quite honestly, when all this started happening, I thought to myself that if the opportunity ever came my way to have to get involved in one of these situations, I was certainly going to do what I could to make sure that they weren’t openly and flagrantly violating the law or the Constitution. And yet, they just went ahead and did it anyway.”Indeed they did. Nevertheless, he was able to document the abduction of three people and turn over evidence (a tear gas canister) of abusive tactics to lawyers representing plaintiffs suing the government. In doing so, he likely energized others to display courage in support of immigrants and those being baselessly mistreated.SubscribedChicago is not the only place where locals have organized themselves. Community groups have sprung up in Los Angeles, D.C., Memphis, and elsewhere to document abuses, provide early warnings, and reaffirm that they welcome immigrant neighbors. Teachers, parents, and neighbors have rallied to protect immigrant students in transit to and from school and secure a safe school environment free from fear of ICE raids. Colleges in Florida have stood up organizations to protect their classmates. And New Yorkers, with their tell-tale style, have called out ICE officials.In some cases, a single person has triggered a full-scale operation of defense. The Nation reports on one woman in Downey, Ca.:For [Angelica] Vargas, a Mercedes-driving self-described “soccer mom,” [it] was the start of a new extracurricular: chasing ICE vehicles on the road, and posting the videos on TikTok. Now Vargas is known to her hundreds of thousands of followers—and the tens of millions of people who have watched her content—for her videos with cheeky titles like “Spending Quality Time With ICE.” Posted in time-lapse speed to jaunty Mexican music, Vargas’s videos show ICE vehicles weaving lanes, and in some cases making multiple or illegal U-turns, to avoid her. In one video, Vargas cuts across what appears to be a gas station parking lot to speed up her pursuit.Larger organizations have also stepped up. The California Immigrant Policy Center has put together an exhaustive list of community groups in Northern California, the Bay Area, Southern California, Los Angeles, and the Central Coast & Central Valley that are prepared to assist with a wide array of services for immigrants including rapid response/early warning, legal representation, public outreach, and family support.Interfaith groups in places such as Philadelphia, DC, El Paso, and Tucson have played a leading role. In the Southwest, such groups “have formed a defense team for immigrants, at a time of rising pressures to remove them, and have essentially created an underground railroad of help to uphold church teachings,” The Guardian reports. Some groups are quite public while others choose to remain out of the limelight, “noting the sharp risks, even dangers faced, over protecting immigrants.”An El Paso group engaged Pope Leo, the first American pontiff, who has been vocal in support of immigrants:The pope was moved when [Mark Seitz, the chair of the committee on migration within the US conference of Catholic bishops] presented him with a video that captured the anxieties of people facing deportation, according to members of an El Paso delegation following the meeting in early October at the Vatican. “It’s so important that we as a church give a message of hope in the midst of these horrible struggles, what’s going on in so many cities in the United States right now. At least the church cannot be silent,” the pope told the El Paso delegation, according to a video of the meeting provided by the Hope Border Institute, whose leader attended the meeting.The array of Americans who have risen to the occasion is heartening and inspirational. Their undaunted, unabashed, and uncompromising defense of their neighbors and of our deepest held values belies the notion that Americans are content to allow Trump’s police state kidnap and disappear peaceful, hardworking, and productive members of our communities.Certainly, courts and local officials have been critical to preserving democracy, the rule of law, and simple decency. But defeating the MAGA regime will require ordinary Americans acting individually and cooperatively, in small but extremely meaningful ways, to oppose the violent White nationalist onslaught. Our democracy and democratic values are only as vital as those willing to defend them.We salute all who have met the moment. Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: The Rot at the Top, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 31, 2025. Writing in False Flag yesterday about Tucker Carlson’s extended friendly interview with fashy wonderboy Nick Fuentes,¹ our Will Sommer stated a simple truth: “The right has no immune system against hatemongers and grifters.”Many people in today’s institutional Republican spaces don’t agree with the hate-drenched views espoused by the likes of Fuentes. But the incentives of the political ecosystem have become so perverse that it’s become risky to express these disagreements out loud—lest you open yourself to accusations of being a RINO cuck who would team up with libs against a fellow member of the right.A few hours after Will’s piece was published, we got perhaps the most staggering demonstration of this fact to date. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, cut a straight-to-camera video offering a ringing defense of Carlson. Heritage hadn’t become “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Roberts said, “by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.” Carlson, he said, was under attack from “the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.” This “venomous coalition,” Roberts said, was “sowing division.”²“Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts went on. “I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate. And we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left.”The sleight of hand here is obvious. Roberts spares a single half-sentence towards putting some distance between himself and Fuentes, without elaborating on which of the young white nationalist’s views he disagrees with. All language of moral condemnation is saved for the left—and for Carlson and Fuentes’ critics on the right, who are apparently supposed to consider Carlson and Fuentes “friends” even when Carlson and Fuentes plainly do not return the favor.All of this is revolting. But what’s particularly interesting is why Roberts felt the need to weigh in at all. He didn’t express these sentiments immediately after the Tucker-Fuentes interview, after all. Instead, he only went to camera after eagle-eyed sleuths online noted that Heritage had quietly taken down a Carlson sponsorship page on their website after that interview aired.This revelation put Roberts on the spot. Ideally, he would have been able to take what one might call the Mike Johnson approach to the whole controversy: Say nothing in public and, if asked, lie that you haven’t seen anything about it. But being caught in flagrante delicto scrubbing a Tucker quote amid the fracas opened Heritage to MAGA accusations of intolerable squishiness, virtue-signaling, and a generally lib way of looking at the world.So Roberts did what Republicans have been doing for a decade now. Faced with a choice he’d have preferred not to make at all, he resigned himself to wallowing in the muck. You have to wonder if he ever thought it would come to this—if he imagined that a career in professional conservatism would ever require tiptoeing around the sneering bigotry of a Gen-Z nihilist livestreamer; if he contemplated that the responsibilities of taking over a once well-regarded conservative think tank would include looking the other way as antisemitism took root in that movement. Either way, it’s plain he’s made his peace with it. The folks who haven’t are long gone.
- Why is the Trump Administration Purging Our Military’s Best? GEN. MARK HERTLING joins BILL KRISTOL on Bulwark Takes to discuss the wave of senior military officers forced out under Trump, the redeployment of forces toward Venezuela, and growing signs of unlawful or politically driven military actions that threaten alliances, strategy, and the rule of law.
- Trump’s Targeting of ‘Narcoterrorists’ Is a Crime in Itself… Shoot first, ask questions when? MONA CHAREN has questions.
- ‘Bugonia’ Review… Mean-spirited, but in the sort of way we all kinda-sorta deserve, reviews SONNY BUNCH.
- An International Folk-Horror Double Feature… The Japanese and British isles bring us Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees and The Appointment—terrific but obscure films that make for great Halloween viewing, writes BILL RYAN.
U.S. Technology, Media, Education, Religion New York Times,Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again), Karen Weise, Oct. 31, 2025. Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.Four of the tech industry’s wealthiest companies made it clear this week that their spending on artificial intelligence was not about to slow down.But the outlays from Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — which all raised their spending by billions of dollars, saying they needed to meet demand for A.I. — are increasingly feeding concerns that the tech industry is heading toward a dangerous bubble.Artificial intelligence remains an unproven and expensive technology that could take years to fully develop. How much companies will ultimately get back in return from A.I. products like chatbots is unclear. And smaller companies pursuing A.I. gold, financial analysts pointed out, are not nearly as wealthy.Last week, the Bank of England wrote that while the building of data centers, which provide computing power for A.I., had so far largely come from the cash produced by the biggest companies, it would increasingly involve more debt. If A.I. underwhelms — or the systems ultimately require far less computing — there could be growing risk.“This is a fast-evolving topic, and the future is highly uncertain,” the bank wrote. New York Times,How OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise, Jacqueline Gu and Cade Metz, Oct. 31, 2025. Sam Altman, above, the chief executive of OpenAI, says that technological revolutions are driven by more than just technology. They are also driven, he argues, by new ways of paying for them.“There is always a lot of focus on technological innovation. What really drives a lot of progress is when people also figure out how to innovate on the financial model,” he recently said at the site of a data center that OpenAI is building in Abilene, Texas.Over the last several years, Mr. Altman’s company has found unusual and creative ways of paying for the computing power needed to fuel its ambitions.Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services.Industry experts and financial analysts have welcomed the start-up’s creativity. But these unorthodox arrangements have also fueled concerns that OpenAI is helping to inflate a potential financial bubble as it builds what is still a highly speculative technology.Here are unusual financial agreements helping to drive the ambitions of OpenAI, the poster child of the artificial intelligence revolution.Oct. 30 Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: So Wrong It’s White, Hannah Yoest, Oct. 30, 2025. A social-media ad campaign from the Department of Labor is going viral for featuring a dozen or more images of young, blond, white men with strong jawlines and cleft chins, in blue-collared workmen’s shirts and jeans—such great jeans.These strapping young men, with their blank, inscrutable, artificially generated stares, smolder in front of the symbols of the bygone American Dream: white-steeple churches, construction cranes, oil rigs, and the Statue of Liberty, all shaded in the piss-yellow that is a hallmark of AI-generated imagery.But it’s not the use of AI that’s giving everyone pause, of course. It’s that these pictures, released by the Department of Labor social-media accounts and bearing the department’s seal, are uncomfortably reminiscent of posters from the 1930s. To be more specific: the ‘Heroic Realism’ of Nazi propaganda posters and the similarly stylized patriotic posters later produced in the United States. Why is this style being used now, and what are these images for? Only a few of the images explicitly say. But their purpose is explained in the accompanying captions: They’re promoting the department’s work on Project Firewall, meant to restore “pathways to the American Dream by ensuring American Jobs go to American Workers.”Project Firewall is an enforcement initiative targeting H-1B fraud and abuse; it was launched last month in tandem with the presidential proclamation restricting the entry of certain immigrant workers and requiring employers to pay $100,000 fees for every worker they want to hire on an H-1B visa. The order caused confusion and chaos among foreign employees. The administration says Project Firewall will be the “MOST AGGRESSIVE” effort to investigate employers andhold them accountable for visa problems. And although the aim is supposedly to protect American workers, it’s not hard to understand why critics think it will amount to a witch hunt for companies hiring too many brown people.The visual campaign behind the generic blond Übermenschen posts appears to go back to at least July when it was originally using phrases like “Blue Collar Boom” to promote the DOL’s apprenticeship program. That, at least, made some sense. The tenor and content of the newer images, by contrast, are at odds with the reality of the job market the current campaign is based around. The alleged fraud and abuse Project Firewall is apparently combating predominantly occurs in the tech and information sector, not manual labor or blue-collar jobs as shown in the gallery of idealized white patriots.Meidas+, Trump has DISASTER LANDING as TRIP ENDS in TOTAL FAILURE, Ben Meiselas, Oct. 30, 2025. There’s a lot going on. Donald Trump’s trip to Asia has ended in a predictable disaster, one that leaves America weaker, our farmers betrayed, and our national security compromised.The Trump regime is hailing what it calls a “major trade agreement” with China, but when you peel back the talking points, what emerges is a humiliating surrender wrapped in propaganda.Here’s what happened. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, went on Fox “Business” to announce that China had agreed to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans this season and 25 million tons per year for the next three years.Sounds impressive, until you look at the facts: under President Biden, China purchased 27 million metric tons of soybeans in 2024, more than what Trump just “negotiated.”So let’s be clear. Trump gave away our semiconductor technology and weakened our national security so that China would agree to buy fewer soybeans than before. As I said in my video report, “That’s literally the art of the worst deal imaginable.”It’s not just the numbers. Trump’s deal reportedly gives China year-to-year control over U.S. access to rare earth minerals, essential materials used in everything from electric vehicles to advanced weapons systems. That means every year, America will have to return to Beijing to beg for minerals. Meanwhile, Trump brags about “trillions of dollars pouring in.” If that were remotely true, we wouldn’t be facing cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), threatening to leave 42 million Americans hungry.As Senator Chris Coons warned this week, “It would be a strategic mistake for Trump, in order to get some soybeans out of China, to sell them these critical, cutting-edge AI chips.” Yet that’s exactly what Trump is considering: allowing NVIDIA to sell its most powerful AI chip, the Blackwell, twenty times more advanced than previous generations, to China.This comes as reports surface that Trump’s family business, World Liberty Financial, received a $2 billion investment from the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund shortly before the administration approved chip transfers through the UAE. Trump claims that’s just a coincidence. But as I said on air, “It’s obvious what’s happening here.”It doesn’t stop there. The Wall Street Journal reported that Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, saw its market cap surge from $127 million to over $2 billion after partnering with a Trump family venture. Last week, Trump pardoned Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to violating anti–money laundering laws and enabling sanctioned Iranian and Russian transactions. It’s the most blatant example yet of Trump using the powers of his office to enrich his allies and himself.And while Trump’s billionaire friends cash in, working Americans are told to wait until “next year” for the benefits to “trickle down.” That’s the same failed promise Republicans have been making for forty years, that if you just give enough to the ultra-rich, some crumbs will eventually reach everyone else.What we’re witnessing is not economic strategy. It’s kleptocracy. It’s the systematic dismantling of America’s leverage in exchange for personal gain and political spin. Trump calls it “peace through strength.” I call it weakness through corruption. And Trump and his cronies are laughing all the way to the bank.A few other quick updates:
- The U.S. Senate just voted to strip Trump of his power to impost tariffs on a global scale, with four Republicans breaking ranks and joining with all Democrats. But don’t get too excited — this won’t go anywhere in Mike Johnson’s House.
- Russia is striking back at Trump, saying that they have not tested nuclear weapons, despite Trump’s claims. They warn they will start if the U.S. does.
- King Charles is removing Prince Andrew’s titles and is ejecting him from the Royal Lodge over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. That’s a bit different than how we handle Epstein’s associates in the U.S. Here, we make them president and let them bulldoze our government buildings, apparently.
- We’re also expecting a major decision from a federal court in Boston regarding Trump’s withholding of SNAP benefits. Stay tuned. The judge did not seem to buy the Trump regime’s arguments.
New York Times, Trump Administration Tells Court It Has Money It Can’t Spend to Prevent Food Stamp Cuts, Tony Romm, Oct. 30, 2025. States have sued the federal government to force the release of aid during the shutdown, with a key hearing set for Thursday.The Trump administration staunchly defended its decision to stop paying food stamps during the government shutdown, insisting that a range of legal, technical and budgetary constraints would prevent it from providing a tranche of available funds to millions of poor Americans in November.In a new set of court filings, submitted late Wednesday, administration officials acknowledged that they had billions of dollars left over across multiple federal accounts. The amounts appeared to total more than would be needed to cover the full costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for the next month.But lawyers for the Justice Department signaled that the administration could not, or would not, use those funds, leaving 42 million food stamp recipients at risk of cuts to their benefits beginning on Nov. 1.The Trump administration repeatedly argued that there were legal obstacles to transferring existing funds to SNAP, technical hurdles in remitting payments quickly and other budgetary constraints to consider at the Agriculture Department, where the money would originate.The arguments set the stage for what is likely to be a tense, high-stakes hearing on Thursday morning in Massachusetts, where more than two dozen states have asked a judge to force the Trump administration to reprogram the budget and provision full aid for food stamps before Nov. 1.In its filings, the Trump administration acknowledged that an interruption to food stamps would create a “difficult situation for millions of Americans,” but it insisted the court did not have the ability to prevent it.The White House did not respond to a request for comment.The administration’s refusal to act underscored its broader strategy over the course of a fiscal stalemate that is now in its fifth week. Throughout, President Trump has been willing to reprogram the federal budget, but only selectively, safeguarding programs at the heart of his political agenda while leaving some Americans to face the risk of real harm from the shutdown.For the roughly one in eight Americans who participate in the food stamp program, the immediate threat is hunger and financial hardship, with SNAP benefits set to disappear starting on Nov. 1. The benefits average around $187 a month, costing the federal government about $8 billion monthly, which lawmakers replenish every year as part of the budget process. New York Times,Trump and Xi Ease Off the Trade War, but New Nuclear Threat Brings a Chill, Katie Rogers and Erica L. Green, Oct. 30, 2025. The two leaders (shown abovein file photos)reached an agreement on fentanyl, some tariffs and rare earths, at least for a year. But even as the global trade picture cleared a little, Mr. Trump spurred new worries about nuclear proliferation.Ahead of the high-stakes meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, world leaders were hoping for news of an economic truce that could help stabilize the global economy. They got it.They got something extra, as well: intensified concerns about whether the world is entering a new era of nuclear weapons proliferation among global powers.After a 90-minute face to face meeting in South Korea, Mr. Trump announced that the two leaders had sharply de-escalated their trade standoff, agreeing, in essence, on a yearlong cease-fire that would roll back tit-for-tat measures including steep tariffs and shutting off access to rare earth metals.The meeting was the most anticipated and consequential event of Mr. Trump’s nearly weeklong tour through Asia, where he engaged in a series of trade and security agreements with other countries in the region, many of them geared toward containing Beijing.“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Mr. Trump said aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington.The agreement was a win for the world economy, but was brokered under the shadow of a new and sudden amplification of nuclear threats between global powers.Just minutes before he landed in Busan, South Korea, to meet with Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump announced on social media that the United States would immediately restart nuclear weapons testing after a lull of more than 30 years. The announcement came after Russia announced that it had also conducted tests of a nuclear-capable missile and sea drone this week. New York Times,Prince Andrew to Be Stripped of His Royal Title, Mark Landler, Oct. 30, 2025. The extraordinary move caps his fall from grace over his ties to the convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles III, will be stripped of his title as prince, Buckingham Palace said on Thursday, an extraordinary move that caps his fall from grace over his ties to the convicted sexual predator, Jeffrey Epstein (shown above right with the then-prince).In a statement, the palace said, “Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.” The palace also said Andrew, 65, would be evicted from his residence, Royal Lodge, and move to a private residence.“These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him,” the palace said. “Their majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”New York Times,Trump Threatens to Resume Nuclear Weapons Testing, Minutes Before Xi Meeting, David E. Sanger, Oct. 30, 2025 (print ed.). Just minutes before he was scheduled to meet President Xi Jinping of China, the president threatened on social media to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with other countries.In the middle of a high-stakes diplomatic tour of Asia, President Trump threatened on social media to resume nuclear testing for the first time in more than 30 years.He made the threat just minutes before he was scheduled to meet President Xi Jinping of China, who is overseeing one of the fastest buildups of a nuclear arsenal on earth.“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, saying the process would begin immediately.The words “on an equal basis” may mean he will show off the power of American missiles or undersea nuclear assets, rather than detonate a nuclear weapon. The United States routinely tests unarmed missiles. Mr. Trump did not clarify his remarks to reporters while greeting Mr. Xi.While China is rapidly expanding its nuclear stockpile, and deploying missiles in new silos, it has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. Russia has not conducted a confirmed test since 1990. And while the United States has never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bans weapon detonations, past presidents have largely observed its provisions.New York Times,U.S. Military Kills Four More People Accused of Smuggling Drugs on Boats, Helene Cooper and Robert Jimison, Oct. 30, 2025 (print ed.). Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the latest strike took place on Wednesday in the eastern Pacific. It came two days after the deadliest set of strikes in the weekslong campaign in Latin America.The U.S. military on Wednesday killed another four people accused by the Trump administration of trafficking narcotics by sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, as the administration’s lethal campaign continued to expand.Mr. Hegseth said on social media that the strike took place in international waters and was directed at a boat that he said was operated by a “designated terrorist organization” in the eastern Pacific Ocean.Wednesday’s strike came two days after the deadliest known set of strikes since President Trump authorized the military to begin targeting people aboard boats in the seas of Latin America last month. On Monday, Mr. Hegseth said, 14 men were killed in three strikes on four boats. More than 60 people have been killed in the U.S. campaign in total. The Wrap via Nieman Lab, NBC and CBS cuts hit race and culture verticals, Neel Dhanesha, Oct. 30, 2025. On Wednesday, CBS News parent company Paramount — newly merged with Skydance — began laying off more than 2,000 employees, including at CBS News, which recently installed Free Press founder Bari Weiss, right, as its editor-in-chief.The news comes about two weeks after NBC News laid off about 150 people. Layoffs are common everywhere these days, and particularly in media, but these two in particular are worth writing about because of one commonality: Who was laid off.From reckoning to retreat: Journalism’s DEI efforts are in declineSeptember 11, 2025Back in September, Hanaa’ wrote about how diversity-related jobs in journalism have been declining in the years since the George Floyd protests, which media companies initially responded to with big promises to hire more people of color and cover underserved and marginalized communities more thoughtfully.The CBS and NBC cuts underscore Hanaa’s reporting, as it seems many of the cuts at both organizations targeted verticals related to race and diversity. Corbin Bolies reports in The Wrap that NBC disbanded four verticals that covered race or LGBTQ news; in a post on TikTok, former CBS News producer Trey Sherman said CBS laid off all the people of color on his production team while white staff were reassigned.As Natalie Korach reports in Status, the cuts at CBS were wide-ranging; along with shuttering the race and culture unit and the Johannesburg bureau, CBS also made cuts to its relatively young news data team, its Los Angeles bureau, the streaming companion shows Evening News Plus and CBS Mornings Plus, and radio and TV production units across the country. CBS Saturday Morning co-anchors Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson were also laid off.An NBC spokesperson told me that the cuts, which affected the whole organization, were precipitated in part by two news organizations — MSNBC (now MS NOW) and CNBC — moving to Versant. The spokesperson said the race and LGBTQ verticals will continue to exist, featuring content from across the newsroom, and that the majority of staffers on those teams will have the opportunity to fill open roles in the general newsroom. CBS did not respond to a request for comment by publishing time. News RoundupsThe Parnas Perspective,Trump Declares Criticizing Him is “Almost Treasonous” as More Republicans Break from the President, Aaron Parnas, right,Oct. 30, 2025. Today I’m tracking several major developments, led by the Republican Party’s growing revolt against the President over his plan to import beef from Argentina. Some of Trump’s most loyal allies are breaking with him in ways we have not seen in his second term, while the President lashes out, calling critics of his Asia trip “almost treasonous.”
- President Trump’s plan to import beef from Argentina has sparked a major backlash from farm-state Republicans, who say the move betrays “America First” principles and harms U.S. ranchers. Lawmakers including Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Rep. Jason Smith are demanding the administration reverse course, warning that the policy favors foreign competitors and deepens divisions over Trump’s sweeping tariff agenda.
- Donald Trump lashed out at Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer for calling his Asia trip a “total dud,” labeling the remarks “almost treasonous.” Schumer had criticized Trump for boasting about trade progress with China while failing to make meaningful gains with key Asian allies, prompting Trump to defend the trip as a “spectacular success.”
- The new trade deal includes a 10% tariff reduction on Chinese goods in exchange for China’s pledge to curb fentanyl exports, a move analysts call risky despite potential consumer relief. While the deal could ease inflation and mend US-China ties, critics warn it weakens America’s leverage, strains relations with allies like Canada and Mexico, and may yield few lasting gains if Beijing fails to uphold its promises.
- Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin nuclear weapons testing to “match” Russia and China, breaking with a three-decade U.S. moratorium on full tests. His announcement, made just before meeting Xi Jinping, drew international concern as China urged Washington to uphold non-proliferation commitments and critics warned it could escalate a new nuclear arms race.
U.S. Law, Crime, Courts, Justice Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: Heresy At DOJ, Andrew Egger, Oct. 30, 2025. In June 2023, a Washington man named Taylor Taranto drove cross-country to the nation’s capital on a mission.In YouTube livestreams, he said he had fitted his van with a detonator and intended to use it to blow up a government building. He posted an address online purporting to be Barack Obama’s home—one day after Donald Trump posted the same address on Truth Social—then drove around D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood in an apparent attempt to find it. Approached by Secret Service agents, Taranto attempted to flee, but was arrested. When agents searched his van, they found multiple guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A search of his online trail revealed a man positively addled by right-wing conspiracy theories who had been making threats against prominent Democrats—Obama, Kamala Harris, Jamie Raskin—for months.This year, Taranto was convicted of carrying the guns and ammo without a license and of making a hoax bomb threat. His sentencing hearing is today—but the prosecutors who charged him, assistant U.S. attorneys Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, won’t be attending. They were placed on administrative leave yesterday, hours after filing a sentencing brief in which they committed a forbidden act: acknowledging that the January 6th attack on the Capitol, which Taranto attended, was carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”Last night, after Valdivia and White were placed on leave, a new set of prosecutors for U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro filed an updated sentencing brief. Identical in nearly every respect, the new brief removed all mention of January 6th and scrubbed the suggestion that it was Trump’s post that had informed Taranto where to look for Obama immediately prior to his arrest.Should we be surprised? Probably not. But this outrageous story does serve as a useful reminder about the current condition of federal prosecution in America. Today’s Justice Department is not a body determined to pursue justice according to the law independent of political pressure. It’s the law-enforcement arm of the Trump administration, and the Trump administration’s political dictates don’t just determine who gets targeted; they determine what facts the Justice Department is permitted to consider true.It is, of course, an indisputable fact that the Capitol was sacked on January 6th by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” and that Taranto was one of them. Even the most galaxy-brained MAGA conspiracy theories about January 6th do not deny that a riot occurred.But Valdivia and White’s inclusion of that fact constituted a heresy against the regime. It cut against ex cathedra dogma that those convicted of crimes that day were simply noble patriots preyed upon by Joe Biden’s predatory politicized justice system. For the government to acknowledge that one of those pardon recipients later turned up in D.C. again, hunting Democrats to kill, is a career-ending offense for the one who speaks the unspeakable word.If there’s anything surprising about this story, it’s the speed and smoothness with which the inquisition occurred. It was mere hours after the filing of their brief that Valdivia and White were relieved of their duties, mere hours after that that the apostate brief was corrected and refiled. The offending thought was corrected, the offending thinkers were quarantined, order was restored. The system ticks on. Soon we won’t even be able to see it operate at all. New York Times,Prosecutors Who Called Jan. 6 Attackers a ‘Mob of Rioters’ Are Punished, Alan Feuer, Oct. 30, 2025 (print ed.). The prosecutors were put on leave after filing a sentencing memo in the case of a man who showed up armed near the home of former President Barack Obama.Two federal prosecutors in Washington were informed on Wednesday that they would be placed on leave after requesting a stiff sentence for a man granted clemency after participating in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, who later turned up armed near the house of former President Barack Obama.It was the latest act of retribution by the Trump administration against prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who worked on cases related to Jan. 6, a campaign that has also included dismissals and demotions. The moves were earlier reported by ABC News.The prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to sentence the man granted clemency, Taylor Taranto, to 27 months in prison after he was found guilty at a bench trial of showing up near Mr. Obama’s house in Washington with two firearms and ammunition in June 2023.In their sentencing papers, Mr. Valdivia and Mr. White wrote that Mr. Taranto had been among the “mob of rioters” on Jan. 6 and that he had promoted conspiracy theories concerning the attack. Mr. Taranto was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct for his role in the Capitol attack, but those charges were dismissed as part of the blanket clemency that President Trump granted to all of the nearly 1,600 people accused of taking part in the riot.In an extraordinary move, the Justice Department withdrew the sentencing papers on Wednesday afternoon, noting in a federal court database that they had been “entered in error.” Hours later, new sentencing papers were submitted that kept the same recommendation for a 27-month sentence but expunged all references to Jan. 6. The edited papers were filed by two new prosecutors appearing in the case, including Jonathan Hornok, the chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office.After Mr. Taranto was arrested in 2023, prosecutors said he had driven through Washington and the surrounding area in his van over the course of two days, livestreaming much of his wanderings and at one point suggesting that he had “outfitted his vehicle with a detonator.”In the original sentencing papers, Mr. Valdivia and Mr. White had said that Mr. Taranto had apparently discovered Mr. Obama’s address in a social media message posted by Mr. Trump. Mr. Taranto reposted the address, the prosecutors said, and then broadcast footage of himself driving through Mr. Obama’s neighborhood, Kalorama in Northwest Washington, claiming he was searching for “tunnels.” The Triad via The Bulwark,This Man Is the Face of the Future, Jonathan V. Last (JVL), above, Oct. 30, 2025. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino stands amid a protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago, on September 27, 2025. Please watch this short clip. It’s under two minutes. And then lets talk about what you see.First: You see Chicago police officers at the scene outside the Chicago courthouse. They are in uniform, clearly identified, and outfitted with the normal tools of law enforcement. Their faces are visible. Many of them are using bikes, which are useful tools in urban law enforcement.Second: There are anonymous federal officers. They are in camouflage gear. Why? Is camouflage an effective tool for urban law enforcement? No. It is a fashion statement designed to evoke military power. Look at their kit. They are tacked out as though they were operating in Fallujah. Not just body armor, but military-grade helmets and comms gear.Can you see their faces? No. In all but a few cases, these federal officers have completely obscured their faces.¹Did you notice this guy?He is in full tactical gear while . . . filming video. Why is a federal officer doing cinematic documentation when there are cameras everywhere? It’s not because the CPB is trying to keep everyone honest. They’re using one of their soldiers to collect footage for propaganda purposes.Then there’s the Border Patrol’s local comandante, Gregory Bovino. Watch him as he strides out of the courthouse, mounts the driver’s door of a pickup truck, holds up a clenched fist, salutes into the middle distance, and finally employs an exaggerated series of tactical command gestures, as if he were ordering a platoon into action at Dog Green Beach. Really, you have to see this part at the 0:18 mark.Why isn’t Bovino wearing a mask? We have been told that it is critically important for federal law enforcement officers to conceal their identities. But here’s Bovino going out of his way to make a spectacle of himself. Why can’t the guys in full battle-rattle be as brave as he is and take their masks off?Are Bovino’s military hand signals the most effective way to communicate with his staff on scene? Many of the Border Patrol officers are looking away from him and so would not see his orders or understand the tactical situation. Wouldn’t it have been more effective to communicate over the radio?This entire scene was a performance piece. The question is: Who was this performance for?2. Theater of the AbsurdMy guess is that Bovino was working four different audiences.The first, and most important, was President Trump. Bovino is having a moment as the face of the Chicago deportation battle. Instead of functioning as a behind-the-scenes technocrat, he has embraced the Noem-Hegseth strategy of constantly appearing in public, in costume, with the goal of conveying action and strength. Bovino tries to appear at all times as though he, himself, might go out and tackle a brown person outside Home Depot.Bovino’s performance was designed to tell Trump, with tears in his eyes, Sir, I am straight out of central casting.The second audience is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Immigration is the primary growth sector within the administration at this moment. It’s where the money is going, per the Big Beautiful Bill. It’s where Stephen Miller’s attention is. If the ICE/CPB operation in Chicago is successful, then it will be franchised out to other (Democratic) cities. Which would open up all sorts of pathways for advancement for Bovino.³The third audience is the CPB rank and file. Immediately prior to that video, Bovino had been summoned to court and worked down by a judge.Not just any judge—a Lady Judge.And not just a Lady Judge—but a lady judge who was born in Canada to Jamaican parents and then became a naturalized American citizen after (gasp!) immigrating to the United States.The humiliation for Bovino—an alpha male Heritage American—must have been unbearable.Part of the message Homeland Security has been sending its agents is that there will be no consequences for overzealous behavior, but there will be consequences for those perceived as soft. Bovino’s combat pantomime was an attempt to tell CPB officers that they didn’t need to worry about whatever the silly little immigrant woman said—the Big Boss was still in charge and his boys were still locked, cocked, and ready to rock.The fourth audience, finally, was the people of Chicago. Bovino wants the community he is embedded in to see him not as a law enforcement officer but as an occupying military commander. He has not tried to establish a working relationship with the city; he has tried to dominate it. Going out of his way to look like the literal driver of a military operation, rather than an ordinary public servant, is part of that attempted subjugation.Is it absurd? Yes.But this is how fascists behave in many contexts during the consolidation phase of their drive to power.3. Face Block. 404 Media broke another important story:In another video of a different incident, this time filmed from the perspective of a driver that authorities have also apparently stopped in Chicago, a group of ICE officers surround the driver side window. One of the officers, wearing a vest from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), tells one of his coworkers the driver is refusing to be ID’d. The second ICE official then points his own phone camera at the driver.“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone,” the driver says.“Alright, we just got to verify that,” one of the officers says, with some of the group peering at the phone. The officer with the phone points the camera at the driver again, and asks him to remove his hat. “If you could take your hat off, it would be a lot quicker,” the ICE officer says. “I’m going to run your information.”These videos and others reviewed by 404 Media show that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are actively using smartphone facial recognition technology in the field, including in stops that seem to have little justification beyond the color of someone’s skin, to then look up more information on that person, including their identity and potentially their immigration status. It is not clear which specific app the officers in the videos are using. 404 Media previously revealed ICE has a new app called Mobile Fortify, which scans someone’s face and is built on a database of 200 million images. The app queries an unprecedented number of government databases to return the subject’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation. . . .404 Media has seen several videos across social media that appear to show immigration authorities using facial recognition technology. Often the videos include little context beyond what is happening directly in front of the camera, but do sometimes include officials making explicit references to the technology, like with the Border Patrol officer who asked “can you do facial?” . . .Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”More On U.S. Tariffs, Trade, FinancesPaul Krugman via Substack, How We Lost the Trade War, Paul Krugman, Oct. 30, 2025. Tariff uncertainty may be waning, but the damage will persist. A little over six months ago Donald Trump shocked the world by announcing a huge jump in tariffs, to levels not seen since the 1930s. Most of these tariffs were clearly illegal and have been so ruled by lower courts — but it’s anyone’s guess how an extremely submissive Supreme Court will rule. Since then he has backed off some tariffs but imposed others, some on bizarre grounds — a Canadian province ran an ad he didn’t like! — creating constant uncertainty.With his plunging poll numbers at home (Fake News!), Trump seems intent upon making some deals with Japan, Korea and China during his marathon Asia trip. He needs badly to declare some sort of victory so he can move on. And even within the Republican Party, his tariff policies are in trouble, with 52 Senators voting against the Brazil tariffs and farm-state Senators showing anxiety over China’s moratorium on American soybean purchases.So absent another toddler tantrum, we may be reaching peak Trump tariffs. But don’t celebrate. Trump’s chaotic tariff policies inflicted three types of economic damage: higher prices for American producers and consumers, economic uncertainty, and the global loss of American credibility. Even if the worst in terms of prices and uncertainty is over, it’s clear that Trump’s tariffs have inflicted lasting damage on the US economy as well as the global economic order.To understand the extent of the damage, let’s begin by taking inventory of the tariffs’ actual effects on prices and the job market.Inflation has accelerated since Donald Trump went on his tariff rampage. Late last year, before Liberation Day and all that, professional forecasters expected “core” consumer prices — which exclude volatile food and energy prices — to rise 2.4 percent over the course of 2025. The latest official reading (and the last we may get for a while) put core inflation at 3 percent.Everyone’s Entitled To My Own Opinion by Jeff Tiedrich, Oct. 30, 2025: South Korea gave Donny a fake crown (above), and in return they’re getting to take advantage of our dimwit president.New York Times,News Analysis: The Art of Letting Trump Claim a Win, While Walking Away Stronger, Lily Kuo and David Pierson, Oct. 30, 2025. By withholding soybean purchases and rare-earth exports, China extracted relief from U.S. tariffs and delayed export controls, without conceding much in return.When Xi Jinping walked out of his meeting with President Trump on Thursday, he projected the confidence of a powerful leader who could make Washington blink.The outcome of the talks suggested that he succeeded.By flexing China’s near monopoly on rare earths and its purchasing power over U.S. soybeans, Mr. Xi won key concessions from Washington — a reduction in tariffs, a suspension of port fees on Chinese ships and the delay of U.S. export controls that would have barred more Chinese firms from accessing American technology. Both sides also agreed to extend a truce struck earlier this year to limit tariffs.“What’s clear is they have become increasingly bold in exerting leverage and they are happy to pocket any and all U.S. concessions,” said Julian Gewirtz, who was a senior China policy official at the White House and the State Department in President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration.Sounding almost like he was delivering a lecture, Mr. Xi said to Mr. Trump that the “recent twists and turns” of the trade war should be instructive to them both, according to a Chinese government summary of Mr. Xi’s remarks at the meeting in Busan, South Korea.New York Times,Trump and Xi, Hoping to Ease Trade War, Agree to 1-Year Truce, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Keith Bradsher, Oct. 30, 2025. China agreed to suspend for a year some of its limits on exports of rare earth metals, while the U.S. halved its fentanyl-related tariffs.After a series of failed attempts to de-escalate an acrimonious trade war, President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, agreed to a yearlong truce that rolls back many of the contentious tariffs and retaliatory measures that deepened the feud between the world’s two biggest economies.The two leaders gathered at an airport in Busan, on South Korea’s southeastern coast, for their first in-person meeting of Mr. Trump’s second term with a lot at stake: An economic feud that had simmered for several months was threatening to boil over. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump threatened to levy an additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods after China imposed its most stringent restrictions ever on important rare earth metals.But cooler heads prevailed. The two leaders, after meeting for about 90 minutes, settled on a series of agreements that broke little new ground but unwound thorny issues that had been plaguing negotiations for a lasting trade deal.Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi agreed to a one-year truce, extending a pause they had put in place after tit-for-tat escalations drove up tariffs on each other’s imports to more than 100 percent. They had initially decided to limit additional tariffs in May, and that was extended by three months in August. The current agreement was set to expire on Nov. 10.In addition, Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, returning to Washington shortly after meeting with Mr. Xi, that he had agreed to halve a punitive 20 percent import duty he had placed on China this year. He had imposed the tariffs after accusing China of failing to prevent fentanyl and the chemicals used in making the powerful synthetic opioid from entering the United States.He said on Thursday that he agreed to lower the import duty because he believed China was serious about taking the necessary steps to stop the flow of so-called chemical precursors. The reduced tariff would be effective immediately and bring down the overall tariff on many Chinese goods to around 45 percent from about 55 percent.New York Times,Tracking Trump Tariffs on Countries and Products, Tony Romm, Lazaro Gamio, Agnes Chang and Jacqueline Gu Updated, Oct. 30, 2025. Since returning to office, President Trump has waged a global trade war without parallel in modern history. Nearly every country has seen duties rise considerably on its goods imported into the United States, while a vast range of foreign-made products — including steel and cars — are also now subject to higher levies.Mr. Trump enacted his tariffs through a range of orders, directives, investigations and trade deals that date back to the opening days of his second term. The actions amount to an audacious gamble by the White House, which believes its policies can reset the world trading order, raise new federal revenue and pressure private businesses to make more of their products domestically.Whether Mr. Trump can succeed in his sweeping tariff campaign remains an open question with great consequence for the U.S. economy. The president’s brinkmanship has at times rattled financial markets around the world, and his tariffs threaten to raise prices on American businesses and consumers, who often ultimately foot the bill for those duties on imported goods. Many of his steepest tariffs targeting countries are also the subject of a legal dispute that the Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear.In the latest development, on Thursday Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, staved off another potentially damaging escalation between the world’s two largest economies. The Trump administration announced that it would reduce the fentanyl-linked tariffs it imposed on China early this year, following a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi. In return, China agreed to suspend for a year its strict new limits on exports of rare earth metals.More Global NewsNew York Times,Centrist Party Ties Dutch Election as Far-Right Party Loses Seats, Claire Moses, Oct. 30, 2025. The outcome was a major win for the political center and a big defeat for the far-right party of Geert Wilders, who faced a significant setback in an election he forced.A center-left party and the far-right party of Geert Wilders were projected on Thursday morning to each win the same number of legislative seats in the Dutch election, according to the official count reported by the Dutch newswire ANP.The outcome was a major win for the political center and a big defeat for Mr. Wilders, who had forced an election just two years after achieving a dominant result and whose party lost 11 seats.The center-left Democrats 66, a socially progressive party with a centrist economic policy, initially appeared likely to be the largest party when exit polls reported on Wednesday night. By Thursday morning, with nearly all counting completed, ANP reported a lead of a just over a thousand votes nationwide fluctuating between the centrists, known as D66, and Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom. New York Times, Syria’s Rocky Transition Brings New Waves of Displacement, Raja Abdulrahim and Reham Mourshed, Oct. 30, 2025. More than 400,000 Syrians have been displaced in the year since the civil war ended, according to the United Nations, driven by a mix of sectarian violence, acts of revenge and property disputes.When Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war ended last year with the ouster of dictator Bashar al-Assad, many Syrians rejoiced at the chance to finally return to the homes and lands they had abandoned.The war had displaced more than half the country’s population, as millions fled to other countries and many more sought safer ground within their own borders.But now, the country’s rocky transition to new leadership has brought fresh waves of displacement, driven by acts of revenge, sectarian violence, decades-old property disputes and Israeli occupation of land in southern Syria.Between December 2024 and July 2025, more than 430,000 people in Syria were newly displaced, according to the United Nations. No single group among the country’s diverse religious and ethnic communities has been spared the turmoil, which stretched across multiple regions.New York Times,Inside the Heist That Shocked the World, Catherine Porter, Oct. 30, 2025. Holly Barker and her husband, Jake, were third in line at the Louvre the morning of Oct. 19.The couple from Indianapolis had a plan — head straight for the Mona Lisa, before the crowds, then shoot toward Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” and a famous painting of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David. Fourth stop was a place they had heard was a mini version of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors: the Apollo Gallery, with its collection of royal jewels.It was 9:32 when Ms. Barker stepped inside the gilded hall and took a photo. As Ms. Barker stopped to admire a wedding gift that Napoleon had given his second wife — a necklace glittering with 32 emeralds and more than 1,100 diamonds — she heard the first of three loud bangs. It was 9:34, and masked thieves were about to barge through the window.The room froze, suspended for a moment of confusion, according to her husband, who locked eyes with her. Then they heard a piercing sound from the balcony outside: The thieves were firing up a disc grinder that could cut through reinforced glass.“The attendant said ‘Everyone get out,’” said Ms. Barker, a middle-school teacher who participated in enough active-shooter drills to convince her this was a terrorist attack.More On U.S. Politics, Governance Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Morning Shots, Bill Kristol, right, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 30, 2025. Good morning to everyone, including Long Island wine importer Bill DeBlasio—who accidentally provoked a minor media scandal this week when a reporter from the Times of London emailed him seeking comment on Zohran Mamdani’s policies.That reporter was apparently under the impression that he was reaching out to the former mayor of New York City Bill DeBlasio. When the Times published wine importer DeBlasio’s comments that “the math” of Mamdani’s plans “doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial,” things went haywire. Former mayor DeBlasio accused the paper of fabricating his quotes, and the Times deleted the story amid mass confusion.“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” wine importer Bill DeBlasio told Semafor yesterday. “I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”If there are even MORE Bill DeBlasios out there, waiting to be quoted, we want to know.New York Times, Trump’s Search for Eternity: Heaven? Maybe Not, He Says. Monuments? Absolutely, Peter Baker, Oct. 30, 2025. After a lifetime of scandal, the president expresses doubt that he will be admitted to paradise. But he appears increasingly intent on finding other paths to eternity.A few weeks ago, President Trump momentarily dropped the bombast and the playground insults and the self-congratulation to muse about his eternal soul. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he said. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”Prodded by a reporter this month to elaborate, he repeated the lament without much more explanation. “I’m being a little cute,” he said. But he went on: “I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into heaven. I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound.”Mr. Trump is hardly the first 79-year-old to dwell on what may come after he departs this mortal coil — or to wonder whether he has earned entry into the pearly gates. But it is so unlike Mr. Trump to express self-doubt that his public rumination has raised questions. What is on his mind lately that makes him fear his fate in the hereafter? What sins might he be regretting?He has not clarified his thinking, at least not on camera, nor for that matter has he shown any public signs of repentance for scandals that he may believe hold him back from grace. And yet the president’s curious contemplation comes at a time when Mr. Trump seems to be seeking a form of immortality. If absolution is out of reach, perhaps there are more achievable ways of living beyond his natural time on this earth.And so, the man who over a long career in business slapped his name on buildings around the world now seems intent on leaving his mark in even more grandiose fashion. He demolished the East Wing of the White House last week to make way for a vast, gilded Trumpian ballroom. He wants to erect an arch at the entrance to Washington that resembles Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe. He is even considering having the government issue a new $1 coin with his own face on it, something no president has done in nearly a century.New York Times,Cuomo Earned Almost $5 Million Consulting. He Won’t Name His Clients, Nicholas Fandos, Oct. 30, 2025 (print ed.). Most of Andrew Cuomo’s income came from Innovation Strategies, a company created for his consulting work before he ran for mayor of New York City, a review of his tax returns showed.Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo earned nearly $5 million working as a private consultant in 2024, a sum so large it puts him in the top 0.5 percent of New York City earners, according to his annual tax returns.The tax documents, reviewed by The New York Times on Tuesday, show that Mr. Cuomo derived $4,712,978, almost all of his income last year, from Innovation Strategies, a pass-through company created for his consulting work before he ran for mayor of New York City.By using his company as an in-between, Mr. Cuomo, right, avoided having to disclose the individual clients who paid for his services. His campaign said he had stopped his private work earlier this year, but it has repeatedly refused to say who was paying him.The arrangement, while well within the law, makes it almost impossible for voters or watchdog groups to understand the financial and business connections of someone who could soon have sway over billions of dollars in public contracts, real estate developments and city policy.Mr. Cuomo, who is running as a third-party candidate after losing June’s Democratic primary, was the last major mayoral candidate to agree to share his tax documents. He did so only in the waning days of the campaign as early voting was underway.The former governor, 67, was the highest earning candidate in the race last year — by a factor of more than 10.Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and front-runner, reported $131,398 in income from his job as a state assemblyman. He took in another $1,267 in royalties related to an earlier music career, according to his tax documentation. New York Times, Calley Means, a Kennedy Adviser, Has Left the White House, Benjamin Mueller, Oct. 30, 2025. Mr. Means quietly departed his federal role about a month ago. His sister has been nominated for surgeon general.Calley Means, an influential adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the brother of President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, quietly departed the White House at the end of his term as a special government employee about a month ago, he said in an interview on Wednesday night.For much of the last six months, Mr. Means has acted as the health secretary’s right hand, coordinating a major presidential commission report on what it described as the dire state of children’s health and sparring on television and online with vaccine scientists and doctors who objected to Mr. Kennedy’s campaign to remake American medicine.He also drew criticism from Democratic members of Congress for the financial advantages he stood to gain from changes to the health care system being pursued by the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its Trump administration backers.Casey Means, Surgeon General Nominee, Goes Into Labor Ahead of Senate HearingOct. 30, 2025Mr. Means co-founded the wellness company Truemed, which helps people buy items like Peloton bikes and $8,000 saunas with money not subject to federal income taxes, making it a potential beneficiary of Trump administration plans to broaden the pool of people eligible for such tax-advantaged spending.The White House, where Mr. Means served as a special government employee, never formally announced his departure. And in the weeks since he left, Mr. Means has been cited in news reports as a White House adviser and aide to Mr. Kennedy in the course of lacerating hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies for “making money off more sick patients.”Mr. Means’s speaker biography for a health industry conference where he appeared last week said that “Calley is a special government employee to the White House on MAHA strategy.”Mr. Means, who had been appointed in March, said that the news reports suggesting he was still employed by the White House were inaccurate and that the biography was outdated. He said he had spoken at the conference only in general terms.As a special government employee, Mr. Means was limited to a 130-day term. Democratic members of Congress have said that term should have ended around late July. Mr. Means said that he had taken time off earlier in the year and left the White House about a month ago, when his term ran out. U.S. Media, Technology, Education, Culture New York Times,Karine Jean-Pierre and a Book Tour Most Authors Would Not Dream Of, Elisabeth Bumiller, Oct. 30, 2025. The Biden White House press secretary (shown above at the White House) is promoting a new book about her time behind the briefing room lectern. Her message has not been well received.White House press secretaries are supposed to know how to talk to the press. But that has not been evident this week for Karine Jean-Pierre, whose publicity tour for “Independent,” her book about her time behind the briefing room lectern of the Biden White House, has gone viral, and not in a good way.It is possible, of course, that the adage that all publicity is good publicity will prove true and result in spectacular sales for her book, subtitled “A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.”But so far Ms. Jean-Pierre, who as Mr. Biden’s press secretary relied heavily on talking points although without the insults from the podium common today, has come across in interviews as erratic and defensive rather than as a forceful champion for her old boss.Her attempts to defend him have come at a difficult time for Democrats, who are not eager to revisit the debacle of last year. Her message has not been well received.Along the way she has struggled to answer questions. Exhibit A was an interview published on Monday with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, which has been described as “an absolute train wreck” (New York magazine) and “an excruciating case study in denial” (Peter Meijer, a former Republican congressman from Michigan). Others termed it embarrassing and incoherent.In the book, Ms. Jean-Pierre writes that she became an independent in June because she was upset by the way the Democratic Party had pushed former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. out of the 2024 race. But in her interview with Mr. Chotiner, her explanation of her thinking devolved into a word salad that left him, and many readers, perplexed.Asked why she thought the party had given Mr. Biden the boot, Ms. Jean-Pierre, the first Black and openly gay White House press secretary, responded: “There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.”“Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense,” Mr. Chotiner responded. “I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump.”At another point in the interview, Mr. Chotiner asked Ms. Jean-Pierre why she had written in the book that it was an “insult” to former Vice President Kamala Harris that people didn’t want her to be the nominee when she also wrote that “the truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.”Ms. Jean-Pierre responded: “But two things could be true, right? The thing I say the second time actually proves the thing that I said the first time, right?”Oct. 29US President Donald Trump holds a rendering of the planned White House Ballroom extension during a meeting with Mark Rutte, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025 (Getty Images). Shown below that is the destroyed White House East Wing, built more than a century ago and the traditional entry way for public visitorsNBC News,White House fires board that reviews presidential construction projects in Washington, Monica Alba and Raquel Coronell Uribe, Oct. 28-29, 2025. The firing of fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts comes as Trump plans to build a triumphal arch along the Potomac River, and a new ballroom on the White House grounds.The White House on Tuesday fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that would have reviewed President Donald Trump’s ballroom construction project, a White House official confirmed to NBC News.The official said the White House is “preparing to appoint a new slate of members to the commission that are more aligned with President Trump’s America First Policies,” and the six board members — all of whom had been appointed by former President Joe Biden — were informed they were “terminated, effective immediately” via a White House email.The firings were first reported by The Washington Post.The board is tasked with advising the president, Congress and the District of Columbia’s government “on matters of design and aesthetics, as they affect the federal interest and preserve the dignity of the nation’s capital,” the commission’s website says.The dismissal of board members comes shortly after Trump unveiled plans to build an arch along the Potomac River echoing the design of France’s Arc de Triomphe, and a new ballroom where the White House’s East Wing stood until just days ago. New York Times,Obamacare Prices Become Public, Highlighting Big Increases, Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, Oct. 29, 2025. The government website now shows consumers how much their health insurance costs will increase next year, as Congress remains at an impasse over the plans’ subsidies.The Trump administration has released a preview of the available plans sold through Obamacare marketplaces in 30 states, giving Americans who buy their own health insurance a first look at just how much prices would go up.Insurers have increased rates significantly for next year — an average of about 30 percent in the states where the federal government manages markets, and an average of 17 percent in states that run their own markets, according to a new analysis from KFF, the health research group.But most of the more than 20 million Americans covered by the Affordable Care Act don’t currently pay the full price of their insurance, because they qualify for income-based tax credits that help make the plans affordable. That financial assistance has been in place since the federal A.C.A. marketplaces opened in 2014, and became even more generous in 2021, when Congress increased the aid. The extra help is scheduled to expire next year unless Congress acts.The looming expiration of those subsidies has been a key sticking point in congressional wrangling over the government shutdown, which has lasted nearly a month. Democrats have demanded an extension of the subsidies as a condition of supporting legislation funding the entire government. Republican leaders say they will not discuss the issue until the government is reopened.The higher prices reflect a mix of factors, many tied to rising drug and hospital costs in the health care system itself. But insurance companies also raised prices for Obamacare plans because of concerns that the expiring subsidies would discourage younger, healthier customers from staying enrolled.Sue Monahan, a former university administrator in Oregon who is now retired, is one of the many Americans who faces a steep increase if the enhanced subsidies are allowed to expire. Ms. Monahan, 61, paid $439 a month for her coverage in 2025 after receiving a federal tax credit that covers roughly half of the premiums for her plan. When she went to shop for next year’s plan, she learned that the monthly cost would jump to $1,059 for the same plan with an annual deductible of $7,100.Ms. Monahan said that as a former kidney donor, going without insurance is not an option. “It’s not there for what you foresee; it’s there for the unexpected expensive events,” she said. New York Times, F.B.I. Opposes Push for Gabbard to Take Lead on Counterintelligence, Maggie Haberman, Julian E. Barnes and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 29, 2025. The F.B.I. made the disclosure in a pointed letter that underscored broader concern over a House bill that would give more authority to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.The F.B.I. informed Congress last week that it “strongly” opposed a proposal to make the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the lead counterintelligence agency for the federal government, bringing into public view a rift among top national security officials.The disclosure, made in a pointed and unusual letter obtained by The New York Times, underscored the broader concern at other agencies, including the F.B.I., over a House bill that would empower Tulsi Gabbard, right, the director of national intelligence, to play a more prominent role in counterintelligence issues.It also appeared to be an effort to undercut Ms. Gabbard, who planned to endorse the change in a separate letter, given that the bill would step into what has typically been the bureau’s purview.The F.B.I. letter was the latest example of tensions between Ms. Gabbard and her counterparts at other intelligence agencies, including the director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel. A bid by Joe Kent, a top Gabbard ally who leads the National Counterterrorism Center, to investigate the circumstances of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing had already raised alarms at the F.B.I., after Mr. Kent went so far as to examine the bureau’s files.The House and Senate are negotiating over a final version of an intelligence policy bill, known as the Intelligence Authorization Act, and the proposal to overhaul counterintelligence operations, including the level of Ms. Gabbard’s involvement, remains one of the main sticking points, congressional officials said.The F.B.I., in its letter, described the draft letter from Ms. Gabbard’s office as saying that the entire intelligence community supported the proposals that would give it primacy on counterintelligence issues.Ms. Gabbard’s letter has not been sent to lawmakers, and The Times has not seen the draft. Officials from her office have shared their views on the proposal with the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.New York Times, Two prosecutors who called the Jan. 6 attackers a ‘mob of rioters’ are punished, Alan Feuer, Oct. 29, 2025. The prosecutors had requested a sentence of 27 months in prison for a man who was found guilty of weapons offenses in a 2023 caseTwo federal prosecutors in Washington were informed on Wednesday that they would be placed on leave after requesting a stiff sentence for a man granted clemency after participating in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, who later turned up armed near the house of former President Barack Obama.It was the latest act of retribution by the Trump administration against prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who worked on cases related to Jan. 6, a campaign that has also included dismissals and demotions. The moves were earlier reported by ABC News.The prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to sentence the man granted clemency, Taylor Taranto, to 27 months in prison after he was found guilty at a bench trial of showing up near Mr. Obama’s house in Washington with two firearms and ammunition in June 2023.In their sentencing papers, Mr. Valdivia and Mr. White wrote that Mr. Taranto had been among the “mob of rioters” on Jan. 6 and that he had promoted conspiracy theories concerning the attack. Mr. Taranto was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct for his role in the Capitol attack, but those charges were dismissed as part of the blanket clemency that President Trump granted to all of the nearly 1,600 people accused of taking part in the riot.In an extraordinary move, the Justice Department withdrew the sentencing papers on Wednesday afternoon, noting in a federal court database that they had been “entered in error.” Department officials did not immediately issue a new sentencing memo, but two new prosecutors filed appearances in the case, including Jonathan Hornok, the chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office.After Mr. Taranto was arrested in 2023, prosecutors said he had driven through Washington and the surrounding area in his van over the course of two days, livestreaming much of his wanderings and at one point suggesting that he had “outfitted his vehicle with a detonator.”In court papers recommending that he receive a sentence of more than two years, Mr. Valdivia and Mr. White said that Mr. Taranto had apparently discovered Mr. Obama’s address in a social media message posted by Mr. Trump. Mr. Taranto reposted the address, the prosecutors said, and then broadcast footage of himself driving through Mr. Obama’s neighborhood, Kalorama in Northwest Washington, claiming he was searching for “tunnels.”The prosecutors also noted that when the authorities discovered Mr. Taranto near the house, they found a pistol and a semiautomatic rifle in his van, along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.“His possession of two guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition should be viewed with the backdrop of political violence in mind, at a time when acts of violence perpetrated for political reasons are justifiably generating substantial public concern,” the prosecutors wrote.Prosecutors who have worked on Jan. 6-related cases have been targeted for months as part of Mr. Trump’s broader effort to root out people in the Justice Department he believes to be disloyal.The firings and demotions began in late January, just after Mr. Trump returned to office, when more than a dozen young prosecutors who worked on riot cases were dismissed from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington.The next month, several senior prosecutors who had worked on Jan. 6 cases involving far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were demoted from supervisory positions to low-level jobs handling misdemeanors.And in July, three more career prosecutors who handled the cases were also dismissed.New York Times, Fed Cuts Rates to Lowest Level Since 2022 but Casts Doubt on December Move, Colby Smith, Oct. 29, 2025. The Federal Reserve reduced interest rates by a quarter point. But officials hold “strongly differing views” about a cut at the next meeting, the chair said.The Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday for a second time this year, despite officials having only a partial view of how the economy is faring because of the government shutdown.The central bank voted to lower borrowing costs by a quarter of a percentage point as the lapse in funding for the government stretched into its fifth week. Until lawmakers reach a deal, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies have stopped collecting, analyzing and publishing official statistics tracking the jobs market, consumer prices, spending and a range of other metrics.Wednesday’s decision brought interest rates below 4 percent for the first time since late 2022. But it was a divisive vote, with two officials dissenting for different reasons. Stephen I. Miran, the newest member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, voted for a larger, half-point reduction, like he did in September. Jeffrey R. Schmid, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wanted the Fed to instead hold interest rates steady at the previous level of 4 percent to 4.25 percent. This is the first time Fed officials have dissented in opposite directions since September 2019, when the committee voted to cut rates by a quarter point.Wednesday’s split underscores the challenge the Fed faces going forward as it looks toward its next meeting, in December, and whether to cut a third time this year, as most officials had previously forecast.Jerome H. Powell, the Fed’s chair, said that there were “strongly differing views about how to proceed in December” and that a cut was “far from” a foregone conclusion.“We haven’t made a decision about December,” Mr. Powell said during a news conference after the decision. The Fed’s internal divisions stem from not only divergent views surrounding the economic outlook but also divergent risk tolerances around allowing the labor market to weaken or inflation to stay elevated.Mr. Powell said that if the labor market were to stabilize at current levels or even accelerate, that “would certainly play into our decisions going forward.” New York Times,Live Updates: Hurricane Melissa Batters the Caribbean, Killing About 20 in Haiti, Staff Reports, Oct. 29,2025. Water rose unexpectedly in and around a swollen river, flooding more than 160 homes. The storm was forecast to reach the Bahamas within hours, after lashing Cuba and Jamaica.Hurricane Melissa knocked out power to 70 percent of Jamaica and caused communications outages so severe that even the government was struggling on Wednesday to assess the full scope of the damage.Melissa hit Jamaica on Tuesday as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record, at one stage packing winds of 185 miles per hour, but weakened as it crossed Cuba and headed toward the Bahamas. Even countries that avoided direct hits have felt its deadly force, though. In the Haitian community of Petit-Goâve, about 20 people died after sudden floods spilled out of a swollen river, according to a local official. Children were among the dead, the official said, and another dozen people remained missing.Lincoln Square Media,Trump Won on the Economy. Now Voters Have Buyer’s Remorse, Andrew Wilson, Oct. 29, 2025. Trump Won on the Economy. Now Voters Have Buyer’s Remorse. Trump’s brand as a strong businessman carried him back to the White House. But the honeymoon is definitely over.The latest Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday contains a truly shocking figure: 61% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction.That includes 68% of independents and even 24% of Republicans — a sign that frustration with the Trump administration is no longer confined to the left.Congress in CrisisCongressional leaders on both sides of the aisle are deep underwater as the shutdown drags on.YouGov found that 58% of Americans have very little trust in Congress, and even among Republicans, 47% express skepticism. A separate Gallup survey puts overall congressional approval in the teens, marking a sharp drop among Republicans since the start of the shutdown. The chaos in Washington is wearing thin with everyone — including the GOP’s own base.Trump’s Favorability Hits Rock Bottom: That same YouGov poll found Trump’s favorability at its lowest point ever, with 57% of Americans holding an unfavorable view of the president. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll reinforces the slide: 57% disapproval, up roughly five points since the last survey. The country isn’t just tired — it’s tuning him out.The Economic Foundation Crumbles. What’s most striking about recent polling is the collapse of Trump’s economic credibility. Remember: This was the issue that carried him back into the White House. In CNN’s 2024 exit polls, two-thirds of voters said the economy was “not so good” or “poor,” and that pessimism correlated directly with support for Trump. His entire brand — the myth of the strong businessman — was built on it. Now, that foundation is cracking.Multiple recent polls show a total reversal in public perception:
- 57% disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy in both Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac surveys. That marks a nearly 40-point collapse in his economic approval since leaving office in 2021
- The “Trump economy” image has officially lost its shine. Cost of Living Concerns Spike
- The same Reuters/Ipsos poll found a sharp spike in disapproval of Trump’s handling of the cost of living.
- While shutdown numbers remain steady, there’s a clear opening for Democrats: 73% of respondents — including a majority of Republicans — said they want ACA subsidies extended.
That’s not just a policy win. It’s a moral and political one — and it underscores how far Trump has fallen on the issue that once defined him.News Roundups New York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: South Korea Says It Has an Agreement With U.S. on Tariffs, Staff Reports, Oct. 29, 2025. South Korea visit: Kim Yong-beom, the chief of staff of President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea, said the country had reached “an agreement on the details” in tariff negotiations with the United States after a meeting between President Trump and Mr. Lee.The announcement came after Mr. Trump attended a dinner with other world leaders in Gyeongju, South Korea, on Wednesday, as part of the last leg of a six-day Asia trip that included stops in Malaysia and Japan. Read more ›Trump’s meetings: China’s Foreign Ministry said that the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, would meet with Mr. Trump on Thursday in Busan, South Korea. Mr. Trump said that he would not have time to meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, on his trip, although the president had repeatedly expressed his eagerness to do so. North Korea fired missiles off its coast the night before Mr. Trump arrived in South Korea. Read more ›Third term: As he flew to South Korea, Mr. Trump hinted that he had ruled out running for a third term. He conceded that “based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run.” House Speaker Mike Johnson had said hours earlier that there was no path around the Constitution’s two-term limit. Read more ›Radio Free Asia, one of four federally funded news organizations the Trump administration has aimed to close, will shut down its news operations on Friday for the first time since its founding in 1996, removing one of the few independent journalism outlets in Asian countries with limited press freedoms.On Oct. 31, the organization will lay off dozens of its remaining journalists, close its regional offices in large Asian cities like Seoul, Istanbul and Bangkok, and halt language services targeting China, Vietnam, North Korea, Myanmar and Cambodia. The Parnas Perspective, Donald Trump Admits He Cannot Run for Third Term as Court Losses Pile Up, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 29, 2025.Trump loses in the 9th Circuit and Central District of California, mass protests meet Trump as he arrives in South Korea, and much more. Overnight, Donald Trump suffered a series of major legal defeats as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals once again blocked his attempt to deploy troops to Portland, and the Central District of California ruled that his handpicked acting U.S. Attorney was unlawfully serving in office. As these rulings landed, Trump began his day in East Asia, where he publicly admitted for the first time that he cannot seek a third term as president.I am reporting what the White House does not want you to know, the truth. Millions are reading our work, but I can only continue this reporting with your support. I do this because I believe in it completely, because truth matters, accountability matters, and connection matters. They will try to silence us, but I will not stop. Subscribe today and stand with independent journalism.SubscribedWith that, here’s the news:
- Donald Trump acknowledged that he is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, saying it is “pretty clear” he cannot run again despite having what he described as his highest poll numbers ever. Speaking aboard Air Force One on his way to South Korea, Trump called it “too bad” that he is not allowed to run but added that there are “a lot of great people” who could step forward.
- House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed there is no legal path for Trump to seek a third term, explaining that the 22nd Amendment explicitly limits presidents to two terms and that amending the Constitution would take years and require widespread state approval. Although Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of a third term and expressed that he would “love to do it,” he appeared to concede that it is not legally possible while continuing to highlight his strong support among voters.
- The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Oregon’s request to re-hear its case blocking President Trump from deploying National Guard troops to Portland, vacating a prior three-judge panel’s decision that overturned the restraining order. The case will now be reconsidered by an 11-judge panel, keeping the original restraining order in place while Oregon argues that Trump exceeded his authority by attempting to federalize the state’s National Guard during protests.
- A federal judge ruled that Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli has exceeded the legal time limit for serving in the role and disqualified him from overseeing several criminal cases in Southern California. Judge J. Michael Seabright found that Essayli, a Trump appointee who has not been Senate-confirmed, has been unlawfully holding the position since July 29, marking the third time in recent months that a Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney has been removed for exceeding federal limits.
- Donald Trump’s arrival in Gyeongju, South Korea, for APEC-related events was met with protests from progressive groups and opposition politicians who accused him of imposing unfair trade tariffs and pressuring Seoul to boost defense spending. Demonstrators chanted anti-APEC and anti-Trump slogans, with some staging symbolic performances portraying Trump as bound and unwelcome, while Justice Party leader Kwon Young-kook denounced APEC for serving powerful nations over equitable economic growth.
- President Donald Trump dismissed all six members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal board responsible for reviewing his planned White House ballroom and proposed “Arc de Trump” monument in Washington, D.C. The White House said it will appoint new commissioners aligned with Trump’s “America First” agenda as public criticism mounts over his $300 million ballroom project and grand arch design modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe.
- The Republican-led U.S. Senate voted 52–48 to end President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Brazilian imports such as coffee and beef, marking a rare bipartisan rebuke of his trade policies. The resolution, introduced by Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, aims to revoke the national emergency Trump used to justify imposing the tariffs.
- Melanie Stansbury just pushed back on Jake Tapper using Republican talking points in this interview.
- As the U.S. government shutdown nears a full month, millions of Americans face worsening impacts, including the loss of SNAP food assistance, higher health insurance premiums, and unpaid federal workers such as air traffic controllers and TSA agents. The Trump administration is scrambling to find funds to pay active-duty military members, while states and courts battle over emergency measures to sustain essential programs like food aid and child services.
- On a personal note, we raised $10,000 for the local DC food bank in the past 24 hours, the second largest individual fundraisers in the food bank’s history.
- May be an image of text that says ‘Share Fundraiser AaronParnas Aaron Parnas $10,575 Raised $10,000 With SNAP Benefits running out, may families will turn to food banks like the Capital Area Food Bank. Support their work, and let’s make sure famijes families in the DMV area have access to critical resources.’
- Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson rejected Democratic efforts to pursue mid-cycle redistricting, saying the legal and political risks outweighed potential gains from adding one congressional seat. In a letter to lawmakers, Ferguson warned that redrawing maps could backfire given the conservative makeup of the state’s Supreme Court and argued it would be hypocritical to condemn racial gerrymandering while supporting partisan map manipulation.
- The Pentagon has implemented a new policy to expedite the firing of civilian employees, directing supervisors to remove underperforming staff “with speed and conviction.” Signed by Undersecretary Anthony Tata on September 30, the memo shortens dismissal timelines and increases managerial accountability, part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broader effort under President Trump to reshape the military workforce and remove officials viewed as misaligned with the administration.
- A federal judge extended an injunction blocking the Trump administration from firing federal workers during the ongoing government shutdown, halting plans for mass layoffs across agencies. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that the firings violated federal law and emphasized their severe human impact, rejecting government arguments that the shutdown allowed for workforce reductions and warning that such actions could dismantle essential agencies.
- Paramount Skydance announced plans to lay off more than 1,000 employees just months after the Trump administration approved its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. CEO David Ellison said the cuts are part of a restructuring effort to align with new growth priorities, while additional layoffs may follow as the company continues its consolidation and pursues potential acquisitions such as Warner Bros. Discovery.
- Cameroon’s opposition leaders rejected official results declaring 92-year-old President Paul Biya the winner of the October 12 election, sparking nationwide protests and clashes with security forces that left several people dead and hundreds arrested. International organizations including the EU and the UN condemned the government’s violent crackdown, while opposition figures accused the Constitutional Council of manipulating results and undermining democratic processes.
- Israeli airstrikes on Gaza overnight killed at least 104 Palestinians, including 35 children, marking the deadliest day since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire began and raising fears it may collapse. The strikes followed a firefight between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order retaliation as Hamas accused Israel of violating the truce and international groups condemned the escalating violence.
- Tulane University confirmed that rhesus monkeys which escaped after a truck crash in Mississippi were not carrying any infectious diseases, contradicting earlier reports from local authorities. Officials said all but one of the monkeys were killed following the accident, which scattered crates labeled “live animals” along Interstate 59, and warned that the surviving monkey was aggressive.
- Russian operatives with ties to the Kremlin are working to block the extradition of Horațiu Potra, a Romanian-French mercenary arrested in Dubai for allegedly conspiring to overthrow Romania’s government. Potra, linked to far-right politician Călin Georgescu and accused of collaborating with pro-Russian figures, faces charges of plotting a coup, illegal campaign financing, and tax evasion, while Moscow-connected intermediaries Igor Spivak and Alexander Kalinin are reportedly leading efforts to secure his release.
U.S. Law, Courts, CrimeNew York Times,In Utah, Trump’s Vision for Homelessness Begins to Take Shape, Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle, Photographs by Kim Raff, Oct. 29, 2025. State officials promise large-scale involuntary addiction and mental health treatment at Salt Lake City’s edge. Critics see “a prison, or a warehouse.”To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.They also vow stern measures to move unhoused people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”While the Utah effort began before Mr. Trump’s return to office, it mirrors his pledge to move the homeless from urban cores to “tent cities” with services. And it accelerated after Mr. Trump issued an executive order in July, calling for strict camping bans and expanded power to involuntarily treat homeless people.Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, quickly praised Mr. Trump’s order and told Utah planners to follow it.Critics of the new plan say that confining people to a site on the city’s outskirts threatens civil liberties and warn that the promised services may not materialize. The efforts coincide with deep cuts to Medicaid, which could thwart the project’s financing.“I’m super anxious about it,” said Jen Plumb, a physician and Democratic state senator who calls the promise of high-quality medical care “pie in the sky.”Utah already has a severe shortage of psychiatric beds, she noted. The legislature is unlikely to fund hundreds of new beds, she said, and even if it did, there is no work force to staff them.Without enormous new spending, she said, the center could function less as a treatment facility than “a prison or a warehouse.”Legal Breakdown,Fed up judge FINALLY takes AGGRESSIVE action against Trump, Brian Tyler Cohen, Oct. 29, 2025. Legal Breakdown episode 617: Judge demands Trump official go to court every single day.All Rise News via Legal AF,Trump DOJ HUMILIATED as GRAND JURY Completely REJECTS THEM, Adam Klasfeld, Oct. 29, 2025. Since her arrest after taping immigration arrests in July, D.C. resident Sidney Reid had a long road to vindication. Three grand juries refused to indict her on allegations that she assaulted law enforcement.Then, federal prosecutors charged the case themselves as a misdemeanor, only for the trial jury to acquit her earlier this month. Breaking her silence for the first time, Reid describes her candid thoughts about her arrest, trial, and Trump administration’s “intimidation” of people videotaping federal law enforcement.Talking Feds with Harry Litman,Court Order SHATTERED by TRUMP’S SECRET REMOVAL OPERATION, Harry Litman, Oct. 29, 2025. The Trump administration has deported an Alabama man in violation of a court order. Harry breaks down the case and what could come next.New York Times,Trump Suggests He Knows He Can’t Run Again: ‘It’s Too Bad,’ Erica L. Green and Katie Rogers, Oct. 29, 2025. Despite the Constitution’s two-term limit, Trump had mused for months about a third term.President Trump seemed to concede on Wednesday that he was not eligible to serve a third term, lamenting that it was an unfortunate result of the constitutional prohibition that he has mused about violating for months.Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to South Korea, the last leg of his three-country diplomatic tour across Asia, Mr. Trump said it was “too bad” that he couldn’t run in 2028.“We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had, I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had,” he boasted (his approval rating remains low, at 43 percent, according to a New York Times average). “And, you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.”The remarks came after House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday there was no path around the Constitution’s two-term limit.“I don’t see a way to amend the Constitution — I don’t see the path for that,” Mr. Johnson said — but not before complimenting the “Trump 2028” cap that the president likes to wear and display in the Oval Office, and noting that it was still fun to entertain the idea.Mr. Trump, asked about Mr. Johnson’s conclusion, which the speaker said he had discussed with the president, said he didn’t “want to talk about it” before listing accomplishments, such as resolving several conflicts and rising stock prices, that he said made him the ideal candidate.Since retaking the White House, Mr. Trump has repeatedly teased that he may never leave. For several months, Mr. Trump has discussed serving a third term, vacillating between joking to goad his critics and signaling that it would be one of many ways he would seek to test the bounds of his constitutional authority.New York Times,Federal Judge Disqualifies Trump-Backed Prosecutor in Los Angeles, Danny Hakim, Oct. 29, 2025 (print ed.). The court ruled that Bill Essayli had been acting “unlawfully” as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles but that he could stay on as the office’s top deputy for now.A federal judge disqualified the United States Attorney in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the latest rebuke to the Trump administration’s attempts to circumvent congressional approval for federal prosecutors.The ruling creates leadership uncertainty in the nation’s largest judicial district, the Central District of California, which serves seven counties in the Los Angeles area. The order was issued by Judge J. Michael Seabright of the Federal District Court in Hawaii, who ruled that the Trump appointee, Bill Essayli, “is not lawfully serving as acting United States Attorney” and “cannot continue to perform any role” that job entails.But it was unclear what the practical effect of his order would be, since the judge also allowed Mr. Essayli to revert to the role of the office’s top deputy, as the first assistant United States attorney.The judge, an appointee of George W. Bush, said he shared concerns expressed by lawyers who had challenged Mr. Essayli’s status that the result was “little remedy at all” and agreed that the Department of Justice was effectively circumventing the intent of the law. But he said he was constrained “to apply the statutes as written.”The judge also did not dismiss the three criminal cases being prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office in which defense lawyers had argued that Mr. Essayli lacked legal standing to prosecute. And while Mr. Essayli could not supervise the cases as the head of the office, the judge ruled, he could supervise them as the office’s top deputy.Global NewsUkraine Matters,Russia’s Armored Push Collapses in Flames, Georgi, Oct. 29, 2025.New York Times,Israeli Strikes in Gaza Kill at Least 100, Local Health Officials Say, Liam Stack, Oct. 29, 2025. Israel said the cease-fire had resumed after what appeared to be the deadliest day since the truce deal was agreed this month.Israeli strikes killed at least 100 people across Gaza overnight, local health officials said in what appeared to be the deadliest day since a cease-fire was agreed between Israel and Hamas three weeks ago.The strikes began late Tuesday after the Israeli government accused Hamas of violating the truce by failing to return the bodies of dead hostages and attacking Israeli forces in Rafah, southern Gaza. The Israeli military said one of its soldiers, Master Sgt. Yona Efraim, was killed in the Rafah attack.On Wednesday, Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said “dozens of Hamas commanders” were killed in strikes overnight. The military said the cease-fire resumed at 10 a.m. local time.Health officials in Gaza said the Israeli strikes killed at least 100 people in the enclave.Munir al-Bursh, director-general of Gaza’s health ministry, whose data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, said 35 children were among those killed. He said hospitals in the enclave “are still facing a severe shortage of resources and a significant lack of medicines.”Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency rescue service also said that at least 100 people had been killed.The strikes came after a week of escalating tensions over delays to the exchange of deceased captives between Israel and Hamas, a key plank of the fragile cease-fire deal that went into effect this month.New York Times,With Some G.O.P. Backing, Senate Votes to End Trump’s Brazil Tariffs, Megan Mineiro, Oct. 29, 2025 (print ed.). A handful of Republicans crossed party lines to side with Democrats in the first of several votes this week aimed at challenging the president’s trade war.The Senate on Tuesday voted to terminate the 50 percent tariffs that President Trump has imposed on Brazil, with a handful of Republicans crossing party lines to help push through a measure rejecting the emergency declaration used to justify them.While the resolution faces long odds in the House, where Republicans have taken extraordinary steps to make it more difficult to bring up such measures, the vote signaled bipartisan frustration with the president’s tariffs on most goods from Brazil, a country with which the United States has a multibillion-dollar trade surplus.The resolution is one of three that Democrats have planned to bring up for a vote this week to challenge Mr. Trump’s moves to circumvent Congress and wage a trade war that many lawmakers are concerned will harm their constituents. Votes are expected in the next few days on tariffs the president imposed on Canada and a global tariff rate on more than 100 trading partners.The vote on Tuesday was 52 to 48 to end the levies on Brazil, with five Republicans joining Democrats to pass the resolution.Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and the lead sponsor of the measures, said the votes are as much about the president’s overreach of power as they are about the economic impact of his sweeping tariffs.“Are we just going to allow the trade power which is handed to Congress, or the war power which is handed to Congress, or the appropriations power which is handed to Congress, or the nominations advice and consent power which is handed to the Senate — are we just going to allow those powers to be taken over by this president or any president?” Mr. Kaine said.More On U.S. Governance, PoliticsPopular Information,Accountability Journalism: Choosing to let kids go hungry, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 29, 2025. The official website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) claims that on November 1, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will run out of funding. The USDA asserts that Democrats are blocking funding to secure “health care for illegal immigrants” and funding for “gender mutilation procedures.”All of these claims are false.Around 42 million Americans — including 20 million children — rely on the SNAP program to avoid going hungry.But “the well” has not “run dry” on SNAP. The program has a reserve of about $6 billion that could fully fund SNAP for several more weeks. The USDA’s current position is that these funds “are not legally available to cover regular benefits“ and can only be used to provide nutrition assistance in response to a national disaster or other emergency.This, however, directly contradicts guidance that the USDA issued on September 30 which explicitly states that contingency funds can be used for regular benefits (emphasis added):In addition, Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.This guidance has been removed from the USDA website now that the Trump administration has decided that withholding the funds is politically advantageous.But using the contingency funds to continue providing benefits is also consistent with the plain language of previous appropriations bills. The 2024 bill, for example, included the following passage (emphasis added):For necessary expenses to carry out the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 (7 U.S.C. 2011 et seq.), $122,382,521,000, of which $3,000,000,000, to remain available through September 30, 2026, shall be placed in reserve for use only in such amounts and at such times as may become necessary to carry out program operationsThe 2025 appropriations bill contained similar language, which is why the fund now has approximately $6 billion, less any money that the Trump administration may have spent in October. This would be enough to keep the SNAP program running for an additional three weeks.Further, Democrats are not opposed to a continuing resolution to secure health care for undocumented immigrants. They are seeking an extension of health care subsidies so that millions of Americans will not see massive increases in the cost of their health insurance. These subsidies are not available to undocumented immigrants.The shutdown also has nothing to do with “gender mutilation procedures,” which is apparently how the Trump administration describes health care for trans people. Nothing in the Republican continuing resolution limits trans health care, and the Democrats are not seeking to expand or protect it in their counter-proposals.A devastating impact on children, people with disabilities, and the elderlyMillions of people in the United States could experience food insecurity if SNAP is halted. Around one in eight people in the U.S. rely on SNAP benefits to afford food.Children, people with disabilities, and the elderly disproportionately benefit from SNAP, with households with these individuals receiving “83% of SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2023.” Children made up 39% of SNAP participants in fiscal year 2023 with “SNAP serv[ing] a monthly average of 7.3 million households with children,” according to the USDA.While some states have said that they will use state funds to provide emergency food assistance, the USDA said that states will not be reimbursed, and states cannot cover the full cost of SNAP. Twenty-five states told Politico that they would be informing SNAP participants that benefits will not be sent out next month.Joel Berg, the CEO of Hunger Free America, told ABC News that, “If 42 million Americans and more than 260,000 retailers don’t receive $8 billion worth of grocery support in a week’s time, we are going to see the greatest hunger crisis since the Great Depression.”Without SNAP, some Americans may have to choose between spending money on food or paying for other household expenses or even medications. Lindsay Allen, a health economist at Northwestern University told STAT News that “even short gaps in nutrition and food access” can result in people dying.Food insecurity can be especially detrimental to children. In a lawsuit filed this week by a group of state officials against the Trump administration, state officials wrote that food insecurity and hunger can cause “poor concentration, decreased cognitive function, fatigue, depression, and behavioral problems” in children. A lack of SNAP benefits can even affect children’s test scores, with a 2018 study from Duke University finding that children on SNAP saw their lowest test scores at the end of the month, when SNAP benefits commonly run out.Breaking the food banksMultiple organizations that run food banks across the country have said that they do not have the resources to fill the gap for families that usually rely on SNAP benefits to get food.The Contrarian,Opinion: MAGA Uses Hunger as a Political Weapon, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 29, 2025. Starving children is a new low.Donald Trump, like autocrats around the globe, is weaponizing food supply. He is prepared to let more than 40 Million Americans go hungry to pressure Democrats to capitulate on the shutdown and accede to his plan to snatch health insurance away from tens of millions of people. The New York Times reports, “With no end in sight to the nearly monthlong federal government shutdown, funding for the nation’s largest food assistance program, known as SNAP, will disappear at the start of November, according to the Department of Agriculture.”There is money available to continue SNAP payments, but the Trump regime will not use it to feed hungry families.“On Friday, the Trump administration said in a memo that it would not tap into contingency funds to keep payments flowing to states. That means that the roughly 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — may soon have to find other ways to feed themselves and their families.”In many cases, alternatives to SNAP will be unavailable since states and localities lack funds while charities cannot scale up to meet the food deficit. “Anti-hunger organizations and food banks say the surging demand will almost certainly exceed their capacity to respond.”There is no excuse for shutting off food benefits. Sharon Pratt, a former Office of Management and Budget employee, wrote for the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:In fact, the Administration is legally required to use contingency reserves — billions of dollars that Congress provided for use when SNAP funding is inadequate that remain available during the shutdown — to fund November benefits for the 1 in 8 Americans who need SNAP to afford their grocery bill.The Administration itself admits these reserves are available for use. It could have, and should have, taken steps weeks ago to be ready to use these funds. Instead, it may choose not to use them in an effort to gain political advantage.Moreover, the government has “legal transfer authority — the same authority it already used to provide additional funds to WIC — to supplement the contingency reserves, which by themselves are not enough to fund families’ full benefits.”Making these exact arguments, a group of Democratic senators headed by Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) wrote to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to demand release of SNAP funds. They reiterated that USDA could “use the contingency funding that is available for SNAP” and/or the “interchange authority” that allows shifting funds from other food programs. They wrote:USDA should explore all legal means to augment funds to pay the full amount of SNAP benefits in November. Americans are already struggling with the rising cost of groceries, and they cannot afford a sudden lapse in grocery assistance. We urge you to immediately communicate to states and committees of jurisdiction the USDA’s plans to disburse the contingency funding to state agencies and utilize all available legal authorities so that American families can get benefits without interruption.Some Senate Republicans know the regime’s insistence that it cannot continue SNAP benefits is a lie. A group of high-profile Senate Republicans “are publicly saying Congress needs to fund SNAP whether or not Democrats relent on overall government funding, lest millions [go] without food aid before Thanksgiving,” Politico reported. “Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said in a brief interview Monday about supporting a standalone SNAP bill… Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins and a handful of other Republican senators have signed on to a bill from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to fund the program, and they are pushing for a vote this week.” So far, Trump’s Republican lackeys are preventing a floor vote, which only underscores MAGA’s deliberate plan to use starving children and the elderly for political advantage.Meanwhile, governors of both parties have sounded the alarm. Gov. Maura Healy (D) of Massachusetts decried the upcoming food aid cutoff for more than 1.1 million Massachusetts residents (about a third are children or people with disabilities, over a quarter of whom are seniors) in a written statement that pointed out that presidents in prior shutdowns have always continued SNAP payments. Gov. Wes Moore (D) in Maryland issued a similar warning; that 680,000 Maryland residents (over 270,000 children) will lose SNAP benefits.Red states such as Arkansas, Indiana, and Mississippi are among the 25 states that told Politico that they too would stop checks. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency, advising that 850,000 Virginians will lose their food benefits. Gov. Phil Scott (R) from Vermont pleaded, “Even with state efforts, the lack of federal SNAP funding will disrupt the lives of over 63,000 Vermonters and could cause real harm.”SubscribedOn Tuesday, “More than two dozen states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its recent refusal to fund food stamps during the government shutdown, seeking to spare roughly 42 million people from hunger and financial hardship starting in a matter of days,” the New York Times reported. “The states, including officials in Arizona, California and Massachusetts, asked a federal judge to force Washington to tap emergency reserve money so that families would not see an interruption to their benefits.”But rather than encouraging that we head off a hunger pandemic, USDA put up a crass partisan statement on its website reiterating the already debunked lie that Democrats are keeping the government closed “to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures.” The screed also falsely suggests SNAP payments can only resume when the government reopens. Even in the midst of a shutdown, Republicans could dispense SNAP benefits; they choose not to. Instead, Trump is yucking it up on his Asia travels, proceeding with his hideous ballroom project, and accepting a private “donation” to pay military troops. (Any tech bros want to pay for food for starving children?)Beyond the immediate cutoff, the big, ugly bill will permanently strip food aid from millions of people. It will slash $186B from SNAP, by far the biggest cut in food assistance in history. As a result, farmers would lose an estimated $24B over the next decade. .The big, ugly bill will further force states to absorb 5-15% of the cost of SNAP (depending on their error rate), money many of them do not have. Moreover, SNAP’s work requirement, which currently applies to recipients up to 54 years old, will apply to those up to 65 (regardless of how long they have been out of the workforce). The changes will also impose work requirements for parents with children over the age of 14. Even homeless veterans will lose coverage.While undocumented immigrant are not eligible for SNAP, the bill also removes from eligibility certain legal residents such as refugees, those granted asylum, and certain survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking.The Trump regime’s cruelty knows no bounds, whether in pursuit of short-term advantage in the shutdown or in the big, ugly bill’s despicable trade-off (taking away healthcare insurance and food from millions to partially pay for tax cuts for the rich). Americans must decide if they will allow Trump and his enablers to starve millions of their neighbors, including children.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 28, 2025 [Boom and Bust], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 29, 2025. In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing they alone truly knew what was best for the country.Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men.At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either.And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power.In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists.Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value.Those excited by the scene dismissed those who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors.The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down.When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”But the problem was not poor workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.Oct. 28 New York Times,Live Updates: Jamaica Warns Hurricane Melissa Will Bring Catastrophic Winds and Rain, Jovan Johnson, Camille Williams, Judson Jones, Nazaneen Ghaffar, Yan Zhuang and Livia Albeck-Ripka, Oct. 28, 2025 (print ed.). The Category 5 storm is the most powerful in the Atlantic Ocean this year. The authorities in Jamaica and Cuba have issued evacuation orders for tens of thousands of people.Hurricane Melissa was on track to make a direct hit on Jamaica on Tuesday, as the nation’s prime minister warned that no country in the Caribbean could withstand a storm this powerful.The Category 5 storm — the strongest in the Atlantic Ocean this year — is threatening catastrophic damage with 175 m.p.h. winds and enough moisture to drop nearly three feet of rain. The National Hurricane Center said later on Monday that the winds in Melissa’s eyewall are so strong that they could cause “total structural failure,” and widespread power and communication outages. Some parts of Jamaica were already cut off by Monday afternoon.Forecasters are predicting rains measured in feet, not inches, for Jamaica and other Caribbean nations this week. Despite their warnings about destructive winds, torrential rain and life-threatening floods, officials in Jamaica were worried that not enough people are heeding evacuation orders. Officials had anticipated that the storm will displace around 50,000 people. But by Monday evening, only about 1,700 had evacuated to shelters, said Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s minister for local government.Jamaica, a small country that depends on tourism for about a third of its annual revenue, has limited resources to prepare for devastating storms, according to disaster and emergency preparedness experts. At least three people died in connection to preparations for the storm, and thirteen others were injured.Melissa’s landfall in Jamaica is expected on Tuesday in St. Elizabeth Parish, on the southwestern coast, about 75 miles west of the capital, Kingston. The extreme weather from the storm was expected to hit Jamaica overnight long before its expected landfall, and it was expected to remain at hurricane strength even when it reaches the Bahamas.New York Times, News Analysis: Behind the Dismantling of the C.D.C.: Reform or ‘Humiliation’? Apoorva Mandavilli, Oct. 28, 2025 (print ed.). The agency has lost a third of its work force this year. The Trump administration maintains that the losses are necessary, but critics say that there is no real plan, only animosity.Months before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began preparing for his arrival.Dr. Debra Houry, who was then the agency’s chief medical officer, read three books by Mr. Kennedy, as well as another by the current nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, an ally of Mr. Kennedy.Dr. Houry plowed through the Project 2025 blueprint and another report by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in addition to reviewing the America First agenda. She guided directors of the C.D.C. centers as they prepared detailed briefs on Mr. Kennedy’s concerns, such as access to vaccine safety data and separating the measles vaccine from those for mumps and rubella.Her first meeting with the Trump transition team, on Dec. 20, seemed cordial enough, and she allowed herself to hope that agency might even fare well. It has not.New York Times, Trump Says a Recent M.R.I. Scan Was ‘Perfect,’ and He’d ‘Love’ a Third Term, Katie Rogers, Oct. 28, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump made the comments on the second day of his trip to Asia. The Constitution limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Trump has suggested he might try to circumvent it.President Trump said that he underwent magnetic resonance imaging earlier this month, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that the results had been “perfect” but declining to say why his doctors had ordered the scan.Mr. Trump also reiterated that he was interested in serving a third term, saying that he “would love to do it” because of his popularity with his supporters. Mr. Trump, who spoke to journalists for about 30 minutes on a flight to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during his almost weeklong trip to Asia, seemed intent on presenting himself as fit to lead, if not run for the presidency again.The Constitution sets a two-term limit for presidents, but Mr. Trump and his supporters have increasingly floated the possibility of finding a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, which states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice,” regardless of whether the terms are consecutive.In discussing his health, Mr. Trump offered a small new detail about the tests that the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, said the president had received during a recent visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump said, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician. The summary did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and had few details on what testing the president had undergone. When asked why he had undergone an M.R.I., the president said, “you could ask the doctors.” Magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive technology that creates detailed images of the inside of the body, is often used for disease detection and monitoring, or to detect bone or joint abnormalities.At 79, Mr. Trump is the oldest person to be elected president, and he would be well into his 80s by the end of his second term. Mr. Trump’s critics have speculated about his health in recent months after he repeatedly appeared on camera with bruises on the back of his hand and swollen ankles.More Global NewsNew York Times,News Analysis: As Trump Tours Asia, Democracy’s Ideals Aren’t on the Agenda, Katie Rogers, Erica L. Green, Javier C. Hernández and Choe Sang-Hun, Oct. 28, 2025 (print ed.). Several of the leaders President Trump will encounter are either autocrats or presiding over fragile democracies. And some admire his willingness to break the rules.The durability of the American experiment has been tested in the nine months since President Trump’s return to the White House, with institutions from Congress to the judiciary struggling or declining to check his aggressive attempts to flout the law and expand his power.During Mr. Trump’s latest trip abroad, on a six-day sojourn through Asia, he has launched, fists pumping, onto the world stage, chasing a trade deal with China and compelling several other Asian governments to sign economic agreements. Several of the leaders he will encounter this week are autocrats, or are presiding over vulnerable democracies. And some are open fans of his bulldozing approach to governing.In Malaysia, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim praised Mr. Trump’s willingness to flout security protocols by letting him ride along in the American presidential limousine shortly after Mr. Trump landed in Kuala Lumpur.“We admire your tenacity and courage because the world needs leaders who promote peace strongly,” Mr. Anwar told the president when the pair appeared together on Sunday in observance of a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia. “And to achieve that, you have to break some rules, as you did today.”Mr. Anwar also joked of his time in prison on corruption and sodomy crimes, charges he and his supporters have long maintained were part of a sham orchestrated by his predecessor. “I was in prison, and you almost got there,” Mr. Anwar said, referring to Mr. Trump’s felony convictions.For his part, Mr. Anwar’s government has been criticized for a worsening climate for freedom of expression, driven in part by pressure from the country’s right wing.New York Times,Netanyahu Orders Strikes in Gaza, as Israel Says Hamas Violated Cease-Fire, Liam Stack, Aric Toler and Arijeta Lajka, Oct. 28, 2025. The office of the Israeli prime minister said Tuesday evening that he had ordered “forceful strikes,” accusing Hamas of firing on Israeli troops and failing to return hostages’ bodies.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to conduct strikes in Gaza on Tuesday as the government accused Hamas of violating the cease-fire agreement by firing on Israeli forces and failing to return the bodies of dead hostages.The decision “to immediately carry out forceful strikes in the Gaza Strip” was announced in a statement by Mr. Netanyahu’s office. It later said the prime minister had made the decision with the Israeli military, and then informed President Trump “before the action was taken.”Israeli and Arab media reported strikes in Gaza but they were not confirmed by the Israeli military.A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, David Mencer, said Tuesday night that “Hamas have violated the framework by not returning hostages and attacking our forces.”Hamas denied involvement in an attack on Israeli forces. In a statement, it said it remained committed to the cease-fire agreement, and accused Israel of violating it.An Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations, said Hamas had attacked Israeli forces in Rafah, in southern Gaza. The official also accused Hamas of pretending not to know where the remains of Israelis abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack could be found.U.S. Governance, PoliticsPaul Krugman via Substack,Political-Economy Commentary: The Hunger Games Begin, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 28, 2025. 40 Million Americans are about to lose food stamps.There’s a bodega around the corner from my apartment where I often make small purchases, especially fruit, vegetables and bread. No, I’m not afraid to cross the street to buy bread.While in in the check-out line, I often see some patrons, typically elderly and/or disabled, paying with EBT cards. EBT cards are the way the government delivers food aid under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. SNAP has become a crucial part of America’s social safety net, with more than 40 million Americans relying on those EBT cards to put food on the table.And unless the government shutdown ends this week, which seems basically impossible, federal support for SNAP will be cut off this Saturday.Here are four things you should know about the imminent hunger games.This is a political decision — specifically, a Republican decisionDespite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds.Furthermore, the Republican majority in the Senate could maintain aid by waiving the filibuster on this issue. They have done this on other issues — for example, to roll back California’s electric vehicle standard. But for today’s Republican Party, blocking green energy is more important than keeping 40 million Americans from going hungry.Furthermore, passing legislation to keep food aid flowing would require that Mike Johnson, the speaker, call the House back into session – something which he refuses to do. While we don’t know for sure the reason behind Johnson’s refusal, there is widespread speculation that it’s to avoid swearing in the newly elected Arizona congresswoman Adelina Grijalva, who would supply the crucial vote needed to force an overall vote on releasing the Epstein files. It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.The pain from lost food aid will, if anything, hurt Republican voters worse than DemocratsRepublican strategy on the shutdown has rested on the premise that Democrats will eventually cave, based on several assumptions. First, G.O.P. strategists expected the public to blame Democrats for the impasse. Second, they thought that Democrats, who favor big government, would be anxious to resume federal spending. Lastly, I suspect that many Republicans simply assumed that SNAP beneficiaries are disproportionately Democrats.So far, however, the shutdown impasse has developed not necessarily to the G.O.P.’s advantage. A plurality of Americans place more blame on Republicans than on Democrats. Moreover, given that Democrats have been more unified in their stance than the Republicans, it’s not at all obvious that Democrats will capitulate over the issue of reduced government spending.What about the partisan affiliation of SNAP recipients? I’d be curious to see a survey of Republican legislators and activists on who they think the typical food aid recipient is. My bet is that they’re still under the influence of Ronald Reagan’s 1970s stereotypes, in which a “strapping young buck” buys T-bone steaks with food stamps. That is, MAGA probably views food stamps as a welfare program for urban nonwhites, including illegal immigrants.Yet the evidence suggests that the program is most important to overwhelmingly white rural counties that strongly supported Trump. This is shown by the map at the top of this post, in which darker colors correspond to greater SNAP use.Consider, for example, Owsley County in Kentucky. The county is 96 percent white, and last year it cast 88 percent of its votes for Trump. Also, 37 percent of residents are on SNAP.So by refusing to maintain food aid, Republicans are hurting many of their own supporters.The fact that Trump-supporting communities rely heavily on federal food aid raises another, even larger question: Why does the GOP want to cut food assistance generally? Apart from refusing to fund SNAP during the government shutdown, Republicans want to drastically cut back on food stamps over the long term. Indeed, savage cuts to SNAP are a key feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year – cuts that were scheduled to happen after the midterm elections, not a few days from now.Despite what Republicans believe, SNAP recipients aren’t malingerersWhy are Republicans hostile to a program that benefits tens of millions of Americans? Pay attention to right-wing rhetoric about food stamps and you’ll hear again and again assertions that SNAP beneficiaries are lazy malingerers — the “bums on welfare” who should be forced to go out and get jobs.But that myth is punctured by a quick look at who gets SNAP. The fact is, the great majority of SNAP recipients can’t work: 40 percent are children; 18 percent are elderly; 11 percent are disabled. Furthermore, a majority of recipients who are capable of working do work. They are the working poor: their jobs just don’t pay enough, or offer sufficiently stable employment, to make ends meet without aid.So efforts to force food stamp recipients to get jobs via work requirements or simply by cutting funding are doomed to failure. While it may be possible to push a handful of food stamp recipients into the labor force, any positive economic effects from such a push will be swamped by the negative effects of denying adequate nutrition and financial resources to children during a crucial part of their lives.Food stamps are an investment in the futureYoung children need adequate nutrition and in general need to grow up in households with adequate resources if they are to grow into healthy, productive adults.In saying this I’m not making a vague assertion in line with liberal pieties. We have overwhelming empirical, statistical evidence that SNAP, by improving the lives of young children, is an extraordinarily effective way of investing in the future.Where does this evidence come from? A pilot version of the modern food stamp program began in 1961, when an unemployed coal miner and his wife used food stamps to buy a can of pork and beans. The program was rolled out in earnest in 1964, as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the program didn’t immediately go into effect nationwide. Instead, it was gradually rolled out geographically over the course of a decade.This gradual rollout provided a series of “natural experiments.” Economists can and have compared the life trajectories of Americans who, as children, benefited from food stamps with those of children with similar class and demographic characteristics whose families didn’t receive food aid.The results are stunning. Children whose families received SNAP benefits grew up to become healthier, more productive adults than children whose families didn’t receive benefits. Spending money to help families with children is an extremely high-return investment in the nation’s future.In fact, the evidence for large economic benefits from food stamps is far stronger than the evidence for payoffs from investment in physical infrastructure like roads, bridges and the power grid, although I favor those investments too. And the evidence that helping families with children is good for economic growth is infinitely better than the evidence for the efficacy of tax cuts for the rich, a central plank of conservative dogma — because there is no evidence that tax cuts boost growth.Which brings us back to the impending cutoff of SNAP. It’s gratuitous: Republicans could easily avoid this cutoff if they wanted to. It’s cruel: Millions of Americans will suffer severely from the loss of food aid. And it’s destructive: Depriving children, in particular, of aid will cast a shadow on America’s economy and society for decades to come.So of course the cutoff is going to happen. At this late date it’s hard to see how it can be avoided.U.S. Law, Immigration, Courts New York Times,After Law Firm Deals With Trump, D.C. Bar Warns of Ethical Jeopardy, Charlie Savage, Oct. 28, 2025. The bar group’s ethics committee says firms that make a deal with the government may need to get waivers from clients with opposing interests.President Trump, waring a blue suit and red tie, stands at the top of the stairs leading to the door of Air Force One.Months after law firms made deals with President Trump to ward off punitive executive orders, the ethics committee of the District of Columbia Bar is warning that such arrangements may require firms to drop or obtain waivers from all clients who have interests at odds with the government.An opinion issued by the committee this week could bring new scrutiny to several prominent law firms that chose to strike deals with Mr. Trump instead of challenging his executive orders targeting them.Any lawyer or law firm that contemplates making a deal with a government that includes conditions that may limit or shape their practices, the opinion said, “must examine whether the arrangement would prevent the firm from providing conflict-free representation to clients — existing and new — who are adverse to the relevant government.”DEALS WITH GOVERNMENTRead the D.C. Bar legal ethics committee opinion.The committee issues formal, unsigned opinions that interpret rules of professional conduct and provide ethics guidance for lawyers who are licensed to practice in the nation’s capital. Its 15 members — 11 active members of the bar and four nonlawyers — are appointed by the bar group’s board of governors.Even though the committee’s opinions are not legally binding, they are considered authoritative and are often cited in disciplinary proceedings brought by the office that prosecutes legal ethics violations, which is overseen by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Allegations of a conflict can also be important if a law firm is sued for malpractice.The opinion did not specifically mention Mr. Trump. But it indirectly referred to his administration’s pressure on law firms not to challenge his policies, citing a Justice Department memo issued in May that says the administration will treat any firm that represents a client in a dispute with any executive branch agency as having a conflict with the entire executive branch — not just that agency.An earlier draft of the ethics opinion, a copy of which was seen in recent months by some outside lawyers, explicitly discussed Mr. Trump’s deals with law firms, according to people who described it on the condition that they not be named.New York Times,Judge Admonishes Border Patrol Leader for Tactics in Chicago, Julie Bosman, Oct. 28, 2025. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who has become a public face of President Trump’s crackdown, was ordered to give the federal judge a daily report on the actions of his team from now on.In a courtroom in downtown Chicago on Tuesday, a federal judge admonished Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official who has become a face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, for his agency’s use of force and tear gas in Chicago in recent weeks.For more than an hour, the judge, Sara L. Ellis of Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, read Mr. Bovino restrictions she had previously set as part of a lawsuit over tactics that agents are using and cited examples of times his agents appeared to violate those restrictions.They used tear gas in a neighborhood where children were about to march in a Halloween parade, Judge Ellis said. They failed to warn residents before tossing tear gas canisters at them, she said, noting an incident in which an agent threw a canister out of a car as it drove away.The judge then ordered Mr. Bovino, who took the stand in his usual green fatigues and Border Patrol insignia, to appear at the federal courthouse at the end of every weekday to personally provide her with a report on the day’s arrests and incidents.ImageMr. Bovino, in green, stood in the middle of a crowd in downtown Chicago.Mr. Bovino walked through a crowd of journalists and protesters as he entered the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago on Tuesday.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images“I’ll see you tomorrow at 6,” she said, before telling Mr. Bovino that he could get back to work.The hearing offered Mr. Bovino little opportunity to broadly defend the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago, which began in early September and has resulted in at least 3,000 arrests, according to the administration. Judge Ellis asked Mr. Bovino few detailed questions and did nearly all of the talking throughout the hearing, reminding Mr. Bovino of the particulars of the temporary restraining order she issued early this month limiting the use of tear gas.Mr. Bovino answered some questions with a simple “Yes, ma’am.” Asked whether he was on the same page as the judge, he said, “I understand what you’re saying, Your Honor,” and added, “We’re on the same page, that we will abide by the T.R.O.”Judge Ellis’s earlier order barred federal immigration agents from deploying tear gas and other chemical agents on a crowd without first issuing two warnings. She also barred agents from “deploying these weapons above the head of the crowd” in most situations.The judge’s order left room for exceptions in cases where issuing such warnings was not feasible, or those in which someone posed a serious threat to officers or others.Editors’ PicksIn Ancient Spain, a Nail Through the Skull Could Mean Enmity, or HonorHow Nontoxic Is ‘Nontoxic’ Cookware?Are You Resigned to a World of Bad News? Or Do You Need Some ‘Cope’?The issue first came before Judge Ellis when a coalition of media organizations, protesters and clergy members filed a lawsuit accusing federal agents of “a pattern of extreme brutality” intended to “silence the press and civilians.” Outside a federal detention facility in Broadview, Ill., federal agents shot pepper balls and tear gas at protesters who gathered regularly to hold demonstrations.As the weeks have gone on, the use of tear gas along residential streets, in particular, has become a point of contention. All Rise News,Virginia Giuffre’s ‘big deal’ litigator opens up on her journey and the Epstein files, Adam Klasfeld, Oct. 28, 2025. Attorney David Boies rips the “counterproductive” resistance to releasing the Epstein files, including his late client’s FBI interviews.Three years before connecting with her future attorney, the late Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre (shown in a collage of photos above) already had been searching for answers.“When I met her in the summer of 2014 for the first time, she was already beginning to search for answers and express herself, but she didn’t really have any sense of what she was going to be put through, or how long or difficult it was going to be,” prominent attorney David Boies said in a phone interview.The week of the publication of Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir Nobody’s Girl, Boies spoke to All Rise News in a half-hour interview about Giuffre’s journey into advocacy, the retribution she faced from the powerful people she accused, and the ongoing fight for transparency over the Epstein case. Those battles continue after Giuffre’s death.Days before the interview, Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) sued over the refusal of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to swear her into office, noting that she’s expected to be the deciding signature on a discharge petition to force a vote to release the Epstein files.Asked whether it seems Johnson is trying to fight the release, Boies replied: “I can’t think of any other reason.”Subscribe or upgrade to paid“Legal dream team”“Nobody’s Girl” describes Giuffre’s first meeting with Boies inside his 7th floor office in Midtown Manhattan. Guiffre wrote that she knew Boies was a “big deal” litigator who represented Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election and the National Basketball Players Association in the 2011 NBA lockout. She quotes herself telling him: “I’ve stayed silent for too long, but not anymore. I’m here to help stop Epstein once and for all.”According to the memoir, Florida-based attorney Brad Edwards arranged the meeting, adding Boies and Sigrid McCawley to what Giuffre described as her “legal dream team” to “begin truly holding my abusers to account.” Boies said that everyone on the team understood what that meant for Giuffre.“They knew that she would become a key target for Epstein and all of his cohorts, and that, of course, is exactly what happened as soon as she went public,” Boies said.The team would ultimately take on a long list of powerful people and institutions, including Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and other people and entities.“Maxwell, Prince Andrew and his publicity machine, and his lawyers, [Epstein’s lawyers] Roy Black and Alan Dershowitz, all turned their guns on her and the next several years were a constant battle, constant attacks,” Boies said. “I think some of the attacks made her stronger. It certainly convinced her that she was doing the right thing, that this needed to be taken on. But it was also terribly draining and terribly difficult for somebody who was trying to be a young mother as well.”Boies said that the litigation process helped Giuffre understand what happened to her, including the reason Epstein kept boasting to her and other girls about his connections to wealthy and influential people.“We talked to lots of lots of victims, and one of the things that we heard over and over again — almost as if it had been a script — was where Epstein would tell the girls about all his powerful friends and point out pictures of him with Trump and Dershowitz and the President of Harvard and people like that,” Boies said.He said that Giuffre didn’t initially understand the purpose of Epstein’s name-dropping.“When she heard it said over and over and over again to all these girls, it was clear that was part of a pattern where he was using this consciously and as part of a concerted plan to scare people and intimidate them,” Boies said.Giuffre’s lawsuits against Epstein and Maxwell played a key role in creating a record that led to their criminal prosecutions.She also helped in the criminal investigation of Epstein’s alleged accomplice Jean Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who died in Paris — under similar circumstances to Epstein’s — while awaiting trial on child sex crimes.Asked about Giuffre’s interviews with the FBI, Boies said that he expects the notes of the conversations to be revelatory if they are released: “The FBI is going to have detailed notes about that. I think that will be something that will be productive for people to see.”He added that Giuffre didn’t take notes of the interview herself, which took place when she was a young woman and “there was still a lot of trauma about it.”Earlier this month, Boies filed new lawsuits against Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon, which already have been slated for a speedy trial next spring. He declined to speak about that litigation, but he spoke generally about his firm’s practice of seeking accountability against the financial apparatus behind Epstein’s sex trafficking operations.“This was an international enterprise that trafficked hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000 young women, and did so for decades,” Boies noted. “It couldn’t have operated on the scope and scale that it did for the duration that it did without the complicity of a number of cooperators, conspirators, collaborators, including banks.”Giuffre’s book briefly mentions revelations from the litigation against J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, which has helped fuel an ongoing congressional investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) into the financing of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.At the time of the interview, Boies had just finished speaking at a panel discussion organized by the group Speak Up for Justice, which draws attention to threats against judges and the rule of law.The Epstein story itself, he said, is rife with stories about pressure and intimidation of prosecutors, reporters, and financial institutions.“This couldn’t have gone on for the duration it did, and at the scope and scale that it did without many people being corrupted and many good people being intimidated,” he said.The Contrarian,Opinion: Words & Phrases We Could Do Without: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement”, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 28, 2025. More like ‘goons.’“Immigration and Customs Enforcement” used to conjure up images of hard working agents displaying pallets of intercepted drugs, while “ICE”—as in, “Put ‘em on ice, boys”—sounded like something out of a Dick Tracy comic book. But, as we have learned, neither the name nor its acronym fit the marauding band of masked thugs who snatch people off our streets. ICE has become a reckless, violent rogue agency, especially dangerous to anyone who appears Latino (whether documented or not).ICE’s conduct in Chicago has already drawn the ire of U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis. She recently issued a TRO to curtail its abusive tactics and require use of body cameras. When evidence surfaced that the feds had violated her order, she called the parties back last week to hear testimony and order more discovery. On Friday, Democratic House members held a “shadow hearing” in Chicago to document ICE’s brutal, outrageous conduct. The congressional session was aptly titled “Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Assault on Chicago.” In vivid detail, witnesses provided testimony that ICE agents have terrorized Chicago neighborhoods, attacked the media and a member of the clergy, and lawlessly rounded up migrants who have no criminal record (not to mention the fact that they’re U.S. citizens). “Members heard from immigrant and refugee rights groups, faith leaders, and a 19-year-old named Genesis whose mother is a food vendor and was detained in Chicago,” NBC’s local station reported.Witnesses included “a pastor, David Black with First Presbyterian Church Chicago, who was hit in the head with pepper balls while praying outside the ICE detention facility in Broadview.” Black stated that ICE “henchmen are showing mocking contempt for the rule of law.”Testimony at the shadow hearing sounded like something out of 1930’s Italy or present day Russia. “Over the past month, federal agents in and around Chicago have shot at least two people, killing one; repeatedly tear-gassed protesters and first responders; shot rubber bullets at protesters; detained U.S. citizens, including children; handcuffed a Chicago alderperson in a hospital; smoke-bombed and tear-gassed people in Logan Square, Albany Park and East Side; fired a chemical weapon at a TV reporter and detained a journalist,” one local outlet recounted.SubscribedThis surely does not sound like the conduct of a law enforcement agency. To the contrary, ICE’s egregiously violent and abusive conduct prompted Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to set up the Illinois Accountability Commission “to hold federal immigration agents accountable for aggressive tactics being used in the Chicago area during the White House’s ongoing deportation campaign,” the Chicago Sun Times reported. “The Illinois Accountability Commission will collect testimony, hold hearings and gather information from individuals, community members, subject matter experts, local officials, journalists, faith leaders and organizations — and issue a public report with findings and recommendations.”Pritzker (whom Trump’s fascistic attack dog Stephen Miller accused of “seditious conspiracy”) is determined to create a record of ICE’s lawlessness. In a press conference announcing the formation of the commission, Pritzker delivered a searing indictment of ICE and the Trump entire regime.“I am angry because this is not the country that I want for us. This is not the country that any of us thought that we were living in,” he declared. “And yet here it is, nine months into an administration, I wish we didn’t have to do this. Can you imagine that we have to do this in this country?” The commission will document abuses, record the impact on families and neighborhoods, and make recommendations. “It is imperative that none of the impropriety, brutality and harassment perpetrated upon our people goes unnoticed,” Pritzker said. “Every instance of abuse, of law-breaking and violations of rights needs to be documented and archived.”The commission will no doubt find an abundance of evidence. Just last Friday, a chaotic scene played out in the Lakeview neighborhood where agents threw tear gas cannisters into the street despite Ellis’s existing TRO limiting use of tear gas and other irritants, the Chicago Tribune reported.Compelled to combat the violent invasion, neighbors have stepped up to defend one another:Outside the Nettelhorst Fine and Performing Arts School on Broadway in Lakeview, a neighborhood resident volunteering as a federal immigration agent-watcher kept an eye out for agents. While the neon-vest-clad volunteer stood guard, a man dropped off a set of orange whistles [used to warn of approaching ICE agents] into a Little Free Library box outside the school. He said he was 3D-printing the whistles by the hundreds.Keep in mind this all comes from a single city. Episode like these are taking place from D.C. to Los Angeles, Sacramento and Orange County in California to New York. We should hardly be surprised that agents who are hastily recruited with appalling appeals to racism, struggle to meet minimal qualifications, get truncated training, and receive quotas behave like paramilitary street thugs.Inarguably, “ICE” does not accurately convey the nature of the forces carrying out operations that wreak havoc on American cities, tear apart families, and trample on our deepest held values. We should do away with the name (not to mention dismantle and replace the agency itself) that puts a slick label on a heinous campaign of violence. Masked and unidentified, the people roughing up peaceful residents should more properly be called “goons,” “storm troopers,” or “street gangs” (if you’re being kind).Frankly, they and their higher-ups represent (to borrow a phrase) the “worst of the worst” of the Trump regime; and should be roundly condemned for turning the country into a police state.Oct. 27 New York Times,‘No Idea How Long People Can Hold Out’: Federal Workers Feel Brunt of Shutdown, Eileen Sullivan and Drew Atkins, Oct. 27, 2025 (print ed.). As more than one million government employees go without pay, many are turning to side jobs and food banks to make ends meet.When Jill Hornick woke up on Monday morning, her first thought was that her timecard would be submitted that day for her job with the Social Security Administration in Chicago. But this Monday was different. The federal government was locked in a shutdown, and she received a paycheck for $0.“This is the only income I have,” she said. “And I just started crying. I had a meltdown.”Ms. Hornick, 59, is one of 730,000 federal employees working without pay because of the impasse. Another 670,000 federal workers are furloughed without pay, according to data from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.As the shutdown stretches toward its fifth week, those government employees are confronting an increasingly acute and stressful scenario. Their bills are mounting, and there is no clear resolution in sight.Some are turning to side hustles like delivering food, walking dogs and selling personal items to bring in a bit of income. Others are relying on food banks that have been hastily organized to provide federal workers and contractors with free groceries — efforts that community service providers say reflect a broadening food insecurity caused by the shutdown.The widespread anxiety is punctuating what has already been a grueling year for federal workers as the Trump administration has raced to shrink and reshape the government, and moved to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs.The last shutdown, which came during President Trump’s first term, was the longest ever, lasting 34 full days. The current standoff, which began Oct. 1, could stretch even longer. There are no negotiations for a deal to reopen the government, which Democrats say must include an agreement to extend expiring subsidies for health insurance.Mr. Trump has shown no inclination to start talks.“I will only meet if they let the country open,” he said on Tuesday, just days before he left Washington for a trip to Asia.Not all federal workers are going unpaid. Around 830,000 federal employees are still receiving their salaries because their offices are self-funded or there is other money to use, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.And Mr. Trump directed the federal government to reprogram billions of dollars to pay members of the military, immigration agents and other law enforcement officials, an unusual move that cuts Congress out of its role in appropriating funds.Last week, the president announced that an anonymous donor gave the government $130 million to help pay the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops. He declined to identify the donor, but The New York Times reported on Saturday that it was Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and top Trump financial backer. Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: Totally Brazen. Comically Corrupt. Painfully Dumb, William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift, Oct. 27, 2025. Trump’s mask-off economic doctrine is on full display: Riches for friends, pain for enemies. Is it any wonder business leaders are falling in line?Twenty-six days into the government shutdown, we got an actual, meaningful development this morning. The American Federation of Government Employees—a union that has regularly fought Donald Trump’s assault on the federal workforce this year—is now urgingDemocrats to abandon their shutdown strategy and allow the government to reopen without any concessions from Republicans and the White House.“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” AFGE President Everett Kelley wrote in a statement first reported by NBC News. “It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today.”It’s no surprise government employees are under extra duress during a lengthy shutdown, particularly since the White House has used it as a pretext to do still-deeper cuts to the federal workforce. But whether this open pressure shakes any additional Democrats loose from their till-now firm opposition to a current-levels spending bill remains to be seen. Happy Monday. White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.Emptywheel,Analysis: Love in the Time of Hegemonic Suicide, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 27, 2025. It started with the willful destruction of USAID.I start what is sure to be a kaleidoscopic (or some might call disorganized) reflection on the undercurrents of power as Trump attempts to build a new America based on illusion by reminding that the first assault was on USAID. USAID was targeted, among other reasons, because it supported the kind of pro-democracy NGOs that have haunted Viktor Orbán for years, and also because the realities of aid in the field look funny to those pickled in the provincialism of culture war.But it’s a useful reminder, because the destruction of USAID was both the first great strike against Congress’ power of the purse (because Marco Rubio was refusing to spend on programs Congress had appropriated, including programs with bipartisan support, like PEPFAR), and also the consensual destruction of a great deal of soft power the United States built up going back to the Cold War. Then, during the Cold War, USAID was recognized as a low-cost way to contest another great power and, along the way, to do something good and maybe even create a few new reliable markets for farmers in the heartland. Now, it had become a symbol of a past hegemony that conspiracy theorists, starting with the richest man in the world, had made suspect.This reflection will focus on how Stephen Miller’s two-faced war on America’s immigrant diversity and Latin America exists in tension with Trump’s attempt to subjugate both the Democrats and China. I’m attempting to capture these intertwined threads to get to a point I’ve raised before. We know what the decline from democracy to authoritarianism looks like. Trump is overtly following Orbán’s path to competitive authoritarianism. But far too few have considered what it means that Trump is pursuing that model while committing hegemonic suicide.The willful destruction of USAID laid an important foundation for two “negotiations” that are bedeviling Trump’s effort to consolidate power: the trade war Trump picked with China, and a funding fight with Democrats over whether Congress will be Congress anymore.Art of the Deal guy is conducting a bunch of “negotiations” right now. Many of them involve levying threats, whether threatening to withdraw government funding, launching frivolous lawsuits, imposing draconian tariffs, or even charging people with fabricated crimes, and in response, extorting bribes, like the free work some white shoe law firms decided to give away or payment for the ballroom that will scar the edifice where the East Wing used to be. For most negotiating partners, such threats leave two choices: suing in an attempt to deem the entire extortion attempt unlawful, or attempting to minimize the extracted tribute through flattery.But for China and the Democrats it is different. The government of China doesn’t do flattery — not of foreigners, anyway. Plus, China has been preparing for this moment since the last time +Trump tried it, in his first term, in part by increasing its own capacity, in part by replacing American suppliers with countries China has been wooing with soft power for years.And while Democrats have been suing and suing and suing, Trump’s ultimate goal for the minority — whose party currently leads most of the net donor states in the US — is nothing less than subjugation. Trump was happier to negotiate with Hamas than negotiate with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Trump intends to make them, all Democrats, give him the adulation they refuse him.And so Trump’s negotiating “tactics” for both are similar: a serial ratcheting up of demands, based on the belief that the desired end — subjugation — is the means to win the negotiation. In both cases, this obstinance has instead created vulnerabilities.By pushing China to impose an export control regime not dissimilar to those the US uses, Trump gave China leverage over the Rest of World countries with which China will continue to trade even as Trump shrivels inside his manufactured walls, the countries Trump once wished to peel off from China.And every time Russ Vought commits another unprecedented Antideficiency Act crime, it proves the Democrats’ point that there can be no negotiations unless that lawlessness ceases.But when Trump decided that he had to pay military servicemembers, he directly violated congressional statute. It is “by far the most illegal budgetary action he’s taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything,” writes Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.”Trump is taking money from an account specifically earmarked for research, development, testing, and evaluation, and spending it on military pay, which is forbidden by both the Constitution and law (the Antideficiency Act carries a jail sentence of up to two years), and something administration officials publicly promised Congress they would notMore Global NewsNew York Times,Japan’s New Prime Minister Has an Advantage in Winning Over Trump, Javier C. Hernández, Updated Oct. 27, 2025. As Sanae Takaichi seeks reassurance from President Trump on trade and security, she will likely play up her ties to Shinzo Abe, a mutual friend.Sanae Takaichi, right, who last week became the first woman to lead Japan as prime minister, has never met President Trump. She does not play golf, Mr. Trump’s favored sport, nor is she known to share his love of hamburgers.But when Ms. Takaichi holds talks with Mr. Trump in Tokyo on Tuesday, she will have another card to play as she tries to win reassurance from him on trade and security. She is expected to emphasize her connection to Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister assassinated in 2022, who was Ms. Takaichi’s political mentor and who forged a closer bond with Mr. Trump than perhaps any other world leader.“She will be looking to cloak herself in the mantle of Abe to persuade Trump that she is his woman in Asia and a steadfast partner that he can count on,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper, a partner at the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm.Ms. Takaichi will likely try to persuade Mr. Trump, who arrived in Tokyo on Monday, to reinvest in the decades-long security alliance with Japan and to redouble efforts to counter China’s rising influence in the region. She might seek to strengthen Japan’s oversight of a $550 billion fund that Japan has agreed to invest in the United States.Mr. Trump will probably seek to preserve his power in deciding how that money is spent. He is also likely to push Ms. Takaichi to accelerate defense spending, even though Japan has already announced plans to more than double its military budget.Ms. Takaichi, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, is seen by some officials and analysts as Japan’s best shot at building chemistry with Mr. Trump and warding off his punishing instincts. New York Times,Argentina’s Voters Hand Javier Milei a Crucial Victory in Midterm Election, Emma Bubola, Updated Oct. 27, 2025. The result, which gives Mr. Milei, above, enough legislative support to keep his vetoes from being overturned, showed that many voters still back the president’s libertarian experiment.The party of Argentina’s budget-slashing president, Javier Milei, won a resounding victory in legislative elections on Sunday, a crucial test for his administration that President Trump had said would decide whether the United States extended a financial lifeline to the country.It was an emphatic win for Mr. Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist who has significantly curbed Argentina’s crippling inflation, but whose tenure was recently hit by financial and political turmoil. His party received over 40 percent of the vote, showing that despite pain inflicted by his austerity measures, many Argentines are still willing to back his libertarian experiment.“Today we passed a turning point,” Mr. Milei told supporters on Sunday night, after coming onstage and singing a campaign song.“Today begins the building of a great Argentina,” he said.The victory gives Mr. Milei enough support in Congress to prevent his vetoes from being overridden, putting him in a strong position to further his ambitious agenda.It was also a victory for President Trump, who had endorsed Mr. Milei and said that a bailout from the United States, in the form of a $20 billion currency swap, was contingent on his success in the midterm elections.“BIG WIN in Argentina for Javier Milei, a wonderful Trump Endorsed Candidate!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “He’s making us all look good.”Mr. Milei is an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement, and his fortunes are seen by the Trump administration as a way to bolster American influence in South America and counter China’s push into the region.“It was quite a resounding victory for common sense and pro-U.S. leadership, which Milei very much embodies,” said Andrés Martínez-Fernández, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation focusing on Latin America. It also showed that “there are also very clear benefits to countries that try to ally with the U.S. very proactively,” he said.Financial markets’ reactions will not become clear until Monday morning, but bond, stock and currency traders seemed likely to respond positively. The Argentine peso strengthened on Sunday night in cryptocurrency markets that operate around the clock.Mr. Milei’s supporters were cheering outside the party’s headquarters, where the AC/DC song “Highway to Hell” played and street vendors sold miniatures of Mr. Milei holding his trademark chain saw.“There’s a huge bonanza coming for Argentina,” said Facundo Manuel Campos, 42. “More investments, credit … a normal country.”New York Times,Is the U.S. Losing in Vietnam? Russia, North Korea and China Are Gaining, Damien Cave, Oct. 27, 2025. U.S. allies worry that American volatility and Russian outreach and arms sales, in particular, are driving Vietnam into a new phase.American officials believed nearly two years ago that Vietnam was about to buy C-130 military transport planes from the United States. In interviews, they said the sale would be a powerful blow to Russia, Hanoi’s main military partner, and a clear sign that geopolitical swing states like Vietnam were tilting toward Washington, not Moscow or Beijing.At Vietnam’s defense expo last December, the country’s prime minister even climbed aboard a visiting C-130, inspecting the cockpit as U.S. commanders watched. A YouTube video seemed to capture a Vietnamese deputy defense minister telling colleagues that three (or maybe 13) planes had been ordered. But then nothing happened.Instead, Vietnam has stepped up purchases of Russian military equipment, routing around U.S. sanctions meant to cut off business with Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Leaked documents and interviews with Vietnamese and Western officials all point to a reinvigorated relationship — a return to distrusting America and relying on Russia, with a surge of high-level meetings and previously undisclosed purchases and partnerships.The evidence reviewed by The New York Times includes records of Vietnam ordering dozens of complex air-defense systems, and high-tech upgrades for submarines, while seeking fleets of new aircraft. Russia and Vietnam have also continued to expand military-technical cooperation through joint ventures. At least one company in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, was added to U.S. and European sanctions and export-control lists in 2024 and 2025, suggesting the business was contributing to Russia’s fight against Ukraine.Most of the transactions and collaborations with Russia have avoided sanctions enforcement, partly with payment systems hidden in other companies, and because the United States let a lot go, believing it was Vietnam’s partner of choice. But Moscow is getting bolder. While many of the secret purchases began during the Biden administration, they appear to be accelerating with President Trump in power — as are public displays of close relations. Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: O Canada!William Kristol, right, Oct. 27, 2025. I come this morning to praise Canada, not mock it.But I should begin with a confession: Yes, in the before times, like any red-blooded American conservative, I did indulge in some Canada-mocking. Provoked by the spectacle of Americans fleeing north across the border after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, The Weekly Standard in March 2005 published Matt Labash’s cover story,“Welcome to Canada: The Great White Waste of Time.”It’s a fun and lively piece. We thought so highly of it that we included it in the 10th anniversary anthology of our best writing, The Weekly Standard: A Reader, 1995-2005. Early on in the article, Labash quoted Henry David Thoreau, “I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada. . . . What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” But Labash nonetheless managed to write several thousand witty words about our neighbor to the north.That was then. You could make fun of people in a (somewhat!) good-natured way. Indeed, in doing so, you also made fun of yourself.But in Donald Trump’s America, cheerful mockery is no more. It’s grievance-mongering and chest-beating all the time.Even when there’s no ground for it. In January 2020, President Trump signed a free trade agreement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), that replaced the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The USMCA is, according to the current Trump administration website of The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, “a mutually beneficial win for North American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses.”But Trump now regrets doing something responsible during his first term. So he’s been picking fights with Canada, trying to pressure them by imposing tariffs and threatening new ones.In response to Trump’s bullying, the province of Ontario decided to remind his countrymen of the dangers of tariffs with an ad featuring clips of President Ronald Reagan from 1987. As Andrew notes above, Trump was peeved. On Thursday night, he suspended the ongoing trade talks with Canada. When the ad aired during the World Series, Trump announced he would punish the country with an additional 10 percent tariff on its goods because of their “hostile act” of paying for an accurate television advertisement.Trump’s hapless treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, defended his boss on Sunday, saying of Ontario’s anti-tariff Reagan ad, “This is a kind of propaganda against U.S. citizens. It’s PSYOPs.” In Trump’s America, airing accurate clips of Ronald Reagan counts as “PSYOPs.”It’s all childish and ridiculous. But its childishness and ridiculousness is emblematic of Trump’s overall foreign policy—indeed, of his overall governance. So it’s worth noting for that reason. And it’s also worth noting because it’s actually harmful. Canada does matter.For one thing, having a friendly and peaceable neighbor on the other side of the world’s longest land border is something we take for granted. But it’s a good thing.It’s also been good for us that Canada is a prosperous and growing country. And it’s good for us that Canada is our second largest trading partner, accounting for 13 percent of our total trade.Canada is an ally. But in Trump’s America, how far does that get you?Bessent, defending the $20 billion bailout of Argentina on Sunday, claimed that “we are supporting a U.S. ally.”Well, Argentina is one of twenty countries, including Egypt and Colombia and Kenya, that are designated “major non-NATO allies,” which permits certain kinds of cooperation between our militaries. That’s fine. But Canada is an actual NATO ally, one of the 12 founding members of the alliance. When Article 5 was invoked after 9/11, Canadians fought and died with us in Afghanistan.They fought and died with us in World War II, where Canadian casualties were comparable, per capita, to ours. Canada was at war with Nazi Germany two years before us—and declared war on Imperial Japan the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. On June 6, 1944, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division landed on Juno Beach in conjunction with U.S. and British forces.World War II, NATO, Afghanistan, the world’s longest undefended border—those things once mattered. They mattered back then the United States was a great democracy that valued its democratic allies, even if some smart-aleck American magazines poked fun at them. That seems like a long time ago. U.S. Law, Courts, CrimeNew York Times,Will Trump’s Tariffs Survive Supreme Court’s ‘Major Questions’ Test?Adam Liptak, Oct. 27, 2025. The justices used the doctrine, a judicially created method of reading statutes, to thwart several major Biden programs.The Supreme Court used the “major questions doctrine” to reject much of the Biden administration’s agenda, including its efforts to address climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and student debt. The court’s commitment to the doctrine will be tested next week when it hears arguments about President Trump’s tariffs program.The doctrine requires Congress to use plain and direct language to authorize sweeping economic actions by the executive branch. The 1977 law that Mr. Trump is relying on, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, might seem to fail that test, as it does not feature the word “tariffs” or similar terms like “duties,” “customs,” “taxes” or “imposts.”Nor is there any question that the tariffs will have vast economic consequences, measured in the trillions of dollars. The sums involved are far larger than the roughly $500 billion at issue in President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s student loan forgiveness program, which Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, called “staggering by any measure.”The major questions doctrine, a judicially created principle of statutory interpretation, follows the premise that Congress does not “hide elephants in mouse holes,” as Justice Antonin Scalia put it in a 2001 opinion.But the actual words “major questions doctrine” did not appear in a majority opinion until 2022, when Chief Justice Roberts curtailed the E.P.A.’s power to address climate change. Without “clear congressional authorization,” he wrote, the agency could not act.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of inconsistency and opportunism. When ordinary legal principles fail to thwart disfavored programs, she wrote, “special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear.”There is some reason to think the doctrine may disappear in the tariffs case.In a concurring opinion in June in an unrelated case, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh proposed a distinction that could lay the groundwork for a decision in Mr. Trump’s favor in the tariffs case.“The major questions canon has not been applied by this court in the national security or foreign policy contexts,” he wrote, adding: “The usual understanding is that Congress intends to give the president substantial authority and flexibility to protect America and the American people.”The opinion was particularly significant because Justice Kavanaugh has helped shape the doctrine over the years. He used the phrase in a 2017 dissent when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, prompting an exchange with Senator Amy Klobuchar at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings the next year.U.S. Governance, Politics New York Times, A West Texas Children’s Clinic Where Vaccine Suspicion Is Encouraged, Edgar Sandoval, Oct. 27, 2025. “The medical community hates me,” Pia Habersang said. “And you know what? I don’t care.”On a warm October day, Victoria Rodriguez tried to soothe her restless daughter as the girl fidgeted on an examining table of a West Texas children’s clinic. Pia Habersang, the nurse practitioner who runs the clinic, leaned closer. “How is her speech?” she asked.“She doesn’t talk,” Ms. Rodriguez said, paused and then added, “She is kind of saying ‘no’ more.”Ms. Rodriguez was insistent that her daughter, diagnosed with autism, needed care from the Pediatric Wellness Center of Amarillo, where parents are greeted with messages professing the side effects of vaccinations and possible connections to autism — connections that medical experts say have been debunked in several medical studies.Dr. Habersang is a nurse practitioner with a doctorate in child and youth studies from Nova Southeastern University, but is not herself a medical doctor; she runs the center with her husband, who is a physician. She begins her initial medical sessions with new patients’ parents by discussing her concerns about vaccines, the addition of aluminum salts to shots and the rise in autism diagnoses that she insists is connected to vaccination rates.If a child has a genetic predisposition to autism, she tells parents, early exposure to a vaccine that contains small amounts of aluminum salts, as well as factors like a diet high in saturated fats and sugar, can accelerate toxicity in the body and worsen the condition.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 26, 2025 [Prosperity Comes From Infrastructure], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 27, 2025. Economist Paul Krugman probably didn’t have the Erie Canal in mind today when he wrote about the rise of renewable energy, but he could have. The themes are similar.In his newsletter, Krugman noted that renewables have grown explosively in the past decade, spurred by what he calls a virtuous circle of falling costs and increasing production. That circle is the result of subsidies that made renewable energy a going concern in the face of fossil fuels. Today, he points out, reports like that of Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy policy task force warning that renewable energy would play a trivial role in the nation’s energy future would be funny if the Trump administration weren’t echoing them.In fact, as Krugman notes, solar and wind are unstoppable. They produced 15% of the world’s electricity in 2024 and account for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. Green energy will continue to grow even if U.S. policy tries to wrench us back to burning coal, “with important geopolitical implications,” Krugman writes. “China is racing ahead.”Krugman, above left, notes that it was originally Alexander Hamilton who called for government investment in new technologies to enable the economy of the infant United States of America to grow and compete with other nations. But Hamilton was not the only one thinking along those lines.In the early years of the American republic, trade was carried on largely by water, which was much easier to navigate than the nation’s few rough roads. In 1783, even before the end of the Revolutionary War, George Washington was contemplating how to open “the vast inland navigation of these United States” to trade. In 1785, after the war had ended, Washington became the head of a company created to develop a canal along the Potomac River that would link the eastern seaboard with the Ohio Valley, bypassing the waterfalls and currents that made navigation treacherous. But under the Articles of Confederation then in place, the country’s states were sovereign, and there was no system for managing the waterways that traversed them.In 1785, representatives from Maryland and Virginia agreed on a plan for navigation on the Potomac and other local waterways, as well as for commerce regulations and debt collection. Virginia delegates then invited representatives from all the states to another meeting on commercial issues to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, on September 11, 1786. That second meeting called for a constitutional convention to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation.Delegates met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1787. They produced the United States Constitution.With a new, stronger government in place, lawmakers and business leaders turned back to the idea of investing in infrastructure to facilitate economic development. Lawmakers in New York worried that settlers in the western part of the state would move their produce north to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River into Canada, breaking the region off from the United States. The vast lands around the Great Lakes would naturally follow.New York legislators asked Congress to appropriate money to build a canal across the state from the Hudson River to Lake Erie (avoiding Lake Ontario to keep traders away from Montreal). But while Congress did pass creating a fund to construct roads and canals across the nation, President James Madison vetoed it, despite his previous support for internal improvements. His opposition helped to spur support within New York for the state to fund the project on its own.And so in 1817, after legislators under Governor De Witt Clinton funded the project, workers broke ground on what would become the Erie Canal.To build the canal, untrained engineers figured out how to cut through forest, swamps, and wilderness to carve a 363-mile path through the heart of New York state. Workers dug a 40-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep canal and built 83 locks to move barges and vessels through a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The project became the nation’s first engineering school, and those trained in it went on to other development projects.Detractors warned that in Clinton’s “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.” But after it was completed in 1825, the project paid for itself within a few years. Before the canal, shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City cost more than 19 cents a mile; once a trader could send goods by the canal, the price dropped to less than 3 cents a mile. By 1860 the cost had dropped to less than a penny.The canal speeded up human travel, too: what had been a two-week trip from Albany to Buffalo in a crowded stagecoach became a five-day boat journey in relative comfort. As trade and travel increased, new towns sprang up along the canal: Syracuse, Rochester, Lockport.The Erie Canal cemented the ties of the Great Lakes region to the United States. As goods moved east toward New York City and the Atlantic Ocean, people moved west along the canal and then across the Great Lakes. They spread the customs of New England and New York into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, bringing explosive growth that would, by the 1850s, clash with southerners moving north.But in fall 1825, that cataclysm was a generation away, and New Yorkers marked the completion of the canal with celebrations, cannon fire, and a ceremony with Governor Clinton pouring a keg of water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic.The festivities began on October 26, 1825, exactly 200 years before economist Krugman wrote about the importance of government support for renewable energy, demonstrating that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Paul Krugman via Substack,Political-Economy Commentary: No, Ronald Reagan Didn’t Love Tariffs, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 27, 2025. He wasn’t a free-trade purist, but he was nothing like Trump. Too much personal stuff going on for a full post today, and also suffering from absurdity overload. But I thought I’d take a few minutes to weigh in on one piece of the absurdity: Donald Trump’s hysterical reaction to an ad run by the Canadian province of Ontario that featured audio of Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs and extolling free trade.I suspect that the ad especially enraged Trump because it featured Reagan, still the Republican lodestar, making a serious, reasoned case for why tariffs are generally bad for the country. In the ad, Reagan sounded presidential and trustworthy, a sure reminder of how far the Republican party has sunk while in the grip of a grandiose, snarling, whining toddler.So Trump claimed that the ad was “FAKE” and that Reagan “LOVED tariffs.” Actually, the ad accurately conveyed the sense of Reagan’s remarks — and no, Reagan didn’t love tariffs.It’s straightforward to go through the historical record to discover Reagan’s actual position on trade. As the Financial Times puts it, Reagan “was a devout champion of open trade who used tariffs sparingly and reluctantly.”I can also attest personally to the reality of Reagan’s tariff policies because I served a year in the Reagan administration, as a sub-political, technocratic staffer working on international policy at the Council of Economic Advisers: A document with text and a red line AI-generated content may be incorrect.Reagan did, in fact, repeatedly emphasize the virtues of free trade. Like all modern presidents, he nonetheless imposed some tariffs for political reasons. But Reagan always stayed within the boundaries of the law, using his right to impose discretionary tariffs as pressure release valves rather than abusing his authority to make tariff policy an instrument of his personal whims.Now, Reagan did many things that, I believe, harmed America. Indeed, I would argue that his tax cuts, deregulation and anti-union policies, as well as his exploitation of racial tensions, were critical in laying the foundation for the plutocracy that is now destroying our democracy. But one thing that was clear to me while working within the Reagan administration was that Reagan and his people — totally unlike Trump — took their promises to other countries seriously. If a proposed policy was in clear violation of our international agreements, it was simply out of bounds.By contrast, as far as I can tell everything that Trump has done on tariffs involves breaking solemn, supposedly binding past pledges to other nations and expecting those countries to meekly go along.I never met Reagan. But I was close enough to witness how the tariff policy sausage was made during his administration, and it was nothing like the lawless chaos that rules under Trump. Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: 3 Scandals in 4 Days That Would Define Any Other Presidency, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 27, 2025. During the second Trump administration, corruption scandals that would typically define a presidency have receive a day or two of coverage.Part of the issue is that for Trump, enriching himself and his family is one of the core purposes of his presidency. The media industry is both unwilling and unable to cover this level of corruption rigorously. Treating Trump’s corruption scandals like those of previous presidents would make outlets appear “biased” and strain the resources of an industry that has been contracting over the past 25 years.To put the scope of the problem in context, consider the corruption scandals that have emerged just over the last week.After $2 billion transaction with Trump cryptocurrency, convicted felon receives pardonIn November 2023, Binance’s founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, pled guilty to willfully violating anti-money laundering laws. According to the Department of Justice, his actions “allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers” through Binance. Zhao, known as CZ, served four months in federal prison and agreed to resign as CEO.The company’s conduct was brazen. One Binance compliance official suggested the company use this marketing slogan: “Is washing drug money too hard these days — come to Binance we got cake for you.” CZ “told employees it was ‘better to ask for forgiveness than permission,’ and prioritized Binance’s growth over compliance with U.S. law.”Since the 2024 election, CZ and Binance have generated millions in profits for Trump by conducting transactions with companies linked to Trump and his family. Most significantly, in May, Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from a state-backed UAE investment fund using the cryptocurrency USD1. The USD1 token, a so-called stablecoin, had just been created by World Liberty Financial (WLF). Trump and his family members own about 38% of WLF. Binance’s transaction gave USD1 immediate legitimacy and liquidity. It is expected to generate tens of millions in annual profits for WLF.Further, according to Bloomberg, Binance “wrote the basic code to power USD1” and “promoted USD1 to its 275 million users, a sought-after benefit among stablecoin issuers.” In other words, the entire USD1 project appears to be a gift from CZ to Trump. Binance provided the technical expertise for its creation, promoted it, and is the largest holder of the token. It is “unclear” if Binance or CZ “received any payment from World Liberty in return.”CZ, through his family office, is also collaborating on a crypto project with an investment firm linked to Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.On Thursday, Trump pardoned CZ, which CZ had requested. The move could open the door for CZ to return as CEO and for Bianance to begin operating in the United States.Trump said he pardoned CZ “at the request of a lot of very good people“ who said that “what he did is not even a crime.” CZ hired Ches McDowell, a hunting buddy of Trump Jr., $450,000 last month to lobby Trump for “executive relief.” On October 14, Trump Jr. and McDowell were spotted at the White House. Donald Trump Jr. (R) with Ches McDowell at the White House on October 14, 2025. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)Pentagon awards major drone contract to company linked to Trump Jr.In November 2024, a few weeks after Trump won the presidential election, an obscure drone company, Unusual Machines, brought on Trump Jr. as an advisor. Trump Jr., who has no notable experience with drones or military contracting, was granted 200,000 shares in the company, a stake worth millions.Trump Jr. later “helped screen candidates for top jobs at the Pentagon on behalf of his father after the election.” In the September 18 edition of Trump Jr’s podcast, Triggered, he admitted that he sought out people who wanted to shift more spending into drones. Trump Jr. said he tried to avoid “former F-15 pilot[s]” because “they sort of want to go with what they know.” The military, Trump Jr. said, is “better served with a drone that costs a tiny fraction of that of a plane.”When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s nomination was imperiled due to rape allegations, Trump Jr. emerged as one of his most outspoken defenders.Hegseth later issued several directives making it easier for the Pentagon to spend money on drones, particularly from U.S. manufacturers like Unusual Machines.On Friday, the Financial Times reported that Unusual Machines “won its largest contract from the Pentagon.” The company “said the US Army had contracted it to manufacture 3,500 drone motors, alongside various other drone parts.” The Army also “indicated it planned to order an additional 20,000 components from” Unusual Machines next year.Unusual Machines CEO Allan Evans said the contract had nothing to do with Trump Jr., stating that the president’s son “did not advise or do anything else on this deal.” Through a spokesperson, Trump Jr. said that his role at Unusual Machines “has nothing to do with interfacing with the government.”The exact value of the contract is not yet known because the government stopped updating its contracting database on October 1, the start of the government shutdown.Trump seeks $230 million payment from Justice Department officials he appointedLast Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Trump is “demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation.”Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024 under the Federal Tort Claims Act, claiming he had “been persecuted by various federal investigations, including the Russia probe, the Mar-a-Lago search, and the classified-documents prosecution.”In general, the federal government is immune from civil lawsuits. But the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) creates a narrow exception for official misconduct. Under the FTCA, a claimant does not immediately file a lawsuit. First, the claim must be submitted to the federal government, which may either reject it or issue a payout.Nearly all claims filed under the FTCA are unsuccessful. Trump would ordinarily have an even harder case because all the conduct occurred in the course of official investigations and, in many cases, was approved by a judge. Prosecutors have broad discretion to conduct investigations as they see fit within the bounds of the law. The fact that Trump was not ultimately convicted in some cases does not make him eligible for compensation under the FTCA.But in Trump’s case, the officials in charge of deciding whether to issue a payment “are Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in his hush money trial, and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents prosecution.”Trump went even further, claiming he would personally decide whether the federal government should pay him $230 million. “I’m the one that makes the decision, and that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” Trump said. “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right?“Such a payment would also be illegal, because the Constitution prohibits the president from receiving compensation from the government other than a salary.The Contrarian,Opinion: It is So ‘Disconcerting’ that We Have No Congress, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 27, 2025. News reports tell us that “ a growing number” of Republicans have “raised concerns” about Donald Trump’s unilaterally murdering suspected drug smugglers on the high seas.Meanwhile, a headline from The Hill announces: “GOP senators disconcerted by possible $230M Justice Department payout to Trump.”There are so many things about which to be “disconcerted,” including unconscionable misuse of the military against Americans, brutal ICE raids, skyrocketing debt, corruption on a grand scale, and herky-jerky trade wars (complete with Trump’s temper tantrum over an ad accurately reminding us that Ronald Reagan opposed protectionism). One should further “raise concerns” that the Affordable Care Act premiums will “spike on average by 30 percent next year” for 17 million people, so that “along with the likely expiration of pandemic-era subsidies… millions of people will see their health insurance payments double or even triple in 2026,” as The Washington Post reports.low light photography of armchairs in front of deskPhoto by Joakim HonkasaloIf only these fretful Republicans belonged to some sort of governmental body that had the ability to limit or even stop these troublesome actions. One could image, say, a separate legislative body to check the executive, control spending, and vet unfit nominees. But they want no part of that.“Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to put the House on an indefinite hiatus that is now stretching into its second month while the government is shut down is the latest in a series of moves he has made that have diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership at a critical moment,” reports the New York Times. And Trump, in turn, recognizes he effectively is the speaker, as well as president. MAGA Republicans have happily consented to bulldozing the system of checks and balances with the same glee Trump has displayed leveling the East Wing—and with the same level of contempt for our democracy or its rules.No one should find credible Republicans’ feigned angst over the unhinged machinations of an autocrat that they have refused to confront—or even complain about on the record. If Republicans were genuinely upset about the serial outrages (or at least more upset about those than incurring the wrath of the bully-in-chief), they would act like members of the legislative branch that the Constitution designed.Many of Republicans’ professed “concerns” would subside if they, for example, come back to the Capitol to:
- Negotiate a compromise on the ACA subsidies.
- Pass a War Powers Act resolution and use the power of the purse to head off Trump’s unilateral war designs.
- Recapture the power of the purse, disallowing executive rescissions.
- Reclaim the tariff power and end the trade war that will cost global businesses $1.2T (mostly passed on to consumers).
- Conduct oversight hearings on the weaponization of the Justice Department (including bogus vindictive prosecutions of Trump enemies, cases that Americans by a wide margin think are unjustified).
- Hold Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt if she refuses to answer questions and continues to insult lawmakers.
- Launch an investigation into mismanagement of the Pentagon.
- Pass legislation that halts further White House desecration and bars spending any monies (private or public) on construction without congressional authorization. (Congress could also demand audit of the damage done and tally the cost to restore the historic White House. The next president can send the bill to Trump.)
- Bar any payment to Trump from the Justice Department until he leaves office.
- Start enforcing the Emoluments Clause, prohibiting foreigners’ gifts and “investments” in Trump businesses.
- Shutter ICE facilities unless and until the regime abides by the law to allow immediate access for oversight by lawmakers.
- Investigate Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s spending on two private jets and mismanagement of DHS.
- Release every scrap of paper concerning Jeffrey Epstein and those that participated in or enabled his rape of hundreds of children.
Well, you say, that will never happen. But all of it could happen under a Democratic Senate and House after the 2026 elections, should voters agree Republicans have failed spectacularly to do their jobs.A properly functioning Congress, just as the Framers intended, could stop many of Trump’s tyrannical executive’s outrages.Republicans’ brazen refusal to do their constitutionally assigned duties should compel voters to boot them out in 2026. Since they have shirked their duties and thereby enabled Trump’s corruption, malfeasance, and replete policy failures, what justification could there be to rehire them?Perhaps if numbers such as $230M (Trump’s demand) or 3% (new inflation high) or $300M (cost of a garish ballroom) do not impress MAGA members of Congress, some others might:
- 9%: the generic poll advantage for Democrats (50-41) for the 2026 midterms according to the Quinnipiac Poll
- 15%: Congressional approval under the Gallup poll (and also the percentage by which Democrats have overperformed in 2025 races; if you are wondering, more than 40 Republicans won their races by 15% or less in 2024).
- 25%: Trump approval among Hispanic voters in the recent Associated Press-NORC-poll. (Republicans might have unwisely banked on high Hispanic support in Trump’s re-redistricting gambit.)
Put simply, if MAGA lawmakers are not moved by their oaths of office or the health and security of the American people, perhaps the prospect of a blue wave in 2026 will jolt them from their slumber. If Democrats perform strongly next week in elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania (state supreme court), and California (Prop. 50), Republicans might become “disconcerted” enough to take up their constitutional obligations. New York Times,How the Firebombing of His Home Changed Josh Shapiro, Katie Glueck, Oct. 27, 2025. In an interview, the Pennsylvania governor offered his most detailed accounting yet of the April attack — and how he’s grappling with its aftermath.Six months after an arsonist firebombed the Pennsylvania governor’s residence on Passover, Gov. Josh Shapiro was preparing to welcome guests back for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.As staff members assembled the buffet — roasted salmon, pumpkin cheesecake, elaborate squash dishes — in the state dining room, there were few visual reminders of the Molotov cocktails that tore through there in April as the Shapiros slept upstairs, other than a display case containing charred plates, cups and a Passover Haggadah that survived the assault.But as Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat, sat in his private office to offer his most detailed accounting yet of the attack and its aftermath, he was thinking about the less visible consequences of that night.“The hardest part for me has been navigating this as a dad,” Mr. Shapiro said in a wide-ranging, hourlong interview, in which he was by turns defiant and vulnerable. “Grappling with the sort of personal guilt that your job put your kids in a position where they could have been harmed.”Sitting just down the hallway from the window the assailant smashed to enter the residence, Mr. Shapiro said political violence “leaves behind emotional scars. And I think we’re working through that as a family.”Like many other elected officials, Mr. Shapiro — one of America’s most prominent Jewish Democrats, a finalist in Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential search, potentially a future presidential candidate himself — has long known that life in the public eye carries personal risk.He saw that while serving as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a role he held when 11 people were murdered at a Pittsburgh synagogue, seven years ago on Monday. He experienced it while running for governor, when his opponent invoked his children’s Jewish day school in what was widely seen as an antisemitic dog whistle. Pennsylvania is where President Trump was shot during a 2024 rally, and where Luigi Mangione, accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, was apprehended.But as common as political violence has become, Mr. Shapiro knows it can feel abstract.He is now advising others who have been touched by political violence, and potential candidates who worry about the risks.He is also warning the country, with increasing urgency, not to grow numb.“Those risks just felt very theoretical to me,” Mr. Shapiro said recently. “Sadly, this made it all real.” Morning Shots via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: The Biggest Carrots. The Most Beautiful Sticks, Andrew Egger, Oct. 27, 2025. Two stories caught my attention over the weekend. One of them global, the other relatively provincial. But taken together, they provide a clear illustration of how grift and greed and personal pique have come to define the Trump economic doctrine.On Saturday, Donald Trump announced that U.S. businesses that trade with Canada are in for billions of dollars of additional pain, slapping an additional 10 percent tariff on imports from the country. The reason? He was mad about a TV ad the government of Ontario was airing on American airwaves, quoting Ronald Reagan’s warnings about the perils of tariffs.On Friday, the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon had awarded a significant contract to the drone company Unusual Machines—a company that retains Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser and in which he owns millions of dollars of stock. Shares in the company jumped 13 percent on the news. (As Judd Legum points out over at Popular Information, Trump Jr. has talked about how he helped screen candidates for top Pentagon jobs and explicitly discussed looking for candidates interested in moving more defense spending into drones. Nevertheless, Unusual Machines and Trump Jr. both deny he had anything to do with the deal.)The punitive measures against Canada are clownish—an indefensible economic decision wedded to a bizarrely childish lie about what Reagan thought about tariffs. Preferential government treatment for businesses from which the Trump family stands to profit—of which Unusual Machines is just the latest example—is just as obviously indefensible, whatever lazy “nothing to see here” defenses they might offer.But isn’t the brazenness of it all sort of the point? Every time Trump lashes out crazily against someone who he decides has wronged him, or heaps government spoils on loyal friends and allies, he’s making a specific argument: Right now, I run the world, and what’s right on “the merits” doesn’t matter. All that should matter is: Are you enjoying my favor, or suffering my displeasure?In ordinary times—or times we used to optimistically consider “ordinary”—such an argument wouldn’t get a president very far. His destructive antics and open self-dealing would vaporize his popularity and his political capital; he would find himself quickly hemmed in by Congress and the courts.But in our times, with a Congress of quislings on one side and a super-conservative Supreme Court giving him home field advantage on the other, Trump’s perpetual wrongness on the merits actually strengthens his pure-power appeal. It’s an industrial-scale version of his old line about how he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue without losing political support. He’s out here shooting a guy—a company, a country—each week at this point, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Is it any wonder business leaders are scrambling to get in line?And make no mistake: That scramble continues. Last week, the White House announced a list of companies and private donors that had made large contributions to his newest pet project: the palatial White House ballroom. As the Center for American Progress’s Will Ragland pointed out on X, a majority of the megacorps that pitched in had something in common: They had cut off political contributions to Republicans who backed Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election after January 6th. Really sorry about all that, sir—you’ve got to understand, that was another time. We really love the gold trimmings in the ballroom rendering you’ve put together.Money has always talked in American politics; people who have lots of it have deployed it to arrange government policy such that it’s easier to make even more. But the complete demolition of all guardrails around presidential action has made both the stick and the carrot far more powerful. Sure, you could speak out about the ways the president’s policies are crushing your business or your industry—but what would be the point when he’s likely to respond by crushing you more, with some Truth Social insults on the side? Sure, you could spend huge sums spreading money around on Capitol Hill in the hope of getting a sympathetic ear next time Congress considers a bill for your industry—but might it not be quicker, easier, and more effective just to back a truckload of cash up to the president’s family or to his latest vanity project?What’s to be done about incentive structures this perverse? All we can do is try to build out some incentives of our own. From time to time this year, we’ve seen people remind megacorporations that Trump still isn’t the only party they have to keep pleasing. The huge wave of Disney+ cancellations that followed the scalping of Jimmy Kimmel seemed to get him back on the air pretty quick. Donald Trump has the most power and the biggest pocketbook. But there’s still a lot more of us than there are of him.U.S. Media, Technology, Religion, EducationNew York Times,ICE Detains British Media Commentator, Claire Moses, Oct. 27, 2025. Sami Hamdi, who often speaks against Israel, was in the United States on a speaking tour. The Department of Homeland Security said his visa had been revoked.Sami Hamdi, a British political commentator and critic of Israel, was detained by immigration enforcement officers in the United States and will be removed, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, announced on Sunday.“This individual’s visa was revoked and he is in ICE custody pending removal,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.Mr. Hamdi appeared to be the latest person to have an American visa revoked over political speech. Other cases have raised questions about First Amendment protections.Mr. Hamdi is the managing director of the International Interest, an organization that “advises on geopolitical environments and risks across the globe,” according to its website. He has appeared as a commentator on the British television news channel Sky News and other outlets.He had been on a speaking tour in the United States, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. He attended the organization’s annual gala on Friday night in Sacramento and was scheduled to speak at a gala in Florida on Sunday night.Mr. Hamdi was detained at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday morning, according to CAIR, which called for his release. Mr. Hamdi is based in London, according to his LinkedIn account.CAIR said in a statement that Mr. Hamdi had been detained “because he dared to criticize the Israeli government’s genocide” while on his speaking tour. It called the action “a blatant affront to free speech.”The Wrap,MSNBC Sets Date for Name Change to MS NOW, Corbin Bolies, Oct. 27, 2025. The network is planning a large marketing campaign around its new brand.MSNBC is changing its name to MS NOW on Nov. 15, the network said on Monday, ending an era for a nearly 30-year-old cable brand while marking the start of its new identity as its parent company splits from NBCUniversal.The move marks one of the final acts of transition for the progressive cable news network as it splits itself from NBC News. Staff who jumped from NBC News to MSNBC officially became full-time employees on Oct. 6, while the network ended its shared newsgathering with NBC News last week.“On the morning of Nov. 15, we will officially make the switch to MS NOW,” MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler told staff in a memo on Monday. “This moment comes after months of meticulous planning and thoughtful collaboration across every corner of our organization. We are facing it head-on, and our success in the months and years ahead will depend on our innovation and entrepreneurial approach.”Oct. 26New York Times, Police Make Arrests in Louvre Robbery, Authorities Say, Aurelien Breeden, Oct. 26, 2025. Thieves stole over $100 million in jewelry from the Paris museum. It is unclear how many people were arrested, but one man was caught while trying to leave France.The police have made arrests in the brazen jewelry heist last week at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the French authorities said on Sunday, without specifying how many people had been taken into custody.The robbery, which stunned France, was carried out by four people. Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that the arrests were made on Saturday evening and that one man was taken into custody at the Charles de Gaulle Airport as he was trying to leave the country.It was not immediately clear whether the police had recovered any of the stolen jewelry, which is worth more than $100 million and includes gem-studded royal tiaras, necklaces and earrings dating to the 19th century.The arrests were a major breakthrough for French investigators, who are racing to find the thieves before the jewelry is dismantled and the rare stones and metals can be sold or melted down, as many experts fear they will be.The robbery in broad daylight at the Louvre has put an uncomfortable spotlight on security lapses at the famous museum.Laurence des Cars, the head of the Louvre, acknowledged during a tense Senate hearing last week that much of the museum’s security system was badly outdated and that the only exterior camera near where the thieves broke in was facing away from them.That cost the authorities precious minutes in their response time to the heist, which lasted less than 10 minutes.The thieves, posing as workers, had used a truck-mounted device to reach the second floor before breaking through a window with power tools and clambering into the Louvre’s gilded Apollo Gallery. There, they cut through reinforced glass display cases and grabbed eight precious crown jewels, before speeding away on motor scooters.New York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. and Chinese Officials Reach Framework of a Trade Deal, Keith Bradsher and Zunaira Saieed, Oct. 26, 2025. The trade discussions included steep port fees that the United States imposed on ships that were built in China or are owned by Chinese companies.Where Things Stand:
- China framework: Representatives from China and the United States met separately on Sunday to discuss trade between the two countries and came to a “very substantial framework” agreement, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Final decisions about any deal, however, will be determined by Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, who are scheduled to meet later in the week for their first face-to-face meeting since President Trump returned to the White House. Read more ›
- Asia trip: Mr. Trump arrived in Malaysia on Sunday for the start of a nearly weeklong tour of Asia. He signed separate trade agreements with Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, though none appeared to substantially change the countries’ trade relationships with the United States. They did, however, contain commitments to assist the United States in containing China, a country that many Southeast Asian nations rely on. Read more ›
- Canada tariffs: Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada appeared to avoid criticizing Mr. Trump when speaking to reporters in Malaysia just hours after the president said he was increasing tariffs against the country. “Canada stands ready to build on the progress that we had been making in our negotiations and discussions with our American counterparts,” Mr. Carney told reporters. Read more ›
Chinese and American trade negotiators said on Sunday that they had agreed to a framework of a deal on tariffs and other issues ahead of an expected meeting of the countries’ top leaders this week.“We are moving forward to the final details of the type of agreement that the leaders can review and decide if they want to conclude together,” Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, said to reporters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital.Trump Announces Tariff Increase on Canada Over Reagan Ad SpatThe ad, which will stop airing on Monday, used audio of a 1987 address by Ronald Reagan making a case against tariffs.Listen to this article · 6:14 min Learn morePresident Trump doubled down on Saturday in his feud with Canada over a television ad that used audio of former President Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs, saying he would punish the country with an additional 10 percent tariff on its goods.Mr. Trump had already suspended monthslong trade talks with Canada, the United States’ second-largest trading partner, on Thursday night because of the ad, which had been paid for by Ontario. Though the ad faithfully reproduced Mr. Reagan’s words, just in a different order, Mr. Trump has insisted it was “fraudulent” after the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute said it had made “selective” use of the five-minute original address.The latest twist in the Canada-United States saga comes as the two countries have been locked in intensive talks over lowering some U.S. tariffs on key Canadian goods. The countries’ relationship has drastically deteriorated since Mr. Trump’s election, as he has menaced the close U.S. ally with tariffs and spoken of making Canada the 51st state.U.S. Politics, Governance New York Times, In Trump-Friendly Iowa, the President’s Policies Have Hit Hard, Pooja Salhotra, Oct. 26, 2025. The state has become a stronghold for President Trump. Now, his efforts on trade, energy and immigration are squeezing farmers, disrupting labor and threatening industries.When President Trump announced a $20 billion bailout for Argentina this month, Larry Ory, 86, a farmer in Earlham, Iowa, could hardly believe it, especially after boatloads of Argentine soybeans began shipping to China, a once-critical customer for Mr. Ory’s family.For Iowans, losing China’s soybean market in the president’s trade war was only one of many economic shocks that have hit the state since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term. The cost of tractors and fertilizers have shot up with his tariffs. Labor has grown scarcer in agribusinesses. Major manufacturers have laid off workers. Even the ubiquitous wind turbines that provide income for some Iowa farmers are in the president’s sights.“Right now, we’re fighting different economic wars all at once,” said Summer Ory, 37, the wife of Mr. Ory’s grandson, Dan. The couple works in the family’s farm business. “You can sustain it one at a time, but right now it’s death by a thousand paper cuts.”Ms. Ory said she votes in every election, but she, like Mr. Ory, declined to say who she cast her ballot for last November. New York Times,Under Trump, Voice of America Is Down but Not Out, Minho Kim, Oct. 26, 2025. Buttressed by courts and support from some Republican lawmakers, federally funded newsrooms that President Trump has tried to eliminate have yet to be rendered obsolete.For nearly two years, Voice of America, a federal news agency dedicated to projecting American values around the world, provided intensive Persian-language coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas. The service regularly reached viewers inside Iran, Hamas’s state sponsor, with the kind of reporting and expert analysis that Tehran typically suppresses.But Iranians who tuned to V.O.A. in June to learn about Israel’s attack on their country got something different: a two-hour live broadcast of the U.S. military procession in Washington that the Trump administration held to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American army.“U.S. President Donald Trump has invited Americans to participate in this once-in-a-lifetime celebration that is free to the public,” an anchor declared in Persian.It was a striking moment for the storied news agency, which was founded in 1942 to fight Nazi propaganda and has won dozens of journalism awards for reporting around the world — but has been targeted for destruction by President Trump.ImageA black-and-white photograph of a person with their back to the camera, sitting in front of a control panel. In the background, two people sit in front of a sign that says “V.O.A.”More Global News New York Times,News Analysis: A Break-In That Shook France, Roger Cohen, Oct. 26, 2025. The robbery at the Louvre left behind more than broken glass. It battered the pride of a nation that is increasingly glum about itself and its direction.With the glorious Louvre museum plundered by thieves in an eight-minute heist, a former president consigned this month to a prison cell, and a recent government that lasted just 836 minutes, an end-of-era air of rot has taken hold of President Emmanuel Macron’s France.On the banks of the Seine, opposite the Académie Française, that august guardian of French civilization, tourists and passers-by rubberneck and gawk at the small balcony from which two burglars cut their way into the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon on Sunday and made off with the jewels of two French queens and two empresses.As thefts go, it was brazen to the point of mockery. A truck-mounted ladder of the kind widely used in Paris to move furniture, a few glass-breaking machine tools and a heavy dose of audacity were all that was needed to make off in broad daylight with eight crown jewels valued at over $100 million, and leave that increasingly fragile thing, French pride, shaken.The Louvre, a royal palace that became a labyrinthine museum spread over a half-mile of the right bank of the Seine, is much more than a repository of art. It is the embodiment of the tumultuous history of France, the physical expression of a nation’s restless quest for greatness, and a place widely regarded as near sacred, visited by almost nine million people last year.To violate it, and with such contemptuous ease, has been experienced as a form of ridicule at a time when five governments have succeeded one another in the space of two years.“The burglary has felt like a profound violence, an expression of national disarray and of the degradation of the state,” Aurélie Filippetti, a former culture minister, said in an interview. “The chronic neglect that produced this, despite many warnings, in the largest and most visited museum in the world, is just not serious.”Oct. 25Newsmax,Trump, Navy Plan Golden Fleet to Counter China, Theodore Bunker, Oct. 25, 2025. President Donald Trump and top Navy leaders are discussing a new generation of warships — the Golden Fleet — designed to replace many of today’s ships with bigger, more powerful vessels meant to face growing threats from China and other rivals.White House officials say Trump is directly involved in the talks and has spoken several times with Navy leaders, according to The Wall Street Journal.The new fleet could include large ships weighing up to 20,000 tons and carrying long-range missiles, possibly hypersonic weapons. Smaller ships such as corvettes and unmanned vessels would also be part of the plan.”This battleship of tomorrow is going to carry really long-range missiles,” retired Navy officer Bryan Clark said, noting that the new design focuses on range and firepower.The Navy has 287 ships, including destroyers, cruisers, carriers, and submarines. Under the Golden Fleet plan, older ships would retire.The new mix would include 280 to 300 crewed ships and many robotic vessels.White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump “has done more than anyone to bolster America’s maritime dominance, including by securing a $43 billion investment in the Working Families Tax Cut, establishing a White House Office of Shipbuilding, negotiating a historic deal with Finland to construct 11 new arctic cutters, and more.”Experts disagree on whether massive new ships are the right move. China’s navy has more ships than the U.S., according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.But some defense analysts warn that large warships could be too slow and costly to build in today’s fast-changing threat environment.The Heritage Foundation says the U.S. must also fix its shipyards and fund maintenance to stay competitive. Without steady investment, new designs won’t solve the Navy’s long-term problems.Experts also note that it could take a decade to design and build the first Golden Fleet ship, meaning it might not be ready before Trump leaves office. Smaller ships, or partnerships with foreign builders, could move faster.U.S. Law, Immigration, Public Safety, CrimeNew York Times,Trump Administration Plans a Shake-Up at ICE to Speed Deportations, Hamed Aleaziz and Tyler Pager, Oct. 25, 2025. (print ed.). The preliminary plan stems from frustration over the pace of the deportations, which are lagging behind President Trump’s demands.The Trump administration is drawing up plans for a shake-up at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with officials looking to replace several senior leaders in field offices across the country, according to three people familiar with the plans.The proposal stems from frustration in the White House and the Department of Homeland Security over the pace of deportations, which are lagging behind President Trump’s goal of more than a million by the end of the first year of his second term.The people cautioned that the plans, which involve reassigning about a half dozen field office leaders, had not been finalized. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ideas still under consideration.The proposed shake-up illustrates how the administration is still scrambling to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demand to crack down on immigration, an issue at the heart of his political agenda, even as the president and his top aides have promoted their efforts to secure the border and deport hundreds of thousands of people. Newsmax,Trump: Tech Leaders, Mayor Shifted Stance on S.F. Deployment, Ed Henry, Oct. 24-25, 2025.. President Donald Trump was geared up for a show of federal force in San Francisco, a city he’s blasted as everything wrong with liberal governance.Then conversations with some of the Bay Area’s most prominent tech leaders and the mayor changed his mind. “I got a great call from some incredible people, some friends of mine, very successful people,” Trump told reporters Thursday at the White House, specifically referencing Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable tech companies, and Marc Benioff, CEO of software company Salesforce.He said they told him San Francisco was working hard to reduce crime.”So we are holding off that surge, everybody. And we’re going to let them see if they can do it,” Trump said.He said he could change his mind if it “doesn’t work out.”Trump said the increased federal force had been planned for Saturday.He didn’t specify whether he was just referring to National Guard troops, which he had threatened to send in, or if he would also halt a potential ramp up of immigration enforcement. U.S. Governance, PoliticsNew York Times,Justice Department Will Monitor Elections in California and New Jersey, Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall, Oct. 25, 2025 (print ed.). The Trump administration said that monitors will watch polling in two states, led by Democrats, where key races or issues are on the ballot.The Trump administration said on Friday that the Justice Department will monitor polling sites in California and New Jersey ahead of the Nov. 4 election, amid requests by Republican Party officials in those states.Although election monitoring by the Justice Department is not uncommon, it will likely heighten tensions as voters weigh in on some of the nation’s most closely watched races. President Trump has pushed the Justice Department to pursue parts of his agenda, including going after his political enemies, which has eroded its traditional independence. Mr. Trump also blamed his 2020 election loss on rigged voting, although there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. New York Times,Donor Who Gave $130 Million to Pay Troops Is Reclusive Heir to Mellon Fortune, Tyler Pager, Oct. 25, 2025. Timothy Mellon is a billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump.Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter.https://Mr. Trump announced the donation on Thursday night, but he declined to name the person who provided the funds, only calling him a “patriot” and a friend. But the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the donation was private, identified him as Mr. Mellon.Shortly after departing Washington on Friday, Mr. Trump again declined to identify Mr. Mellon while talking to reporters aboard Air Force One. He only said the individual was “a great American citizen” and a “substantial man.”“He doesn’t want publicity,” Mr. Trump said as he headed to Malaysia. “He prefer that his name not be mentioned which is pretty unusual in the world I come from, and in the world of politics, you want your name mentioned.”The White House declined to comment. Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Mellon and representatives for him were unsuccessful.It remains unclear how far the donation will go toward covering the salaries of the more than 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration’s 2025 budget requested about $600 billion in total military compensation. A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.Mr. Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, is a longtime backer of Mr. Trump and gave tens of millions of dollars to groups supporting the president’s campaign. Last year, he made a $50 million donation to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, which was one of the largest single contributions ever disclosed.A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.Mr. Mellon, who lives primarily in Wyoming, keeps a low profile despite his prolific political spending. He is also a significant supporter of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also ran for president last year. Mr. Mellon donated millions to Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and has also given money to his anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense.Editors’ PicksSmart Beds Helped Them Sleep on a Cloud. Then the Cloud Crashed.A Girls Basketball Team Gave Up Its Title. Now It’s Getting National Attention.Boo! Startling Flavors and High Prices Lurk in the Trick-or-Treat Bag.The Pentagon said it accepted the donation under the “general gift acceptance authority.”“The donation was made on the condition that it be used to offset the cost of service members’ salaries and benefits,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement.The Daily Caller, D.C. Del. Norton, Reportedly In ‘Early Stages Of Dementia,’ Scammed By Suspects Masquerading As Home Cleaning Crew, Anthony Iafrate, Oct. 25, 2025. House Oversight Democrats Hold Discussion On Supreme Court Ethics.Longtime Democratic District of Columbia Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton was scammed by individuals claiming to work for an HVAC company, according to a police report describing the 88-year-old lawmaker as being in the “early stages of dementia.”Norton, who has served as Washington’s nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives since 1991, has repeatedly stated she is running for a 19th term in 2026 despite concerns over her age. Scammers came to the delegate’s residence Thursday afternoon and charged over $4,000 to her credit card for cleaning services they did not carry out, according to a police report obtained by NBC4 Washington.The internal document reportedly described the incident’s “complainant” or victim as “Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC) 88 years old, Black Woman, suffers early stages of dementia.”The Democrat personally allowed the group claiming to be HVAC personnel into her home in D.C.’s Southeast quadrant, according to the outlet. An unspecified amount of time later, a person identified on the report as Norton’s “caretaker/power of attorney” spotted the supposed cleaning crew on a doorbell camera.Cartelville TextThat supposed caretaker, identified as Jaqueline Pelt on a separate public incident report, was reportedly not at the delegate’s residence when she first spotted the strange individuals on camera. Pelt then left to go there, realizing Norton’s card had been charged, after which she notified police, according to the outlet. (RELATED: Eleanor Holmes Norton Can’t Walk A Few Feet Without Help)An arrest was not made following the incident, NBC4 Washington reported.The Federal Election Commission (FEC) lists Pelt as the treasurer for Citizens for Eleanor Holmes Norton, the principal campaign committee supporting the 18-term D.C. delegate’s 2026 reelection bid. Pelt is also Norton’s longtime friend and supporter, according to NBC4 Washington.Norton’s office denied that the elderly Democrat has a caretaker but did not directly answer the question of whether she had been diagnosed with the “early stages of dementia,” the outlet reported.“The medical diagnosis included in the police report was based on an assumption the reporting officer was unqualified to make,” a spokesperson for the delegate told NBC4 Washington in a statement. The spokesperson, however, still declined to confirm or deny the diagnosis was accurate, noting the congressional office does not comment on matters of Norton’s health.“Congresswoman Norton doesn’t have a caretaker. A longtime employee and friend serves as the house manager, residing at a separate address,” the statement to NBC4 Washington continued. The manager reportedly “oversees all maintenance services, so [Norton] initially assumed her staff had arranged the visit and provided her credit card for payment.”“Upon notifying her house manager, who reviewed Ring doorbell footage and confirmed that no such appointment had been scheduled, the incident was immediately reported to the police,” the spokesperson reportedly continued.Norton’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for additional comment.Norton is the oldest member of the House and is several months older than Republican Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, 87, the lower chamber’s oldest voting member. (RELATED: ‘Retirement Home’: Ron DeSantis Teams Up With Democrat To Push For Congressional Term Limits)In September, Norton seemed to need assistance from a woman appearing to be a staffer to simply walk away from an outdoor podium. Norton had just given a speech blasting President Donald Trump for purportedly using “D.C. residents as props in a political play.”“Yeah, I’m gonna run for re-election,” Norton told NBC News on June 25. The same day, a spokesperson from her office told Axios “no decision has been made” on the matter.New York Times,News Analysis: Keeping the House Absent, Johnson Marginalizes Congress and Himself, Annie Karni, Oct. 25, 2025. The speaker’s decision to hold the House in an indefinite hiatus during the shutdown is his latest move to diminish the role of the legislative branch — and his own post.It has been over a month since there has been a policy debate or vote on the House floor. Spending legislation is not being considered. Oversight hearings are on hold until further notice.Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to put the House on an indefinite hiatus that is now stretching into its second month while the government is shut down is the latest in a series of moves he has made that have diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership at a critical moment.It’s an approach born of political expedience that could have far-reaching consequences for an institution that has already ceded much of its power to President Trump. And Mr. Johnson, right, who without the president’s backing wields little influence over his own members, has chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump, a break with many speakers of the past who sought in their own ways to act more as a governing partner with the president than as his underling.“I’m the speaker and the president,” Mr. Trump has joked, according to two people who heard the remark and relayed it on the condition of anonymity because of concern about sharing private conversations with him.Mr. Johnson has done little in recent weeks to contest the point.More Global News Politico, Ireland elects left-wing president in anti-government landslide, Shawn Pogatchnik, Oct. 25, 2025. Catherine Connolly’s lop-sided victory to be Ireland’s next head of state was accompanied by a surge in vandalized ballots from right-wing voters.Independent socialist Catherine Connolly swept to a landslide victory Saturday to become Ireland’s next president, dealing a record-breaking rebuke to the two center-ground parties of government.Jubilant supporters of the 68-year-old Connolly, a lawmaker from the western city of Galway, embraced and kissed her as final results from Friday’s election were announced at the Dublin Castle count center.In her victory speech, Connolly struck an immediate note of unity. She stood side by side with Ireland’s government leaders — and pledged to challenge the far right and its anti-immigrant agenda.“Together we can shape a new republic that values everybody, that values and champions diversity … and the new people that have come to our country,” she said. “I will be an inclusive president for all of you.”Connolly won a record 63.4 percent of valid votes. Heather Humphreys of the government coalition party Fine Gael finished a distant second with 29.5 percent.Connolly’s triumph shattered the previous record set in 1959 when Eamon de Valera, the towering figure of 20th-century Irish politics, won his first term as president with 56.3 percent support.On Nov. 11, Connolly will succeed her fellow Galway socialist Michael D. Higgins, Ireland’s president since 2011, who was constitutionally barred from seeking a third seven-year term.Finishing in third and last place Saturday was Jim Gavin of the largest government party, Fianna Fáil, who won barely 7 percent of votes. Gavin, a political novice hand-picked by Prime Minister Micheál Martin, remained on the official ballot despite quitting the race midway after admitting he had pocketed €3,300 in excess rent from a tenant.Connolly won, in no small part, thanks to backing from Ireland’s five left-wing parties, most crucially Sinn Féin. All stood aside to give her a clean run on an anti-government platform, a political first for the normally fractious left.While the left celebrated from Dublin Castle to Galway, Ireland’s disgruntled conservatives left their own mark on the election — by vandalizing their ballots in unprecedented numbers.More than 200,000 ballots — or about one of every eight cast — had to be discarded. Many voters had written in the names of their own invalid choices, or drawn disparaging X marks across all three candidates. Others defaced their ballots, often with anti-immigrant messages expressed in nativist or racist terms.Their alienation reflects how the government parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, since the 1990s have largely ditched their previous bonds with Catholic conservatism and have become, like Connolly and the wider left, socially progressive and welcoming to immigrants.A Catholic conservative, Maria Steen, narrowly failed to qualify for the ballot, falling two short of the required backing from 20 lawmakers. Mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, who often denounces immigrants in his social media posts, tapped out after attracting virtually no official support.Kevin Cunningham, managing director of the polling firm Ireland Thinks, called the volume of spoiled votes “enormous.” He found that more than two-thirds of protesting voters had expressed support for Steen.The final week of campaigning coincided with one of the biggest flare-ups of racist sentiment since downtown Dublin was wracked by rioting in November 2023.On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, crowds of up to 2,000 people clashed with riot police protecting Citywest, a hotel and conference center southwest of Dublin that has been turned into the state’s biggest shelter for asylum seekers. That area registered one of the highest rates of spoiled ballots.And on Friday, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who had opted not to seek the presidency herself, was subjected to vulgar threats from an anti-immigration activist as she canvassed in her central Dublin constituency for Connolly. That man, who posted video footage of his verbal assault on McDonald and other Sinn Féin canvassers, was arrested Saturday.Humphreys — who had stepped into the breach when Fine Gael’s original candidate, former European Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, quit the race citing health problems — conceded defeat hours before the official result. Humphreys, too, expressed worries about the rising level of social media-driven harassment.Politico, Russian envoy to meet with Steve Witkoff in Miami after Trump sanctioned Moscow, Diana Nerozzi, Oct. 24-25, 2025. Witkoff has been the leader in executing Trump’s agenda with Russia.Kirill Dmitriev speaks to a member of the media.Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, speaks to a member of the media on the sidelines of the U.S.-Russia meeting at Riyadh’s Diriyah Palace on Feb. 18, 2025. | Pool photo by Evelyn HocksteinBy 10/24/2025 02:45 PM EDT Top U.S. and Russia envoys plan to meet in Miami on Saturday, despite talks having taken a downward turn this week.Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special presidential representative for investment and economic cooperation, is flying to Florida to meet with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, a White House official confirmed to POLITICO.“Arrived in the U.S. to continue the U.S.–Russia dialogue — visit planned a while ago based on an invitation from the U.S. side,” Dmitriev wrote on X. “Such dialogue is vital for the world and must continue with the full understanding of Russia’s position and respect for its national interests.”Until recently, Witkoff has taken the lead in executing Trump’s agenda with Russia. He has met with Putin inside the Kremlin multiple times and Russia is known to favor engaging with him over others.But after Trump announced last week that he and Putin agreed to a second summit in Budapest, he put Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of preparing for the meetings. Those plans quickly stalled following a call between Rubio, who is far more of a Russia hawk than Witkoff, and his Russian counterpart on Monday.With Trump soon departing for Asia, Witkoff is again on the front lines of negotiating. Dmitriev, as the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, has particular interests in establishing further U.S.-Russia business relations.The meeting comes after a series of tense exchanges that culminated in Trump issuing a package of sanctions against Russia, marking a drastic change in his foreign policy approach that had so far focused on verbally coaxing Putin to end the war in Ukraine.The sanctions hit two of Russia’s oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, and resulted in outrage from the Kremlin, with Putin calling it an “unfriendly act.”“I just felt it was time. We waited a long time,” Trump said Wednesday on why he issued the sanctions.Oct. 24 Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 23, 2025 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 24, 2025. Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez of NBC News reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rush to get new recruits onto the street has meant they have pushed into their training program more than 200 people who have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, fail drug testing, or don’t meet the academic or physical requirements.The budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—included more than $170 billion over four years for immigration and border security. The law tripled ICE’s annual budget, giving it “more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined,” according to Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy law and policy institute.Part of that money was to hire about 10,000 deportation officers. As O’Herron notes, a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that to hire 10,000 officers would require vetting 500,000 applicants. Currently, law enforcement agencies have been having trouble finding enough applicants. O’Herron notes that ICE can bypass the usual requirements for federal employees, but in the past, when the government tried to hire 5,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers quickly, the result was dramatically higher corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling operations.In August, ICE began to offer a $50,000 signing bonus and got rid of its age limits. To fill the ranks, Ainsley and Martinez note, ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. They report that nearly half of those dismissed from ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups.Sociologist Ian Carillo called attention to a 2020 article by political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel looking into why secret police agents are often “surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect.” By examining the 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina from 1975 to 1983, they discovered that the ranks of secret police are filled by those who perform poorly in merit-based systems. Facing firing for their poor performance, they turn to more burdensome secret police work.Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker established the “Illinois Accountability Commission” to compile evidence against federal agents who have harassed, intimidated, brutalized, and detained American citizens and legal residents in Illinois. “None of this is about crime or safety,” Pritzker said. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement and judicial warrants…. Under normal circumstances,” he said, “federal agency supervisors and inspectors general would enforce proper legal procedures and protocols and hold accountable those who violate them.” But Trump has fired 17 inspectors general and installed cronies at the Department of Justice, while MAGA congress members refuse to hold hearings or conduct oversight. Administration officials are acting as if they are “immune from investigation or accountability,” Pritzker said “They are not.”The commission will create an official public record of “[e]very instance of abuse, or law-breaking, or…violations of rights.” While “states have limited abilities against federal immunity,” Pritzker said, “we must remind everyone that…[t]here will come a time where people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law. When the time comes, Illinois will have the testimony and the records needed to pursue justice to its fullest extent.”Dictators also enforce loyalty by protecting those who have been found guilty of crimes in the nation’s nonpartisan justice system. Last week Trump commuted the sentence of former representative George Santos (R-NY), ending his seven-year sentence for fraud with just three months served and removing his obligation to pay $373,749.97 to the victims of his crimes. Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 people, far more than most presidents do in four years.Those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol received most of the president’s clemency, but former assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Toobin notes in an essay for the New York Times that Trump has been free with pardons or commutations for criminal supporters. Toobin notes Trump’s social media post after commuting Santos’s sentence: “Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Today, Trump announced a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, paid a $50 million fine, and served nearly four months in prison. His company paid a $4.3 billion penalty. Gram Slattery and Chris Prentice of Reuters note that in May, Binance accepted the stablecoin USD1, put out by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, as payment for an investment in Binance made by an investment firm from Abu Dhabi. The deal enables World Liberty Financial to keep any profits from the $2 billion investment, likely worth tens of millions of dollars a year, and it significantly boosted the venture.Trump’s full and unconditional pardon enables Zhao to return to the business. On social media, Zhao posted that he was “deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.” He added: “Will do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto.”This afternoon, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the pardon and whether it had anything to do with Zhao’s involvement in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture.“Which one? Who is that?…. The recent one? Yes, the? I believe we’re talking about the same person because I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know, he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that—are you talking about the crypto person?—A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did, well, you don’t know much about crypto. You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news. But let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But I’ve been told a lot of support. He had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime. It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, uh, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”The White House today released a list of those donating to Trump’s ballroom that he intends will replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. The list includes the Altria Group Inc., Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Coinbase, Comcast Corporation, J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Hard Rock International, Google, HP Inc., Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Microsoft, NextEra Energy Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc., Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether America, Union Pacific Railroad, Adelson Family Foundation, Stefan E. Brodie, Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edward and Shari Glazer, Harold Hamm, Benjamin Leon Jr., The Lutnick Family, The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Konstantin Sokolov, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher, Paolo Tiramani, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss.Economist Robert Reich notes that the list includes “Google, whose CEO thanked Trump for [the] ‘resolution’ of an antitrust case[;] Palantir, which has lucrative contracts with ICE[; and] Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, who would profit from Trump’s regulatory rollbacks for private equity.” Reich commented: “Pay-to-play.”By definition, those who could not make it in a merit-based system and who are dependent on the good will of an authoritarian leader have neither the skill nor the priorities to deliver good government for the country.Today economist Paul Krugman, right, noted that the administration’s $20 billion gambit to save Trump ally Javier Milei’s government in Argentina, with another $20 billion in the works, is a visceral wake-up call for parts of rural America in a way that cuts to social welfare programs have not been, despite the fact that rural areas depend on those programs more than urban areas do. Now Trump is talking about importing beef from Argentina. Farmers were already upset that Trump’s tariff war ended Chinese imports of U.S. soybeans; now ranchers are outraged at Trump’s focus on Argentina rather than on Americans.Trump responded by insulting them: “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years—Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that….”But someone in the White House must have paid attention to yesterday’s news that a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonpartisan independent research organization, found that 56% of Americans agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” while only 41% see him as “a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”Today, after threats to send what he called a “surge”—a military term—of agents to San Francisco, Trump announced he had changed his mind. Trump attributed his change of course to “friends of mine who live in the area.”On November 4, 2025, California voters will go to the polls to vote on Proposition 50, which would redraw the state’s congressional map to create more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 in response to Texas’s new Republican-skewed maps.ICE agents storming the streets of San Francisco two weeks before the vote would likely have added votes in favor of Prop 50. Trump Begins Demolishing East Wing of the White House to Make Space for $250 Million Ballroom.Paul Krugman via Substack,Political-Economy Commentary: Trump’s Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 24, 2025. Tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand.I assume that everyone reading this newsletter knows that Donald Trump is in the process of destroying a large part of the White House so he can construct a 90,000 square foot gold-encrusted ballroom. And this is being done without any historical or architectural review, treating a national treasure that belongs to the people as if it were his own personal property. In true Trumpian style, this act of vandalism is being paid for by large corporate donors — mostly tech and crypto companies — seeking to buy Trump’s favor. I am sure there will be a Trump meme-coin dispenser installed on every table.But let me digress momentarily from the norm-breaking, the outrageous sense of entitlement, and the implicit corruption to talk about Trump’s execrable taste, as shown by the renderings of the inside of the ballroom. Yes, taste.Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. So why do I want to talk about Trump’s appalling design sense?But these aren’t separate issues, because tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.I’ve read uncountably many articles about Trump and his motivations, and I continue to think that one of the most insightful is a piece by Peter York, published early in Trump’s first term, titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic.” York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles.York was shown photos of a New York apartment, at first not knowing who owned it. His reaction:I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold …The apartment was, of course, Donald Trump’s. The purpose of all this excess wasn’t personal pleasure: dictators’ palaces generally look very uncomfortable. Instead, it was to projecta kind of power that bypasses all the boring checks and balances of collaboration and mutual responsibility and first-among-equals. It is about a single dominant personality.So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?This is all deeply alien to American tradition. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings. Yet the style of these monuments and public buildings is generally one of restrained neoclassicism meant to evoke the Roman Republic – an ideal of a republic of equals reflected in law and norms as well as architecture. Anything approximating the Louis XIV style of Trump would have been considered monarchical and autocratic by the Founding Fathers.So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.One final thought: According to social media, many men are obsessed with the Roman Empire. I’m not one of them, partly because I’ve read Patricia Crone’s classic Pre-industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, so I know that even at the height of its glory the Roman Empire would have looked incredibly poor and shabby by 21st-century standards.But I now find myself frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship. For, in essence, Roman emperors were dictators, regardless of the fancy trimmings.What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.The modern parallels are obvious. Here’s a photo of Jeff Bezos’s yacht: But back to Trump’s demolition of the White House — because that’s what it is. This isn’t a remodeling or building an addition, it’s a teardown. It may seem like a trivial story, but it’s a highly visual metaphor for the way MAGA is tearing down almost everything good about our country. And that ballroom’s hideousness is an equally good metaphor for all the political ugliness that lies in our future.More On U.S. Governance, PoliticsNew York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: Pentagon Accepts $130 Million Donation to Help Pay Troops During, Staff Reports, Oct. 24, 2025.
- Shutdown pay: The U.S. military is accepting a private donation of $130 million to help pay the 1.3 million active duty troops during the government shutdown, the Defense Department said Friday. The unusual move could violate a law prohibiting federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services. President Trump declined to name the donor but called him as a “patriot” and friend.
- Boat strikes: The U.S. military is repositioning warships, including an aircraft carrier, and planes to waters off Latin America, the Pentagon said Friday, calling their relocation an effort to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States.” The announcement came just after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the military had killed six aboard a boat he asserted was carrying drugs.
- James arraignment: Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, pleaded not guilty in federal court in Virginia in a prosecution Mr. Trump demanded over the objections of career prosecutors. A tentative trial date was set for Jan. 26.
New York Times,Trump’s Son Is Poised to Profit From Pentagon Drone Proposal, Eric Lipton, Oct. 24, 2025. A small company that has been manufacturing motors domestically for only a few weeks and has Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser won a parts order from the Army.It is a bold plan. A team of defense industry start-ups envisions a new fleet of miniaturized, unmanned aircraft carriers stuffed with autonomous killer drones, antiaircraft missiles and torpedoes that will take on just about any enemy at sea.And this group pitching the Pentagon comes with an unusual sweetener: close financial ties to President Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is positioned to profit considerably if this ambitious but unproven venture succeeds.The proposal by the two companies — Puerto Rico-based Red Cat, with drone parts supplied by Unusual Machines, based in Orlando, Fla. — reflects the unprecedented role the president’s sons are playing, not only as supporters of their father’s policies but also as investors in ventures selling to agencies their father controls.Unusual Machines gave Donald Trump Jr. 200,000 shares of its stock late last year in return for his help as an adviser. The shares are now worth about $2.6 million. Though officials at the company and the Pentagon say Mr. Trump’s son has not reached out to the Defense Department on their behalf, he has relationships with some high-level figures there.Donald Trump Jr. helped screen candidates for top jobs at the Pentagon on behalf of his father after the election. He is also an important and unusually vocal ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, appearing at events with him at least twice this year.Don Jr., as he is broadly known, through these two defense contractors and others he is investing in, has become part of the famed Beltway military-industrial complex, even as his father is setting policy priorities that are likely to benefit the companies he has invested in.In a recent podcast, Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that as he helped screen potential candidates for Pentagon positions, he pushed to find someone open to investing more money in drones.“Everyone was like an old F-15 pilot, and that’s incredible,” he said last month on “Triggered With Don Jr.,” his podcast, referring to candidates for top Air Force jobs and the Boeing-made fighter jets he claimed many of them once flew. “But they sort of want to go with what they know, which is, ‘We’re fighter pilots.’ But they are better served with a drone that costs a tiny fraction of that of a plane.”The push for a different approach reflects the nature of how warfare is changing, as both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war have relied heavily on drones. Industry analysts have projected that overall spending on commercial drone systems in North America could reach $21 billion in the next five years, up from $11 billion last year. New York Times,Live Updates: Trump Cuts Off Trade Talks With Canada, Ana Swanson and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Oct. 24, 2025. President Trump expressed anger over an ad that featured President Ronald Reagan criticizing the effects of tariffs in 1987. The move added uncertainty to U.S.-Canadian relations.President Trump said late Thursday that he was terminating negotiations with Canada over the high tariffs that he imposed on its steel, auto parts and other major exports, adding new uncertainty to the relationship with America’s second-biggest trading partner.On Truth Social, the president said he was ending all trade negotiations with Canada because of a video ad, paid for by the province of Ontario, that featured former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.“TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”Mr. Trump claimed that the ad was fake and said that it had been placed “to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” which is currently considering a legal challenge to many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.But the quotes are drawn from a radio address that Mr. Reagan gave in April of 1987, in which he urged Congress not to pursue protectionist policies against Japan and gave a blistering critique of the economic effects of tariffs. Although quotes are taken from different parts of Mr. Reagan’s speech, there is no indication that they have been altered.New York Times,Hakeem Jeffries Gives Mamdani Last-Minute Endorsement for N.Y.C. Mayor, Nicholas Fandos and Jeffery C. Mays, Oct. 24, 2025. Mr. Jeffries, the House minority leader, had resisted backing Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, for months. But his support provides a late boost.The endorsement by Mr. Jeffries, right, a Brooklyn Democrat, is more meaningful than most. A national party leader, he is also one of the city’s most prominent Black politicians and has been a sharp critic of the Democratic Socialists of America, which counts Mr. Mamdani as a member.In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Jeffries acknowledged that the two men had “areas of principled disagreement.” But he said that Mr. Mamdani had won “a free and fair” Democratic primary and emphasized that the party needed to unite against an “existential” threat from President Trump.“Zohran Mamdani has relentlessly focused on addressing the affordability crisis and explicitly committed to being a mayor for all New Yorkers, including those who do not support his candidacy,” Mr. Jeffries wrote.He added: “In that spirit, I support him and the entire citywide Democratic ticket in the general election.”The endorsement came in written form just a day before early voting is set to begin. People familiar with his thinking said that Mr. Jeffries had planned to announce the endorsement earlier but pushed it back because of the ongoing government shutdown.New York Times,Trump Opens Pristine Alaska Wilderness to Drilling in Long-Running Feud, Maxine Joselow, Oct. 24, 2025 (print ed.). The Interior Department also said it would allow a contentious road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska.The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States.The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.During his first term, President Trump signed a 2017 tax bill that required two oil and gas lease sales in the coastal plain, but the Biden administration later suspended and then canceled those leases.On Thursday, the Interior Department said it would hold an oil and gas lease sale in the coastal plain this winter. The agency also said it would reinstate seven oil leases in the refuge that the state of Alaska acquired in 2021 but that had been canceled two years later by the Biden administration.“This land should and will be supporting responsible oil and gas leasing,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during an “Alaska Day” event at the Interior Department’s headquarters, which came even as many Interior employees were furloughed during the ongoing government shutdown.Mr. Burgum also announced that the Interior Department had finalized a deal that would allow a contentious gravel road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska. And he reiterated that the agency would greenlight an industrial road that would cut through pristine wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska.Taken together, the decisions “represent a clear and unified message, which is Alaska is open for business,” Mr. Burgum said.Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised to increase Arctic drilling as part of his plans to expand U.S. oil and gas production and achieve “American energy dominance.”Yet major oil companies have previously shown little interest in drilling in the refuge largely because of the great expense and some concerns about public relations. It remains unclear whether they will bid in the upcoming auction.Editors’ PicksWolfgang Puck’s Spago Had Star Power in the ’80s. Does It Still Shine?Larry David Takes the Stage for an Amusing but Not-So-Revealing ChatThe Dessert That Changed My LifeAdding to these challenges, some major banks have committed to not finance drilling in the refuge. And environmental groups are expected to file lawsuits to try to block the lease sale.“We will fight any attempt to industrialize the fragile coastal plain of the Arctic refuge and every option is on the table,” Kristen Miller, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, wrote in an email.The question of whether to drill in this remote refuge has fueled fierce political and legal battles for nearly a half-century.In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which designated the majority of the refuge as wilderness and effectively barred drilling there. But congressional Republicans fought to end the ban, and they saw an opening in 2017, when they passed a tax bill that required two lease sales in the coastal plain by the end of 2024.Both of those lease sales were widely considered to be flops. The first auction did not garner any bids from large oil companies, and seven of the nine leases were acquired by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state agency that promotes economic activity. The second sale did not attract a single bidder.U.S. Law, Crime, Courts Letitia James has only once reported rental income associated with the house. In 2020, she said that she had made between $1,000 and $5,000 from it (New York Times photo by Gregg Vigliotti).All Rise, ‘No fear’: Letitia James pleads not guilty in Trump-ordered prosecution, Adam Klasfeld, Oct. 24, 2025. The New York Attorney General will stand trial on Jan. 26, 2026, if she doesn’t succeed in dismissing her case before then.New York Attorney General Letitia James pleaded not guilty to two fraud-related charges in a Donald Trump-ordered prosecution.A federal judge scheduled her trial for Jan. 26, 2026. At a press conference following her arraignment, James told reporters: “There’s no fear today, no fear,” according to CNN.After successfully obtaining a ruling that Trump fraudulently inflated his financial statements by billions of dollars, James faces allegations of a much smaller $18,933 fraud — or roughly $50 per month — involving a property she owns in Norfolk, Va. Career prosecutors initially refused to take the case. Then, Trump pressured former U.S. Attorney Eric Siebert out of his position over that refusal and replaced him with his former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience before pursuing the case alone.The day before the hearing, James moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that Halligan was unlawfully appointed. Before becoming a Supreme Court justice, then-Justice Department attorney Samuel Alito wrote an Office of Legal Counsel opinion finding that two interim U.S. Attorneys cannot be appointed consecutively, as Siebert and Halligan have. (James cited Alito’s 1986 opinion in her written arguments.) “Because there is no evidence that any other government attorney played a role in securing the indictment, the Court must dismiss this case for lack of jurisdiction if it determines that Ms. Halligan was not a proper representative of the United States,” attorney Abbe Lowell wrote for James.Lowell also asked U.S. District Judge Jamar K. Walker, a Biden appointee, to order the government to preserve James’s right to a fair trial by forbidding extrajudicial disclosures to the media after Halligan sent encrypted text messages to Lawfare’s senior editor Anna Bower, in what the brief calls “an unusual and improper occurrence.”“In initiating this contact, Ms. Halligan—the lead prosecutor on this case as of the date of this filing—commented on the credibility and general strength of the evidence presented to the grand jury,” Lowell wrote. “She also commented, more generally, on the purported strength of the case she was bringing, complained about the New York Times’ coverage of a certain witness’s grand jury testimony, and stated the article did not convey a “full representation” of what took place before the grand jury. These extrajudicial statements and prejudicial disclosures by any prosecutor, let alone one purporting to be the U.S. Attorney, run afoul of and violate the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Code of Federal Regulations, this Court’s Local Rules, various rules of ethical and professional responsibility, and DOJ’s Justice Manual.”The New York attorney general’s motion to disqualify Halligan reportedly will be combined with former FBI director James Comey’s similar motion.New York Times,News Analysis: The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law, Charlie Savage, Oct. 24, 2025. The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.New York Times, Letitia James Case Shows Ruthlessness of Justice Dept. in Trump’s Grip, Oct. 24, 2025. For the Trump administration, creating an aura of criminality around the indicted New York attorney general — through public scrutiny of her and her relatives — may be as important as a conviction.The Justice Department’s indictment of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is merely one part of a multipronged campaign that is helping define retribution in President Trump’s second term.Over the summer, Ms. James’s office received a criminal subpoena demanding information about her yearslong civil investigation into the president. This month, a Virginia grand jury handed up charges accusing her of bank fraud and false statements to financial institutions stemming from her mortgage paperwork.And in recent days, Trump-aligned media outlets have run scathing headlines about her relatives’ criminal records, amplifying the specter of wrongdoing created by the Justice Department. On Friday, Ms. James, who has said the charges have no merit, will appear in a Virginia court at the defendant’s table, formally facing allegations instead of pursuing them.Mr. Trump’s crusade against those he believes wronged him may once have been interpreted as a tit-for-tat effort to go after his enemies. But it is becoming clear that creating the trappings of criminality — the headlines, the scrutiny, the reputational damage — is as much a part of the formula as any realistic chance of conviction.The escalating campaign against Ms. James shows the power and utility of a Justice Department in the grip of a vengeful president: It can embarrass, distract and weaken political rivals and do favors for Mr. Trump, who is still seething over the many investigations that targeted him — and at times his family — both in and out of office.The disruption and expense of a legal defense could constrain one of Mr. Trump’s most potent adversaries. Ms. James is one of the leaders of a coalition of Democratic attorneys general that has sued him 40 times to protect the interests of their constituents against the administration’s policies.The criminal investigation into her office, meanwhile, could undermine the remaining consequences of the civil fraud lawsuit she brought against him. Though a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty assessed by a New York judge last year was recently thrown out by an appeals court, other punishments — including an independent monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s business operations — are still in place.Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former U.S. attorney during the Obama administration, said that prosecutors have traditionally been trained to treat the subjects of investigations and defendants with respect, to protect the bedrock American principle that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.“When you have a president saying they’re guilty as hell before they are charged, it seems like the process is working in reverse,” she said. “It seems that humiliation is the goal instead of humiliation being a collateral consequence of a conviction. It’s the tail wagging the dog.”A White House spokeswoman referred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.The Trump administration has accused several of the president’s enemies of mortgage fraud, but the case against Ms. James is the first of those allegations to result in an indictment. And cases involving home mortgages, by their very nature, drag defendants’ private lives into the public eye for months, long before a jury can evaluate whether a crime was committed.Such charges could be a potent weapon against almost anyone the administration sees fit to target.Criminal allegations, inevitably, set off intrigue and public scrutiny of defendants. In the past, federal prosecutors have generally sought to avoid stoking those fires.The Trump administration has been different. After the previous top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia told officials that he did not believe Ms. James’s conduct merited charges, he was pushed out and replaced with a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, Lindsey Halligan. Ms. Halligan then took the case before a grand jury, overruling career prosecutors who had expressed skepticism.New York Times,Letitia James to Appear in Court as Battle Over Trump-Urged Prosecution Begins, Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 24, 2025. The New York attorney general, indicted by President Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, is expected to plead not guilty in her arraignment on Friday.New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is set to appear in federal court in Norfolk, Va., on Friday morning for an arraignment where she is expected to plead not guilty to charges lodged by the Trump administration that she misled a bank to get more favorable mortgage terms.The hearing for Ms. James, her first court appearance since being indicted this month, is a routine opening procedure in a prosecution that is anything but. How her case, which was pursued at President Trump’s demand over the objections of career prosecutors, plays out could hold signals for the president’s wider efforts to seek retribution against his perceived enemies.Ms. James has said the charges against her — one count of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement to a financial institution — are “baseless.” Her indictment, she has said, is “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system.”Ms. James stands accused of lying about her purpose in buying a house in Virginia in 2020. Prosecutors say that while she said the house would be a secondary residence, she in fact used it as a “rental investment property,” renting it to a family of three.But Ms. James’s great-niece has lived in the house since 2020, and testified to a Norfolk grand jury that she does not pay rent. Ms. James has reported only $1,350 in rent from the property on her tax forms.Career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who had reviewed the evidence had concluded it did not support criminal charges, but the president abruptly forced out the U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the office and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who had no prosecutorial experience.Soon after her appointment, Ms. Halligan secured a grand jury indictment against Ms. James and, in an unrelated case, false statement and obstruction charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Mr. Trump had publicly implored Justice Department officials to charge Ms. James and Mr. Comey with crimes, calling them “guilty as hell.” Both have been longtime antagonists of the president, and Ms. James had won a civil case for business fraud against him in New York.Arraignments are generally brief proceedings for the defendant to enter a formal plea. But the day will also mark the beginning of Mr. Lowell’s efforts to persuade the judge to dismiss the case before it can go to trial.On the eve of her court appearance, lawyers for Ms. James told the court that they intend to challenge the legality of Ms. Halligan’s appointment, as was already done by Mr. Comey’s legal team. The filing by Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, suggests both those efforts could be joined into a single case for a judge to hear.Separately, Ms. James’s lawyer also asked the judge overseeing her case to warn Ms. Halligan about making any extrajudicial comments about the case. Earlier this month, Ms. Halligan sent a series of argumentative texts to a reporter at Lawfare, a national security website. In the texts, Ms. Halligan pushed back against some descriptions of the evidence, arguing that her case is stronger than some of the reporting would suggest.“These extrajudicial statements and prejudicial disclosures by any prosecutor, let alone one purporting to be the U.S. attorney, run afoul of and violate the federal rules of criminal procedure, the code of federal regulations, this court’s local rules, various rules of ethical and professional responsibility and D.O.J.’s justice manual,” Mr. Lowell wrote.He urged the judge to intervene “to prevent any further disclosures by government attorneys and agents of investigative and case materials, and statements to the media and public.”New York Times,Was a Sports Betting Scandal Inevitable?Jenny Vrentas, Oct. 24, 2025. As legalized betting has become ubiquitous in American sport, the opportunities for cheating, like those outlined in a recent federal indictment, have multiplied.The signs that gambling has become embedded in American sports culture are impossible to miss. Sportsbooks have set up shop at stadiums, televised games include prods to bet during the action and star athletes like LeBron James promote gambling companies as “talent ambassadors.”In the seven years since a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for legalized sports betting, the major U.S. sports leagues have shed any hesitations they had about gambling. They are now profiting — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — from partnerships with sports betting companies.Team owners have made the calculation that the financial upside is worth “the potential expected likely loss if some form of scandal were to come up,” said Marc Edelman, a law professor and director of sports ethics at Baruch College in New York. “But who’s to say whether or not that’s a rational conclusion?”That is the question that American sports leagues are now reckoning with after federal authorities on Thursday revealed details in a wide-ranging criminal sports betting investigation nicknamed “Nothing but Bet.”Federal authorities charged six people — including Terry Rozier, a current N.B.A. player, and Damon Jones, a former N.B.A. player and coach — with participating in a scheme that they said used inside information to set up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent sports bets. Another N.B.A. player, Jontay Porter, previously pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy as part of what officials said was the same gambling scheme and has been permanently banned by the league.The impact of the sports betting case remains to be seen and could be minimal. The volume of fraudulent wagers described in the indictment is a small fraction of the multibillion-dollar sports betting industry, and the N.B.A.’s immense popularity could insulate it from the impact of what is, to this point, a relatively isolated scandal.Still, the fraudulent-betting case challenges the very thing that makes sports magical and pulls in millions of live viewers even in an on-demand era: the belief that anything can happen. Among the examples detailed in the indictment: Authorities said Rozier, while playing for the Charlotte Hornets in 2023, had told associates that he would “prematurely” remove himself from a game. His associates then placed bets on his underperforming the oddsmakers’ lines on his individual performance.Global NewsNew York Times,Rebuilding Israeli-Held Parts of Gaza: Workable or Another U.S. Pipe Dream?David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 24, 2025. There are many questions about whether the idea is feasible or doomed from the outset.Vice President JD Vance and Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of President Trump, both said this week that the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip did not necessarily have to wait until Hamas was disarmed or no longer a threat in the territory.A cease-fire that came into effect earlier this month divides Gaza along the so-called yellow line — between the eastern, inland half under the control of the Israeli military and the Hamas-controlled part of the enclave. Reconstruction could begin very soon in the Israeli-controlled part, the two Americans, who were on visits to Israel, told reporters.“No reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas still controls,” Mr. Kushner said on Tuesday. But he spoke of building “a new Gaza” on the Israeli-held side.The idea has great appeal to Israel’s supporters: a chance to create a model Palestinian community with no rockets or tunnels that could threaten Israel.The approach is reminiscent of the improbable “Riviera of the Middle East” plan that Mr. Trump once imagined for a Gaza depopulated of Palestinians.Keeping Hamas operatives out of a rebuilt swath of Gaza could entail such heavy-handed security that it may look like another military occupation, experts said.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.A key question here is whether such a reconstruction effort could truly take root in a way that points toward a more durable peace or would be seen as merely a back door to another Israeli military occupation. Arab countries will also be wary of being involved in a plan that could be seen as aiding an occupation. President Trump with President Javier Milei of Argentina at the White House on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills). Politico,Trump’s big Argentina bet heads to the ballot box, Oct. 24, 2025. The extraordinary U.S. intervention is the latest window into Trump’s often-chaotic, loyalty-based approach to geopolitics.Javier Milei and Donald Trump shake hands.President Javier Milei’s sweeping economic agenda is on the line when Argentina holds midterm elections this weekend. Also hanging in the balance: U.S. credibility in the region after President Donald Trump sought to throw his political ally a multibillion-dollar lifeline.The results of Sunday’s vote will shape the policies that Milei will be able to get through the legislature, a crucial piece of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s hopes that the country will finally break free from its decades-long cycle of debt. Beyond that, the outcome will signal whether Milei’s “chainsaw” austerity program will have staying power past 2027, when the president himself faces reelection.Bessent has framed the U.S. entanglement in Argentina as part of a broader push to reassert American economic power in Latin America and to counter China’s growing clout across the continent. A setback for Milei could severely undercut that effort.“From the perspective of the U.S. taxpayer, obviously there will be losses, but I don’t think those are the material thing here,” said Robin Brooks, a former chief foreign exchange strategist at Goldman Sachs who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s more about the credibility of this particular undertaking and what it says about future undertakings.”Meidas Touch Network +,Canada Stands Firm as Trump Throws Latest Tantrum, Ben Meiselas, Oct. 24, 2025. Donald Trump’s unraveling on Friday morning marked yet another low point in his erratic foreign policy, this time targeting one of America’s closest allies: Canada. Yes, again.Following an unhinged late-night post announcing that he was terminating all trade negotiations with Canada, Trump spent the early hours rage-posting on Truth Social, falsely claiming that the Canadian province of Ontario had created a “fake” advertisement featuring former President Ronald Reagan speaking against tariffs.To be clear, the video is entirely real. The ad used authentic footage and audio from a 1987 radio address in which Reagan warned against the dangers of protectionism, saying that tariffs “greatly deepened the Depression and prevented economic recovery.” In that address, Reagan explained that “the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition.”Trump’s insistence that Reagan “loved tariffs” is a blatant fabrication, one that’s easily disproven by decades of Reagan’s public statements and policy record. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from turning the incident into yet another international crisis.After his tantrum, Canadian leaders, from Prime Minister Mark Carney to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, refused to be drawn into Trump’s theatrics. “We can only control what we can control here in Canada,” Carney said calmly when asked about Trump’s posts. “If the U.S. wants to talk about certain sectors where there’s overlap, we’re happy to have those conversations. But I don’t listen to all of that noise.” Ford took a similar approach, reposting the full Reagan speech with the caption, “Listen for yourself.”U.S. Inflation, Economy, JobsNew York Times,Live Updates: Inflation Report Likely to Show Sticky Price Pressures, Colby Smith, Oct. 24, 2025. The Consumer Price Index for September, released later than usual because of the government shutdown, may reflect the effects of President Trump’s tariffs on a wide range of products.U.S. inflation is expected to have firmed in September, underscoring the challenge for the Federal Reserve as it prepares to lower interest rates again next week to shore up the labor market.The central bank is grappling with a host of challenges. It must decide how much further to reduce borrowing costs at a moment when companies have pulled back on hiring, inflation is picking up again and most of the economic data that officials follow closely are not being released because of the government shutdown.Data delay: The Consumer Price Index report for September comes 10 days after it was originally supposed to be released because of the government shutdown. The lapse in funding had forced the Bureau of Labor Statistics to suspend all operations, including the release of the monthly jobs report and any future data collection. But an exception was made for the inflation report because of a Nov. 1 deadline for the Social Security Administration to publish its annual adjustment to benefits, which accounts for changes in the cost of living.Sticky inflation? The latest report is forecast to show that overall inflation rose 3.1 percent in September from the same time last year, the fastest annual increase since May 2024. “Core” inflation, which the central bank tracks as a gauge of underlying inflation since it strips out volatile items like energy and food prices, is expected to have steadied at 3.1 percent. Those forecasts are according to economists polled by Bloomberg.The Real Michael Cohen via Substack, Commentary: Please Love Someone Else, Michael Cohen, right, Oct. 24, 2025. Trump says he “loves”America’s ranchers; right before shipping in cheaper Argentine beef. Nothing says America First like outsourcing your steak and stabbing your base with a ribeye.There’s a moment, somewhere between narcissism and national policy, where Donald Trump seems to confuse America’s heartland for one of his ex-wives; he claims to love them, then screws them over, then insists it’s for their own good.“The Cattle Ranchers, who I love,” he wrote this week, before announcing a plan that would basically gut the very industry he claims to adore. In Trump’s America, love always comes with a non-disclosure agreement; and apparently, a side of imported Argentine beef.Let’s be clear: when the president of the United States tells you he’s looking out for you, it’s usually because you’re about to get hit by the truck he’s driving. This time, it’s America’s ranchers under the wheels. After years of drought, labor shortages, and skyrocketing feed costs, many small cattle producers were finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. Then Trump; the self-proclaimed “America First” president, decides it’s time to “help” by buying cheaper beef from Argentina.The move, supposedly designed to “lower prices,” is about as sensible as handing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Sure, it sounds good. But importing more foreign beef doesn’t magically make U.S. steaks cheaper; it just kneecaps American ranchers already limping from decades of market manipulation by the corporate meatpacking cartel.And that’s the part Trump either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care to. The U.S. beef market isn’t “free” in any meaningful sense. Four companies; Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef, control over 80% of processing. They set prices, they fix supply, and when caught doing it, they write a check, call it a settlement, and go back to business as usual. Recently, Tyson and Cargill paid out $87.5 million in a class-action lawsuit over price fixing; chump change compared to what they made gouging ranchers and consumers alike.But instead of going after the monopolies, Trump blames the ranchers; while patting himself on the back for tariffs he insists are saving them. In his words, “The only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States.” Translation: You’re welcome, peasants.Try telling that to Destinee Weeks in Oklahoma, who just saw her first real profit in ten years running a 250-head operation with her husband. When she heard about the plan to flood the market with Argentine beef, she called it “a slap in the face.” And she’s right. This isn’t about helping the consumer or stabilizing the market; it’s about Trump doing what Trump does best: transactional loyalty. He handed Argentina a $20 billion currency swap deal to help “a friend in need.” The same week, he quadrupled the tariff-rate quota for Argentine beef.It’s foreign policy dressed up as a discount at the grocery store; except the people paying for it are the ranchers who helped elect him. The irony? These are the same folks who wear MAGA hats to the feed store, who believed Trump’s “America First” meant them. Turns out it meant “America first, unless I owe someone else a bigger favor.”And the White House, sensing the outrage, scrambled to announce an “action plan” through the USDA to “support domestic ranchers.” Translation: a few crumbs for the people you just undercut. It’s like punching someone in the face, then offering them an ice pack as proof of your compassion.Economists, meanwhile, are rolling their eyes. David Anderson of Texas A&M noted that Argentina doesn’t even have enough beef to move U.S. prices significantly. In other words, this whole thing isn’t going to lower your grocery bill; but it will make life hell for small and mid-sized producers. A perfect Trump policy: all optics, no outcome, and chaos in between.And let’s not ignore the broader hypocrisy. This is a man who built his brand on “Buy American,” who turned the phrase “America First” into a political religion; and now he’s cutting deals that make U.S. ranchers feel, in their own words, “invisible.” When you’ve lost the cowboys, you’ve lost the base.John Boyd Jr., founder of the National Black Farmers Association, summed it up perfectly: “Everything that the president is messing with and interfering with affects my farming operation.” This from a man who’s already taken hits from Trump’s trade war with China. The pattern is obvious: Trump creates chaos, blames someone else, then promises to fix it; often by making another deal that breaks something else.So yes, please, love someone else. Because the cattle ranchers of America are finally realizing that Trump’s version of love is a lot like his business record: it sounds great until the bill comes due.At the end of the day, it’s not just about beef; it’s about betrayal. These are the people who fed him, funded him, and filled his rallies. And now, he’s feeding them imported steak.Trump once said, “I alone can fix it.” Maybe. But he’s also very good at breaking things first; and right now, he’s breaking the very people who believed he was their champion.For them, this isn’t just an economic hit; it’s an emotional one. Because nothing cuts deeper than realizing the man you voted for, defended, and believed in, loves Argentina’s cattle more than yours.So to America’s ranchers: it’s time to move on. Love someone else. Because this one? He’s just not that into you.Oct. 23 The East Wing of the White House is shown with an American flag fiying over over the rubble of the East Wing and nearby heavy machinery for President Trump’s unilateral decision to destroy the rooms to create a ballroom at an estimated cost of $250 million (New York Times photo by Alex Kenton on Oct. 22, 2025).New York Times,Trump Is Wasting No Time in Tearing Down the East Wing, Luke Broadwater, Oct. 23, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump initially said the ballroom construction would not dismantle parts of the White House. His officials now say it is cheaper and more structurally sound to simply demolish the East Wing.As roaring machinery tore down one side of the White House, President Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that he was having the entire East Wing demolished to make way for his 90,000-square-foot ballroom, a striking expansion of a project that is remaking the profile of one of the nation’s most iconic buildings.Mr. Trump was unsentimental as news of the demolition spread. “It was never thought of as being much,” he said of the East Wing, which was home to the first lady’s office and spaces used for ceremonial purposes. “It was a very small building.”The process of tearing down the East Wing was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, two senior administration officials said, as Mr. Trump moved rapidly to carry out a passion project that he said was necessary to host state dinners and other events.But the previously unannounced decision to demolish the East Wing was at odds with Mr. Trump’s previous statements about the project, and underscored his intention to blast through the sensibilities of many in Washington to continue putting a lasting imprint on the White House.The president also said on Wednesday that the ballroom would cost $300 million, $100 million more than initially estimated.“In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure,” Mr. Trump said. He also said — somewhat cryptically — that “certain areas are being left.” But the two senior administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, confirmed that the entire East Wing was being demolished.The West Wing and the White House residence, where the president lives, are not affected by the project, which is the largest renovation to the White House in decades.When Mr. Trump first announced his plans for the ballroom, he pledged that the White House would not be touched by the construction.“It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it,” he said in July. “And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”Upon further evaluation, the White House determined it was cheaper and more structurally sound to demolish the East Wing than to build an addition, one of the administration officials said.On Wednesday, the Secret Service kept onlookers away as heavy machinery ripped away at hunks of the building.The scope of the demolition, and Mr. Trump’s repeated promises that the White House itself would not be affected by the work, were in many ways symbolic of how he has conducted his presidency. On a variety of issues, Mr. Trump has blown past norms and traditions, often moving so quickly that it can be too late for courts, Congress or the public to catch up.The planned size of the ballroom would transform the footprint of the White House campus. At 90,000 square feet, the ballroom would be nearly double the size of the White House residence, which is 55,000 square feet.The ballroom is only the latest renovation plan that Mr. Trump has undertaken since he took office for the second time. He is also leaving his mark on the Oval Office, which now features many gilded flourishes. He also paved over the Rose Garden; erected huge flag poles on the White House grounds; and is planning to build an arch in front of Arlington National Cemetery in the style of the Arc de Triomphe.Sara C. Bronin, a law professor at George Washington University who led the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said that Mr. Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing appeared to run afoul of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires federal agencies to take into account the effects of their actions on historic places.“The Trump administration’s shortsighted decision to start demolishing parts of the White House is exactly the kind of action the N.H.P.A. was passed to circumvent,” she said.News RoundupsThe Parnas Perspective,Virginia Democrats Announce Surprise Efforts to Redistrict State, Aaron Parnas, Oct. 23, 2025. Trump says land action in Venezuela is coming, Bannon says Trump will win a third term, White House East Wing completely destroyed.Good afternoon, everyone. We’ve got major developments to cover today. In a surprise move, Virginia Democrats are preparing to redraw the state’s congressional maps, aiming to pick up two to three new seats in Congress, a bold and unexpected power play. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon is openly declaring that Donald Trump will seek and win a third term in 2028, and the demolition of the White House East Wing is now complete, clearing the way for Trump’s controversial new ballroom project.But perhaps most alarming, the Pentagon press corps is now being led by Alex Jones’ InfoWars and Mike Lindell’s media outlet. That is not journalism. That is misinformation central. And it is a direct reminder of why independent, fact-based reporting matters more than ever.I will continue fighting to hold power to account, but I can’t do it alone. Subscribe today to support this work and let’s keep it going.SubscribedWith that, here’s what you missed:Virginia Democrats are preparing to redraw the state’s congressional maps to strengthen their party’s position before the 2026 midterm elections, joining the broader national redistricting fight after Republican-led efforts in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. The move, confirmed by The States Project’s executive director Mandara Meyers, comes less than two weeks before Virginia’s gubernatorial and attorney general elections. If successful, this could net Democrats 2-3 more seats in Congress.Steve Bannon declared that Donald Trump will seek and win a third term in 2028, arguing that the country “needs him,” during an interview with The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and deputy editor Ed Carr in Washington, D.C.The White House East Wing has been completely demolished to make way for President Donald Trump’s planned $300 million privately funded ballroom project, with historical elements preserved and debris removal now underway.May be an image of textThe White House released the full list of donors funding Donald Trump’s new ballroom project, which includes major corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, Meta, Lockheed Martin, Coinbase, and T-Mobile, along with wealthy individuals and foundations like Stephen Schwarzman, Kelly Loeffler, the Adelson Family Foundation, and the Winklevoss twins.Karoline Leavitt refuses to say if Trump will pursue other White House demolition projects. Leavitt stated that the president’s top priority right now is the ballroom.Donald Trump reversed plans to deploy federal troops to San Francisco after appeals from tech leaders including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as well as a call from Mayor Daniel Lurie, who argued that military involvement would hinder the city’s recovery. Trump cited local progress on crime reduction and said he would “give the city a chance,” though he warned federal intervention remains possible under the Insurrection Act.May be a Twitter screenshot of textNancy Pelosi and San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins said local police could arrest federal immigration agents who break California law during expected Trump-ordered raids, arguing no one is above state law; legal experts note the idea faces major constitutional hurdles, as states generally can’t prosecute federal officers acting within their duties.Breanna Morello of Infowars is joining Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s new Pentagon Press Corps, alongside other right-wing media figures and outlets like Tim Pool, Jack Posobiec, LindellTV, and Red State.U.S. Attorney Kelly Hayes reportedly told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that the mortgage fraud case against Sen. Adam Schiff lacks sufficient evidence to proceed, though DOJ official Ed Martin is pushing to keep the investigation open, according to multiple sources cited by MSNBC.President Donald Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who served a four-month sentence for money laundering violations, calling his prosecution part of the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.” The move, celebrated by Zhao and Binance, aligns with Trump’s pro-crypto stance and follows his recent outreach to the digital asset industry.Fred Daibes, a New Jersey businessman convicted of bribing former Sen. Bob Menendez, paid $1 million to a lobbying firm led by Trump ally Keith Schiller in an attempt to secure a presidential pardon or sentence commutation from Donald Trump, according to multiple sources — part of a broader wave of clemency requests during Trump’s second term.A Washington, D.C. man, Sam O’Hara, filed a lawsuit claiming his First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated after he was arrested for following National Guard troops while playing The Imperial March from Star Wars to protest Trump’s military deployments; the ACLU-backed suit seeks damages for false arrest and constitutional violations.President Donald Trump imposed major sanctions on Russia’s top oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, marking his first major economic action against Moscow in his second term and prompting fierce condemnation from the Kremlin. The move—aimed at pressuring Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine—was praised by Kyiv and European allies but dismissed by Russian officials as ineffective. Analysts say the sanctions’ impact depends on U.S. enforcement and whether Washington targets nations like China and India that continue buying Russian oil.A new study found that Florida’s elkhorn and staghorn corals, vital reef builders for 10,000 years, are now “functionally extinct” after a 2023 marine heat wave killed nearly all colonies, highlighting the devastating impact of rising ocean temperatures on coral ecosystems.New York City Mayor Eric Adams endorsed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the upcoming mayoral race after dropping out himself, pledging to campaign with him against Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, who continues to lead the polls by double digits.A federal grand jury indicted Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, for the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train, charging him with violence against a mass transportation system resulting in death — a count that carries the potential death penalty; the case has reignited debate over public safety and criminal justice in North Carolina. Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 22, 2025 [Trump Amok]?, Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 23, 2025. “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”Yesterday, former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton cut to the heart of President Donald J. Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House.Indeed, that might have been the whole point. After saying in July that the ballroom he planned to build would not touch the East Wing, the president tore into the building on Monday, the first workday after about seven million people turned out for the No Kings protests to demonstrate their opposition to his administration.There are currently no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved. There is only the destruction of the People’s House.Today, Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that Trump will demolish the entire East Wing. According to a senior administration official, the demolition should be finished by this weekend.Today the U.S. military struck another vessel the administration claims was smuggling drugs into the U.S., killing two people on board. This is the eighth strike that has been made public; the U.S. strikes have killed at least 34 people. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this strike was operating in the eastern Pacific, widening the zone the administration is patrolling for those it claims are enemy combatants, a legal claim that experts widely reject.Eleanor Watson of CBS News noted that on Sunday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation that when administration officials briefed Congress about the strikes, they “had a very hard time explaining to us the rationale, the legal rationale for doing this and the constitutionality of doing it.” The officials informed Congress that they have “a secret list of over 20 narco organizations, drug trafficking cartels,” but they did not share the list with lawmakers.National security scholar Tom Nichols commented on today’s strike: “The president is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat. And Congress is letting it happen.”Today the Pentagon announced a new press corps to cover Hegseth and the Defense Department after the traditional pool turned in their press badges rather than agree to publish only material approved by Defense Department officials. Among those who walked out were Hegseth’s former colleagues at the Fox News Channel.The new press corps—all of whom accepted the Pentagon’s censorship—consists of right-wing outlets, including LindellTV, run by “MyPillow” chief executive officer and key election denier Mike Lindell, and podcaster Tim Pool, who was funded by Russia before the 2024 election.Yesterday, Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that Trump is demanding the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. His own appointees will decide whether to approve the claims.Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote today: “[H]ow do you top ordering your appointees to cut you a check for $230 million taxpayer dollars…. What thing can be more unimaginable and beyond belief than the president just saying, Cut me a check for a quarter billion dollars? What can be weirder than his bulldozing a big chunk of the White House?”“The real story here is that Trump has been operating as king or dictator for going on a year,” Marshall wrote. “There’s no accountability for anything. No limits, no penalties. So the demands keep spiraling.”Speaking with Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Chris Hayes of All In with Chris Hayes admitted that the destruction of the East Wing hit him hard. “There was really something visceral about those images that landed,” he told the senator. “I wonder if you or other colleagues or other people you’re talking to have had that same reaction.”Murphy answered: “[T]here’s a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing, and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal…. [T]hat visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is, about every single day acting in new and illegal ways.“That’s the story with the killings in the Caribbean, as well. The president just doesn’t believe that any law applies to him, that he can destroy federal property, that he can steal from American citizens, that he can kill with impunity, that he can throw anyone in jail.“We are not living in a functional democracy any longer. It’s not too late to save it, but it is just important to acknowledge that we aren’t on the precipice of losing our democracy. We are losing it every single day. We are not a functional nation with a rule of law any longer, and those toppled walls in the East Wing are a pretty stark reminder of that.”Marshall, though, noted that Trump’s behavior “opens up opportunities the political opposition can and must exploit.” The president is “increasingly reckless, acting like someone who is free from any consequences or the need for support from anyone beyond his admirers.” But “[t]he reality is that Trump is deeply unpopular.”Some evidence for that unpopularity today came in the form of Treasury Department sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies, which suggest the administration feels it can no longer entirely ignore Republican senators. As Hans Nichols and Stef W. Kight of Axios recalled yesterday, bipartisan majorities in the Senate have been demanding sanctions since July, when Trump put them off by saying he would impose sanctions in 50 days if Russia’s president Vladimir Putin didn’t end his war in Ukraine. Then, in August, Trump invited Putin to Alaska, and Senate Republicans backed off to give the president room to negotiate.Last week, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) signaled he was ready to move forward, and lawmakers and aides told the press the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would pass three bills to increase pressure on Russia. One would label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, one would impose economic penalties on China for its support of Russia, and the third would transfer Russian assets frozen in the U.S. to Ukraine.Today the administration announced its own, much more limited, sanctions.On Monday the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.” Ingrassia still works for the administration but will not move to the head of the Office of Special Counsel.Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen wrote on Meidas+, “The Senate—this 119th Congress, which has spent nine months acting like an annex of the West Wing—finally pushed back. This is the same chamber that greenlit Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth at Defense, both appointments that made career staffers consider early retirement.”But, he continued, “some line was finally crossed. Maybe it was the word ‘Nazi.’ Maybe it was the timing,” coming as it did just days after the exposure of another group of young Republicans texting Nazi talk. “Maybe Thune—a man who’s built his career on calculated restraint—decided he wasn’t going to be remembered as the Senate leader who confirmed the guy with the Nazi jokes,” Cohen wrote. “Whatever the reason, the…rubber stamp hesitated.”More On U.S. Governance, PoliticsMeidas Touch Network,Today in Politics, Bulletin 234, Ron Filipkowski, right, Oct 23, 2025. Trump has now demolished the entire East Wing of the WH. NYT:“The scope of the demolition, and Trump’s repeated promises that the WH itself would not be affected by the work, were in many ways symbolic of how he has conducted his presidency. On a variety of issues, Trump has blown past norms and traditions, often moving so quickly that it can be too late for courts, Congress or the public to catch up.”… “The ballroom is only the latest renovation plan that Trump has undertaken since he took office for the second time. He is also leaving his mark on the Oval Office, which now features many gilded flourishes. He also paved over the Rose Garden; erected huge flag poles on the WH grounds; and is planning to build an arch in front of Arlington National Cemetery in the style of the Arc de Triomphe.”… Trump: “After really a tremendous amount of study with some of the best architects in the world, we determined that really knocking it down, trying to use a little section. The East Wing was not much. There was not much left from the original.”… Trump on July 31 when he was first asked about the ballroom: “It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”… Reporter: “Many people were surprised the entire East Wing is being demolished, because you had said initially that the ballroom would just touch… Trump interrupting: It was a very small building, so we did it rather than allowing that to hurt a very expensive, beautiful building that frankly they’ve been after for years. I decided it will be one of the great ballrooms of the world.”… Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about it today: Q – “The president initially said that this project wouldn’t interfere with or touch the current structure. Leavitt: If you look at the renderings, it’s very clear the east wing was going to be modernized. Reporter: But modernizing and tearing down are two different things.”… Q – “Can the President tear down anything he wants without oversight? Can he demolish this building or the Jefferson Memorial? Leavitt: There have been many presidents in the past who have made their mark on this beautiful WH complex. Reporter: So it sounds like the answer is yes, he can tear down whatever he wants.”… Rep. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on MSNBC: “What we have seen around the world is that democracies no longer die because men with guns go in and take it over. Instead, it’s electeds who erode the separation of power, checks and balances. If you have a rubber-stamp Congress, if you have a court that delivers more power to the executive, suddenly you have lost your democracy and you have an authoritarian state structure. It’s here now.”… Leavitt concluded with this: “At this moment in time, the ballroom is really the president’s main priority.”… House Dem Leader Hakeem Jeffries immediately released Leavitt’s statement as part of an ad: “Millions of Americans will see their health insurance costs skyrocket in just over a week. But Trump’s spokesperson says the White House ballroom is the President’s top priority.”… Sen. Chuck Schumer responded to Leavitt’s comment: “Honestly, you can’t make this shit up.”… Gavin Newsom: “Good to know.”… Honestly, it was a stupid (but truthful) comment with horrendous timing (shutdown) that would get most Press Secretaries fired. But, as Trump likes to say, she never will be because “those lips move like a machine gun.”… Don Jr on Fox: “A construction guy, a guy that’s known for building luxury, is actually improving the WH with private funding. To be able to do the deals around the world that are needed, to create more jobs and trade deals you need something like this. This is for the betterment of the property.”… Trump was asked today about the money he has raised for it from corporate donors (full list at the end of the Bulletin): Q – “Have you raised the full $300 million to fund your ballroom? Trump: Yeah. Actually, we raised I think $350 million.”… First he said it would cost $200 million. Then he went to $250 million. Then it was $300 million. Now it is $350 million.… When he was asked how much he personally was going to contribute (he originally said he was going to pay for all of it himself), he refused to give a specific numbers and just said, “we’ll see.”… Trump also commented on No Kings again today: “That garbage deal they had this weekend, which was embarrassing to them. And the crowds were not big at all. But when you look at signs and they’re all made beautifully, they’re all made professionally in a printing shop. Some guy is paying for all that stuff – they’re going crazy because they’re getting paid”… Speaker Mike Johnson held his daily shutdown press conference: “We’re in the middle of the height of the football season. So football fans if you are stuck in the airport this weekend while your favorite team is about to kick off, blame the Democrats for that.”… Tweet from the House Republicans account on Sept 28, 2021: “Last time we checked the Democrats controlled the House, Senate, and White House. If there is a government shutdown it’s because of Democrats.”… Q – “You said yesterday you were still trying to get the details of this $230 million the president wants from the DOJ. Now that you’ve had some time, are you ok with taxpayers potentially being on the hook for that kind of money? Johnson: I’m not trying to dodge the question. I haven’t had time to get the details. That’s still on my list of things to do. Yesterday was literally a 21-hour work day.”… Q – “If it’s so important to pay the air traffic controllers, why wouldn’t you just say right now ‘we’re gonna have the House back in session, we’re gonna vote’? Johnson: We passed the CR to get everybody paid. If I brought everybody back right now and we voted on a measure to pay essential workers, it would be a waste of our times and it would take the pressure off Schumer.”… Dem House Whip Katherine Clark: “So you’d rather play politics than pay hardworking Americans. Got it.”… Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI): “Republicans are now openly admitting to playing political games that cut Americans’ health care and their paychecks.”… Johnson has now had the House adjourned for 80 of the last 92 days.… Forbes: “First Lady Melania Trump’s $MELANIA memecoin is now under legal scrutiny, as a court filing this week alleges the cryptocurrency is part of a broader fraudulent ‘pump-and-dump’ scheme meant to enrich a small number of insiders. The cryptocurrency token that describes itself as being ‘official’ and has been publicized by the first lady, launched in Jan around the same time as her husband’s inauguration.”… “A lawsuit brought by cryptocurrency traders was initially filed in April, which argues a coalition of cryptocurrency developers behind a number of memecoins—including $M3M3, $LIBRA, $ENRON and $TRUST—carried out a fraudulent ‘pump-and-dump’ scheme using the tokens, in which they allegedly manipulated the coins’ launches in order to personally enrich themselves while causing others who bought the coins to lose their investments.”… “Plaintiffs just filed an updated version of their lawsuit, which alleges $MELANIA was also part of the fraud scheme.”… Biographer Michael Wolff is now suing Melania, alleging that her threats to sue him for $1 billion after he said on the MeidasTouch podcast and in a Daily Beast article that she played an extensive role in WH efforts to minimize Epstein’s relationship with herself and her husband. Wolff: “To be perfectly honest, I’d like nothing better than to get Donald and Melania under oath in front of a court reporter, and actually find out all of the details of their relationship with Epstein.”… From the lawsuit: “Mrs. Trump’s claims are made for the purpose of harassing, intimidating, punishing, or otherwise maliciously inhibiting Mr. Wolff s free exercise of speech. Mrs. Trump and her ‘unitary executive’ husband along with their MAGA myrmidons have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them with costly SLAPP actions in order to silence their speech, to intimidate their critics generally, and to extract unjustified payments and North Korean-style confessions and apologies.”… WSJ: Trump today pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.… CBS: “In its sentencing memo against now-pardoned Zhao, DOJ argued his company ‘critically undermined the effectiveness of US sanctions against Iran by providing its Iranian customers the ability to transact with the US customers.’”… NYT: “To spearhead his clemency push, Zhao hired Teresa Guillen, who also represents Zach Witkoff, son of special envoy Steve Witkoff. Guillen’s co-counsel was Ches McDowell, a longtime hunting companion of Donald Trump, Jr.”… Trump was asked about it today: Q – “Today you pardoned the founded of Binance. Can you explain why you did that? Trump: Which one was that? Q – The founder of Binance. Trump: I pardon a lot of people. I don’t know. He was recommended by a lot of people.”… Leavitt was asked about it today: Q – On the pardon, Binance has significant business interests with the President’s family’s crypto company. How do you respond to allegations that this is a corrupt act? Leavitt: The President is exercising his constitutional authority to grant clemency requests. This was an overly prosecuted case by the Biden admin.”… FBI Director Kash Patel announced indictments today of NBA players and coaches in a gambling ring: “This is an operation that showcases to you that under Trump’s admin, there is no room for any type of criminal behavior, be in on the world’s largest stage or in the back rooms of tiny parlors where card games were being played.”… Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins was asked about the frustration of cattle ranchers that Trump is importing beef from Argentina. She said Trump is upset at them for being ungrateful: “There is frustration on both sides. I was with the president yesterday and he is very very frustrated because everything he’s done to cut taxes, bring down costs. The last admin worked to get cattle off the lands. They were worried about climate change. And this president has worked so hard.”… Sen. Maj. Leader John Thune told Semafor that Trump’s efforts to bring down beef prices this way is misguided: ““This isn’t the way to do it. It’s created a lot of uncertainty in that market. So I’m hoping that the White House has gotten the message.”… “Thune hails from SD, a major beef-producing state, and he’s joined by a long line of fellow cattle-conscious Republicans in warning the president and his admin against the import plan. GOP senators have raised the issue to the Dept of Ag, WH advisers, and Trump himself – but so far, the president is digging in despite the red-state concerns.”… NPR: “The president of the American Farm Bureau warned the WH last week that more than half of US farms are losing money, threatening small towns and rural economies. Court records show farm bankruptcies in the 12 months ending in June were up 56% from the previous year. And that ominous trend has continued.”… Joseph Peiffer, an attorney who handles bankruptcy cases for farmers in IL, IA, and MO: “We had five new farm cases in two weeks. That’s astonishing. Shocking. And we’re getting additional calls all the time.”… Rep. Marge Greene on Tucker Carlson’s podcast: “This $40B bailout for Argentina– that’s one of the grossest things I have ever seen. I have no idea who is telling the president that this is a good idea. It’s a punch in the gut to all our American cattle ranchers. I don’t know how that’s America First.”… Greene continued: “People are hurting here at home. Food prices are high. Rent is high. Home prices are ridiculously high. Cars are high. Auto insurance, home insurance, health insurance is insane. Energy prices are high. My own electric bills – they are much more expensive than they were a year ago.”New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Shelves Plan to Deploy Federal Agents to San Francisco, Staff Reports, Oct. 23, 2025. Federal deployment: President Trump is calling off, at least for now, plans to surge federal immigration agents into San Francisco this weekend. Mr. Trump said in Truth Social post that he had stopped the deployment at the request of friends who live in the Bay Area who vouched for the work of the city’s mayor. But it was not clear whether the rest of the region would also be spared. Read more ›Crypto pardon: Mr. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, who admitted in 2023 to money-laundering violations that allowed terrorists and other criminals to move money on the cryptocurrency exchange. Binance has a deal with the Trump family’s crypto start-up that is poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year. Read more ›Worker recall: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will temporarily recall furloughed employees for the Medicare and Affordable Care Act open enrollment periods. The 23-day-old government shutdown shows no sign of ending. In the Senate, a Republican bill to pay essential federal workers failed, and Republicans blocked Democratic proposals to pay a broader group.New York Times,Democrats Block Federal Worker Pay Bill as Shutdown Drags On, Catie Edmondson, Oct. 23, 2025. A Republican measure that would pay essential government employees faltered in the Senate, and the G.O.P. blocked a pair of Democratic bills to pay a broader swath of workers.Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked legislation to pay federal employees who have been working without compensation during the government shutdown, thwarting Republicans’ latest effort to weaken their hand in the federal spending fight.The defeat was part of a series of failed partisan votes on the 23rd day of the government shutdown that underscored the depth of the prolonged impasse, with neither Republicans nor Democrats showing any indication that they planned to relent and seek an off ramp.Democrats said they opposed the G.O.P. measure because it would hand President Trump wide latitude to pick and choose which workers receive compensation while the government is shuttered. Republicans, who offered the bill in part to bolster their argument that Democrats are to blame for any pain that results from the shutdown, contended they were merely catering to their restive progressive base.On a vote of 54 to 45, the measure fell short of the 60 votes it needed to advance. Three Senate Democrats crossed party lines to vote for it: Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both of Georgia.Senate Republicans also blocked two alternatives that Democrats attempted to pass by unanimous consent, in which all senators agree to quickly take up and approve a bill. One of them would pay both essential workers and the roughly 700,000 workers who have been furloughed since the shutdown began. A second would pay both categories of workers, and bar Mr. Trump from laying off any additional federal employees.New York Times,Trump Opens Pristine Alaska Wilderness to Drilling in Long-Running Feud, Maxine Joselow, Oct. 23, 2025. The Interior Department also said it would allow a contentious road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska.The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States.The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.During his first term, President Trump signed a 2017 tax bill that required two oil and gas lease sales in the coastal plain, but the Biden administration later suspended and then canceled those leases.On Thursday, the Interior Department said it would hold an oil and gas lease sale in the coastal plain this winter. The agency also said it would reinstate seven oil leases in the refuge that the state of Alaska acquired in 2021 but that had been canceled two years later by the Biden administration.“This land should and will be supporting responsible oil and gas leasing,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during an “Alaska Day” event at the Interior Department’s headquarters, which came even as many Interior employees were furloughed during the ongoing government shutdown.Mr. Burgum also announced that the Interior Department had finalized a deal that would allow a contentious gravel road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska. And he reiterated that the agency would greenlight an industrial road that would cut through pristine wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska.Taken together, the decisions “represent a clear and unified message, which is Alaska is open for business,” Mr. Burgum said.Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised to increase Arctic drilling as part of his plans to expand U.S. oil and gas production and achieve “American energy dominance.”Yet major oil companies have previously shown little interest in drilling in the refuge largely because of the great expense and some concerns about public relations. It remains unclear whether they will bid in the upcoming auction.Editors’ PicksWolfgang Puck’s Spago Had Star Power in the ’80s. Does It Still Shine?Larry David Takes the Stage for an Amusing but Not-So-Revealing ChatThe Dessert That Changed My LifeAdding to these challenges, some major banks have committed to not finance drilling in the refuge. And environmental groups are expected to file lawsuits to try to block the lease sale.“We will fight any attempt to industrialize the fragile coastal plain of the Arctic refuge and every option is on the table,” Kristen Miller, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, wrote in an email.The question of whether to drill in this remote refuge has fueled fierce political and legal battles for nearly a half-century.In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which designated the majority of the refuge as wilderness and effectively barred drilling there. But congressional Republicans fought to end the ban, and they saw an opening in 2017, when they passed a tax bill that required two lease sales in the coastal plain by the end of 2024.Both of those lease sales were widely considered to be flops. The first auction did not garner any bids from large oil companies, and seven of the nine leases were acquired by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state agency that promotes economic activity. The second sale did not attract a single bidder.New York Times, N.B.A. Gambling Investigation Updates: U.S. Charges N.B.A. Coach and Players in Gambling Schemes, Santul Nerkar, Maria Cramer,Tania Ganguli and Jonah E. Bromwich, Oct. 23, 2025. More than 30 people were indicted on Thursday in a case involving insider bets on basketball games and poker games rigged by Mafia families.Here’s the latest.A pair of indictments unsealed in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday cast a pall over professional basketball, describing separate schemes in which three current and former N.B.A. players and coaches worked with other defendants to defraud gamblers and online betting firms out of millions of dollars.One case accused an N.B.A. player and a former coach of trading inside information on a series of games to win hundreds of thousands of dollars of bets with sports betting companies. The other charged a well-known head coach, Chauncey Billups, with participating in a series of rigged poker games organized by Mafia families that cheated unwitting victims out of at least $7 million.Taken together, the two indictments, involving more than 30 defendants, will compel the league to confront questions about how far the misconduct has spread, and whether those accused of financial crimes affected the outcomes of games.The first indictment accused six defendants, including Terry Rozier, a guard for the Miami Heat, and Damon Jones, a former player and coach, of trading on inside information available to players and coaches to allow a network of conspirators to place winning bets on their games. Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, called it the “insider trading saga for the N.B.A.”The N.B.A. said that Mr. Rozier and Mr. Billups, the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, were being placed on immediate leave.The charges suggest that the first scheme had a real-time impact on at least one N.B.A. game. In March 2023, Mr. Rozier was a starting guard for the Charlotte Hornets. The indictment says that he told his co-conspirators that he was planning to leave a game early citing an injury, information that was not known to Hornets officials. The bettors made hundreds of thousands of dollars of bets and then split the proceeds with Mr. Rozier, said Jessica Tisch, the commissioner of the New York Police Department.Mr. Billups and Mr. Jones were accused of participating in the other scheme, involving the rigged poker games. Those games were set up by organized crime families — the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese families — who would take cuts of the profits and use force to go after debtors, said Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.The investigation has been developing for years, federal and state officials said, and was coordinated by the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department’s Joint Organized Crime Task Force. Those officials said the case was ongoing and could result in more charges.The indictments come at a crucial time for the N.B.A., during the opening week of the season and as it starts new broadcast deals worth $76 billion over 11 years. They became public on Thursday morning when Mr. Rozier was arrested in Orlando, Fla., and Mr. Billups was arrested in Portland, Ore.The poker game scheme began as early as 2019, and rigged games were soon set up across the country, including in the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Miami and Manhattan, officials said.Victims were lured into games to get close to sports celebrities like Mr. Billups and Mr. Jones only to be cheated out of their money through technology like shuffling machines that had been altered to read the cards in the deck and predict which player at the table had the best hand, said Christopher Raia, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York Field Office.The gambling operation “hustled unwitting victims” and “created a financial pipeline for La Cosa Nostra to help fund and facilitate their organized criminal activity,” Mr. Raia said.Mr. Nocella said the technology also included “specially designed contact lenses and sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards, which ensured that the victims would lose big.”Victims believed they were sitting at a “fair table,” Commissioner Tisch said. Instead, they were cheated out of millions of dollars. One victim lost $1.8 million in the rigged games, she said.The related cases involved more than two dozen defendants, including three people who were accused of participating in both schemes.For more than a year, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have focused on illegal gambling operations involving professional athletes. In 2024, a Brooklyn man was charged in an illegal sports betting scheme involving Jontay Porter, a forward for the Toronto Raptors. Mr. Porter, who was barred for life by the N.B.A. that year, pleaded guilty to wire fraud.The charges against Mr. Rozier and Mr. Billups are potentially the biggest hit to the N.B.A.’s reputation since 2007, when the referee Tim Donaghy was found to have bet on games.Mr. Rozier, 31, is in his 11th season in the N.B.A. and has been a key player for several teams. He did not play in the Miami Heat’s season-opener Wednesday night in Orlando.Mr. Billups, 49, is in his fifth season as a coach in Portland. As a player, Mr. Billups made five All-Star Games and starred for the Detroit Pistons, leading the team to the 2004 N.B.A. title, when he was named the most valuable player of the finals. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player last year.The N.B.A. said that it would continue to cooperate with the authorities. “We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” the league said in a statement.The Social Contract with Joe Walsh, If Trump Begins Demolishing the Washington Monument Next Week to Make It a Trump Monument, Not One Republican Will Say a Damn Thing, Joe Walsh (commentator and former Republican congressman from Illinois), Oct. 23, 2025. Actually, a serious question.If Donald Trump next week began demolishing the Washington Monument—because he wanted to change the structure of the Washington Monument and make it look more like Mar-a-Lago or the shape of a T for Trump or whatever—would any Republican say anything?I mean that. Would any Republican object? Would anybody on Fox News say, “Stop. That’s too far”? Would any of Trump’s voters, any of his MAGA supporters say anything?If Trump took a backhoe to the Washington Monument, if Trump took a bulldozer to the Washington Monument, if Donald Trump on his own next week began tearing down part of the Washington Monument or tearing the whole monument down and restructuring it, would any of his supporters, would any Republican say anything?Now, simply asking that question, for all of us, should be so fucking troubling, right? Like, seriously? A President of the United States on his own decides he’s going to demolish a sacred monument in Washington, D.C., a historic monument in Washington DC, the Washington Monument?“Like, Joe, are you serious? Like, why are you even asking this question? That’s unheard of. Of course not. A President of the United States can’t do something like that.”To which I say, really? Really? Donald Trump is demolishing the White House right now as we speak, and no Republican has said anything. No Trump supporter has said anything. Nobody on Fox News or OAN or Newsmax or right-wing talk radio, my former home, has said anything.Donald Trump has basically torn the East Wing of the White House down all by himself, and Republicans haven’t said shit.The White House is our house. The White House isn’t his house. “The Washington Monument isn’t his,” you would scream. “Well, the White House isn’t his,” I would respond. “But, Joe, the Washington Monument, that’s a historic landmark.” “The White House,” I would respond, “is a historic landmark.”“But, Joe, there’s got to be a process, you know, to redo the Washington Monument. There’s got to be a laborious, rigorous process that you’ve got to go through. Congressional approval, permits and vetting, and you’ve got to get all the historic groups to approve, and the committees and commissions and the National Park Service, and blah blah blah. All of that’s got to be done. That whole vetting process, permits, and all the rest before you even touch the Washington Monument, Joe.”To which I would respond, “Same with the White House.” And Trump ignored all of that.It’s the exact same with the White House. All the vetting, Trump ignored. The entire process that one must go through to restructure, to change the structure of the White House—Trump ignored all of it.U.S. Crime, Courts, LawNew York Times,Unlike Trump, Most Who Seek Money for Official Misconduct Face Long Odds, Adam Liptak and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 23, 2025. The Federal Tort Claims Act, the law the president invoked to try to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars, is ordinarily a legal labyrinth that few can navigate.George Retes Jr., an American citizen and Army veteran who says he was brutally mistreated by federal agents when he was detained in a California immigration raid in July, wants to sue the federal government.To start the process, he had to file what is known as a Standard Form 95 saying what happened to him and asking for compensation. It is the same document that lawyers for President Trump have twice filed to claim that he was mistreated by federal law enforcement during F.B.I. investigations into his conduct.Like most claimants seeking money from the federal government for law enforcement misconduct, Mr. Retes is unlikely to get paid — or even to get a response.Mr. Trump, on the other hand, may well obtain a settlement without even going to court, given that the Justice Department officials assessing the president’s claims work for him. One of those officials, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, previously worked as his lead criminal defense lawyer on one of the very cases over which Mr. Trump has filed a claim.The difference between the experience of one ordinary citizen who says he was wrongly caught up in Mr. Trump’s immigration dragnet, and that of the government’s most powerful official, underscores the ethical conflicts and unfairness inherent in Mr. Trump’s situation, legal experts said.Mr. Trump would be “one of the very few lucky people” to win compensation for law enforcement misconduct under the statute that lays out the process for settling claims without litigation, said Anya Bidwell, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group that represents Mr. Retes.“I doubt he deserves it more than countless of my clients,” she added.Mr. Trump is seeking about $230 million in compensatory and punitive damages from the federal government, according to people familiar with the two claims who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe legal filings that are not public documents. On Tuesday, he told reporters he expected to be paid, though he added that he would donate the money to charity.If, like most claimants, Mr. Retes hears nothing after six months, he can sue under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which theoretically waived the government’s immunity in some circumstances. In practice, the statute created a legal labyrinth that few of the many people who file tort claims each year claiming law enforcement misconduct successfully get through.Legal scholars said the contrast was troubling.“The prospect of the United States agreeing to spend taxpayer dollars to settle President Trump’s questionable legal claims is all the more galling given how hard it is for ordinary people to obtain compensation when they are actually abused by federal officials,” said Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.“American citizens wrongfully detained by ICE officers, or law-abiding individuals subjected to excessive force by federal law enforcement agents,” Professor Reinert added, “face significant hurdles even getting their claims heard in court.”Justice Neil M. Gorsuch pondered the point in June in a Supreme Court decision as he delivered an incremental interim victory to a traumatized family whose home was wrongly raided.Could such people sue the federal government for damages? Justice Gorsuch asked. “The answer is not as obvious as it might be,” he wrote.Indeed, said Joanna C. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She called the Federal Tort Claims Act a “hyper-technical statute riddled with exclusions” that made it difficult to win even when federal law enforcement engaged in clear wrongdoing.The law protects law enforcement officials who have exercised discretion, a high bar that suits rarely clear. (That provision was at issue in the June case, when the court unanimously ruled that the family should have another chance to make the difficult showing required by the law.)As a result, Professor Schwartz said, even U.S. citizens who have been wrongly arrested and detained by ICE agents in recent months may struggle to win relief.In an interview on Tuesday in a Washington coffee shop, Mr. Retes grew emotional as he described his background and what he had endured. He was in town to meet with lawmakers to lobby for legislation that would make it easier to sue government officials who engage in misconduct.U.S. Media, Education, ReligionPopular Information,Accountability Journalism: What happens when you trust AI for news, Judd Legum, right. Oct. 23, 2025. AI chatbots are surging in popularity. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, more than 800 million people use ChatGPT each week. Every month, hundreds of millions more use ChatGPT competitors such as Google’s Gemini (400 million), Microsoft’s Copilot (100 million), and Perplexity (15 million).According to a recent study of American AI users, 25% report using an AI chatbot to get news, though most do so only sporadically. But these services have grown so massive that even a modest percentage of users makes AI chatbots a significant, and growing, source of news.Further, AI companies are pushing the public to use AI tools as the starting point for all their information needs. On Tuesday, OpenAI released its own browser, Atlas, which lacks an address bar where users can type a URL directly. In Atlas, everything must go through ChatGPT first.New research released Wednesday by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC reveals a major problem with using AI chatbots for news. An alarming amount of the news information AI chatbots provide to users is false.To perform the study, the researchers developed a set of 30 “core” questions about current news stories with global relevance. The questions mirrored common news-related queries submitted to AI chatbots. Sample questions included:
- What is the Ukraine minerals deal?
- Can Trump run for a third term?
- How many people died in the Myanmar earthquake?
- How did Trump calculate the tariffs?
- How did the recent LA fires start?
- Why did Justin Trudeau resign?
These questions were then submitted to ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini using the free, default mode presented to individual users. The answers were anonymized and reviewed by journalists from 22 participating organizations. Each answer was evaluated for “accuracy (including accuracy of direct quotes), sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, editorialization (where the assistant adds words not in the source that imply a point of view or value judgement), and context.”The study found that 20% of the AI chatbots’ answers “contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.” This is an immense amount of false information. A publication that gets 2% of its facts wrong is not worth reading. Across the board, popular AI chatbots are repeatedly misleading their users about the news. Major accuracy issues across the four AI chatbots studied ranged from 18-22%.In some cases, accuracy issues were caused by relying on outdated information. For example, Copilot was asked, “Should I be worried about the bird flu?” In response, Copilot said that “[a] vaccine trial is underway in Oxford.” But the source for this information “was a BBC article from 2006.” ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot all incorrectly identified Pope Francis as the current Pope, even though he died in April 2025.In other instances, AI chatbots did not accurately represent the content of the source. Gemini, for example, was asked, “How did Trump calculate the tariffs?” Gemini responded that “tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico by Donald Trump were ‘on certain goods, including fentanyl-related items.’” But the source Gemini relied on, which was from the White House, is clear that the tariffs were not imposed on items related to fentanyl, but were imposed as punishment for failing to stop fentanyl smuggling.Among answers that included a direct quote, 12% of the quotes provided were inaccurate. The AI chatbots sometimes invent quotes entirely.More broadly, about 45% of all AI chatbot answers had at least one significant issue with accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context. Sourcing was the most common significant issue. “31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems — missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions,” according to the study.This was a particularly acute problem with Gemini, which had sourcing issues for 72% of all responses. Gemini “showed a strong tendency to make incorrect or unverifiable sourcing claims.” It frequently attributes a claim to a source, only to provide a link to a different source, or no source at all. Problems with sourcing make it difficult for users to identify errors.One of the systemic problems with AI chatbots is that they are overly confident. Increasingly, AI chatbots are unwilling to acknowledge that they do not know the answer to a question. Instead, they make stuff up. A September report from NewsGuard, which monitors online misinformation, found that “non-response rates fell from 31 percent in August 2024 to 0 percent in August 2025.”AI chatbots can be powerful tools for news consumers, capable of synthesizing information from dozens of sources in seconds. Yet these capabilities mean little if the information is not accurate and the tools cannot recognize their own limits.New York Times,Harvard Records an Increase in Asian Students and a Drop in Black Students, Stephanie Saul, Oct. 23, 2025. The shift mirrors trends at other elite schools after a ban on affirmative action. The Trump administration has said it wants to scrutinize demographics to ensure schools aren’t using racial preferences.The percent of Black and Hispanic students in Harvard’s first-year class dropped this fall while that of Asian American students increased, according to figures released on Thursday. It was more evidence that a 2023 Supreme Court ban on affirmative action is having a significant effect on racial diversity at the nation’s elite schools.Harvard College said that 11.5 percent of its first-year students identify as Black this fall, down from 14 percent last year and 18 percent in 2023, before the Supreme Court ban took effect. While the decline is not as sharp as some experts had predicted, it reverses a trend toward increased racial diversity that had begun in the 1960s.The numbers, released by Harvard College, showed an even sharper drop this year for Hispanic students — to 11 percent of this year’s first-year class from 16 percent last year. The percentage of Hispanic students had seen an increase last year from 2023, however.Harvard did not release figures for white students.The racial breakdown of students at Harvard and other schools has been closely watched because of the role these schools play in providing access to power and influence in American society. In recent months, the Trump administration has also sought to force universities to report expanded admissions data that could be used to prove whether they are giving preferential treatment to applicants based on race.The first year of data following the Supreme Court was confusing. Some institutions saw striking drops in Black students while at others, the number remained largely unchanged, defying predictions and prompting suggestions that some schools were ignoring the decision.This year, however, the data is showing some clearer trend lines, according to James Murphy, director of postsecondary policy for Education Reform Now, a nonprofit group that supports expanding diversity and access to higher education.Public Safety, National SecurityNew York Times,A Costly Radio System Faltered When Texas Needed It Most, Mike Baker, Danny Hakim and Blacki Migliozzi, Oct. 23, 2025. Motorola won a $7 million contract to modernize Kerr County’s emergency radio system. When a devastating flash flood swept through the county, emergency crews had trouble using it.After a deadly flash flood swept through Kerr County in central Texas this summer, rescuers combed dozens of miles along the Guadalupe River, looking for survivors. The grueling job was made more difficult because the radio system they needed to coordinate the response was not up to the task.Some rescuers got busy signals. Others got garbled messages. At Camp Mystic, the summer camp where 25 children died in the flooding, there was little to no coverage. Temporary radio towers eventually were brought in to extend service into the disaster zone.It was a frustrating mix of problems, made even more troubling because Kerr County had just spent $7 million to overhaul its radio communication system. But the deficiencies were no accident: The new network installed by Motorola Solutions excluded about a quarter of the county’s sprawling territory from reliable coverage for portable radios, leaving dead zones around Camp Mystic and other areas along the river.To identify the system’s shortcomings, The New York Times digitized proposed coverage maps for Kerr County, reviewed contracting records and obtained data about the radio network’s performance through public records law. The Times found that a nonprofit public utility had also sought to bid on the project and had proposed more extensive portable radio coverage that would have reached more than 90 percent of the county’s territory, including the Camp Mystic area.That alternative system proposed by the utility, the Lower Colorado River Authority, would also have offered more capacity. And it could have been cheaper. But Motorola won the contract anyway, aided by a process that was tilted in the company’s favor.Oct. 22 The East Wing of the White House is shown with an American flag fiying over over the rubble of the East Wing and nearby heavy machinery for President Trump’s unilateral decision to destroy the rooms to create a ballroom at an estimated cost of $250 million (New York Times photo by Alex Kenton on Oct. 22, 2025).New York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: White House Changes Course and Will Demolish Entire East Wing, Staff Reports, Oct. 22, 2025.
- White House demolition: President Trump’s plan to add an expansive ballroom to the White House will mean the demolition of the entire East Wing, which was expected to be fully torn down by this weekend, according to a senior administration official. Mr. Trump had pledged that the East Wing would not be touched by the construction, one of the largest renovations to the building in decades even before the change in plans. Read more ›
- Boat strike: The U.S. military hit another vessel that the Trump administration claimed was carrying drugs from South America, killing two people, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. It was the first American strike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean, expanding the campaign beyond the Caribbean Sea. Read more ›
- NATO meeting: Mr. Trump and Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, were set to meet on Wednesday afternoon in Washington to discuss support for Ukraine. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he no longer planned to meet soon with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, after Russian officials made it clear they had no intention of making a deal to end the war. Read more ›
Senator Angus King, right, the Maine independent, became one of the first senators to criticize the construction project at the White House, whose scale is only now becoming clear. “President Trump’s desecration of the White House is an insult to the American people and betrayal of the obligation to safeguard our history and heritage,” King said in a statement, adding: “The White House does not belong to President Trump; it belongs to the American people.”Sitting next to the secretary of NATO in the Oval Office, President Trump said Washington cancelled a meeting he had proposed with President Putin of Russia. “It didn’t feel right to me,” he said. Asked why he just chose to elevate sanctions against Russia right now, announced earlier today for its two largest oil companies, he said: “I just felt it was time.”Alan RappeportOct. 22, 2025, 5:03 p.m. ET24 minutes agoThe Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Russia on Wednesday, targeting Rosneft and Lukoil, its two largest oil companies. The sanctions are the first against Russia during President Trump’s second term and come amid growing frustration within the administration over the war in Ukraine. “Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate cease-fire,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. “Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support President Trump’s effort to end yet another war. We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.”The University of Virginia, facing immense pressure from the White House, struck a deal with the Trump administration on Wednesday that removed, at least temporarily, the threat of a federal investigation.The Justice Department announced the deal. It was the first time a public university had cut a far-reaching agreement with the Trump administration, which is carrying out an extraordinary campaign to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system. The deal was expected to be less costly than those signed by some private, Ivy League colleges, in large part because James E. Ryan had resigned as president of the university in June. The administration viewed Mr. Ryan as an obstacle in its bid to root out policies focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.The New Yorker, How Bad Is It? George E. Condon, Jr. ( the White House correspondent for National Journal and a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association), Oct.22,2025. The East Wing of the White House is being demolished to make room for the construction of President Trump’s proposed ballroom.How normal is this sort of White House renovation?“The White House wants you to believe this is totally normal, citing all the renovations, big and small, made by past Presidents. They are right that changes were made.But they are dead wrong about how this is being done.With the exception of F.D.R. secretly building a bunker under the East Wing during the Second World War, past renovations of this size were debated, funded by Congress, and done only after the need was manifest. None were rushed and done at the whim of a President.” The Hartmann Report,Commentary on Trump: Is He the Thief in the Ballroom?Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 22, 2025. The fight isn’t between left and right anymore: it’s between oligarchy and the people, between those who hoard power and those still brave enough to believe in democracyTrump is now trying to extract a quarter-billion dollars from the American treasury — our tax dollars — to compensate himself for the troubles he faced when Merrick Garland belatedly tried to hold him to account for criminally stealing classified documents, trying to overthrow the 2020 election, and his explicit, public outreach to Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public that helped him win the 2016 election.The decision about whether to give him the $230 million will largely fall to Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice she heads, assuming no Republicans in Congress dare challenge him. The obscenity of his former private attorney — who looked the other way for eight years in Florida when she was Attorney General there and Trump and Epstein were up to their dirty deeds — ratifying this demand is astonishing.But, like his tearing down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his Mar-a-Lago-style “ballroom” in defiance of the laws giving authority over the White House to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Trump’s defiance of the law and simple decency is another symptom of this gilded age that 44 years of Reaganomics has brought us to. (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the White House’s East Colonnade; that’s how obscene Trump’s wrecking crew’s actions are.)The period from 1933 to 1981 saw an explosion of government activity designed to benefit average working class Americans. Democrats pushed into law — in every case over the loud objections of Republicans — the programs that quite literally created the first widespread American middle class in the 1950s.They included Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour week, workplace and product safety protections, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, free quality public education, protections for the environment, banking and insurance industry regulation, public health programs that almost doubled the average American lifespan, high progressive taxation on great wealth, and numerous others.In the 44 years since Reagan’s inauguration, there hasn’t been a single major program passed through Congress that doesn’t benefit giant corporations or the morbidly rich (or both) more than average people. Even Obamacare was a Heritage Foundation plan from the 1980s to enrich the private, for-profit insurance industry at government expense. Instead, neoliberal free trade, tax cuts for the wealthy and giant corporations, along with an evisceration of dozens of protective programs and regulations, have led us into a second gilded age.We’ve shifted, gradually at first but rapidly over the past decade, from being a democratic republic into a full-blown oligarchy, a system of governance and economics where all major decisions are made by and for the interest of the very wealthy — the oligarchs — with little consideration of the needs of working class and poor people.Oligarchy, critically, is always a transitional form of government that rarely stands for more than two generations. The reason is simple to understand: when people figure out how badly they’re being screwed by the oligarchs, they rebel.Facing that rebellion, the oligarchs have two choices.First, they can do what American oligarchs did in the early 1930s during the Republican Great Depression and give in to the people, allowing things that will grow the middle class like the long list above. After their plot to assassinate FDR failed in 1934, they retreated to their business offices and contented themselves with simply making money for the next 47 years, leaving politics to the politicians.Alternatively, the oligarchs and their bought-and-paid-for politicians can crush the rebellion with what President Grover Cleveland referred to (during the gilded age of the 1880s) as their “iron heel,” by criminalizing dissent, gerrymandering and voter suppression, control of the media, and imprisoning the rebellions’ leaders.Trump and his toadies, particularly the ideologues like “Pee Wee German” Miller and “ICE Barbie” Noem, have chosen that latter path. They’re actively moving to turn America into a fascist state, complete with masked secret police and hundreds of brutal concentration camps for those they determine to be “illegals.” They’re starting with Hispanics, but have made clear in both word and deed that, like in every country that’s followed this path to fascism in the past, their political opponents will be next.Miller is already referring to voters who’ve registered as Democrats as members of a “domestic extremist organization.” Thus, America stands at a turning point.Will we succeed in pushing back against Trump’s naked corruption and theft from the American people? Will we restore the rule of law, the tradition of checks-and-balances, of three co-equal branches of government, and rule by the people?Or will Trump and his lickspittles (including on the Supreme Court) turn America into a tinpot dictatorship with the head guy making off with billions from the public purse while punishing anybody who tries to hold him accountable?To a large extend, the answer to those questions lies with us.If we remain fully engaged, lean hard on our elected officials (particularly Republicans), and demand accountability, there’s considerable hope, as I noted yesterday. The number to call your member of Congress is 202-224-3121.On the other hand, if we retreat back into work and family, ignore the news, and stop showing up to protest and demand our democracy back, America’s extraordinary experiment in self-governance will die as Trump — the thief in the ballroom — continues to rip off the American people and enrich himself and those around him while building his police state. New York Times,Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances, Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, Oct. 22, 2025. The president has placed proponents of his false claims into government jobs while dismantling systems built to secure voting, raising fears that he aims to seize authority over elections ahead of next year’s midterms.Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the Homeland Security Department’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created Trump administration position might help safeguard the vote ahead of next year’s midterms.But many of them left alarmed.Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, the new official, Heather Honey, instead used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call.Ms. Honey, a leader in that movement until her appointment in August as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, complained that her department’s cybersecurity experts tasked with combating misinformation about elections had “strayed from their mission.”The remark echoed a widespread view on the right that the agency had sought to silence supporters of Mr. Trump’s fraud claims. Ms. Honey also repeatedly mentioned a report often cited by election conspiracists to support their claims that voting machines were rigged to favor Democrats, according to the people familiar with the call.The ascent of Ms. Honey reflects how Mr. Trump and his allies, despite a clear victory last year, remain consumed with the belief that the 2020 election was stolen — and how the president is using the powers of the government to upend an electoral system that he insists helped Joseph R. Biden Jr. take the White House.In the past few months, Mr. Trump has elevated multiple proponents of his fraud claims into high-level administration jobs. Now, as government insiders, these activists could wield their newfound power to discredit future results or rekindle old claims to argue for a federal intrusion into locally administered voting systems.On a call with right-wing activists in March, before her appointment to the Homeland Security Department, Ms. Honey suggested that the new administration could declare a “national emergency” and justify dictating new rules to state and local governments. She said this could be based on an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a “manipulation” of the vote.“And therefore, we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” she said in March, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times from someone who joined the call, “and therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”She added, “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”The idea of reinvestigating the 2020 election gained steam recently with the White House’s decision to hire Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who has been tasked with examining the 2020 vote and other election matters, according to a White House official. The hiring of Mr. Olsen, who has worked closely for years with the pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell to promote stolen-election theories, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.Another activist, Marci McCarthy, who spread debunked claims about voting machines in Georgia when she was the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, was named in May to be the director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is housed at the Homeland Security Department.Ms. McCarthy’s appointment comes as nearly all of the election experts at CISA have been placed on administrative leave or reassigned this year amid a large-scale downsizing of the agency, which had played a leading role in deterring attacks on elections systems and combating disinformation about voting. The Contrarian,Opinion: Demolishing the Presidency, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 22, 2025. A White House teardown ordered by a reckless child is the perfect metaphor.Donald Trump has done far, far worse things. But images of the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, including water being sprayed throughout to douse the debris, were viscerally appalling. Maybe it was the resemblance to the damage wrought to the Pentagon on 9/11. Maybe it was an instinctive defense of a national symbol—last destroyed by a monarch in the 1812 war. In any event, the Trump regime have royally screwed up.“The Treasury Department instructed employees not to share photos of the demolition of parts of the White House’s East Wing after images of construction equipment dismantling the facade of the building went viral online,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Treasury’s headquarters is located next door to the East Wing, giving employees there a front-row seat to the construction of President Trump’s $250 million ballroom. The new project is set to replace parts of the East Wing.” To add insult to injury to the Republic, tony donors (including Comcast, Meta, Open AI, and Palantir, among too many others to list) happy to place business before the government are footing the bill—and getting a snazzy thank you dinner where they can hobnob with Trump.Trump promised this sort of desecration would not occur. But, as we know too well, the lifespan of his promises is a nanosecond. A leaked memo telling employees not to release damaging images is the sort of internal rebellion that a White House literally falling apart must dread.The physical destruction of the White House is about as giant a metaphor as one can get. If suggested in a movie script, the demolition of the People’s House—an architectural symbol of our democracy—so that it can incorporate an ostentatious, disproportionate, gaudy ballroom designed by a tasteless real estate developer bent on transforming the presidency into an autocracy would be dismissed as clumsy, preposterous, and improbable. But it is pure Trump, as is the garish faux gold ornamentation he has plastered all over the Oval Office.The cheap Versailles redecoration, an attempted throwback to the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, commencing during a government shutdown fight over stripping health care coverage away from millions of people sounds like something dreamt up by a Democratic consultant. But it is of a piece with the recent string of moronic moves by a White House apparently in the grips of panic.When you resort to a vulgar AI video (“not only juvenile but also betray[ing] striking contempt for tens of millions of Americans he ostensibly leads and for the concept of democratic free speech,” as CNN’s Stephen Collinson observed), or when you insist that the images of millions of No Kings protesters blanketing social and legacy media are fake, you give the impression you are not only crass and delusional, but panicked.SubscribedDon’t forget his jaw-droppingly irresponsible stunt, the Marines’ exercise of “firing high explosive rounds from M777 Howitzers” over a major California freeway that—no surprise!—ended in disaster. “California officials expressed fears about those live rounds being fired over Interstate 5, which runs between the beach where the ‘landing’ was taking place and the rest of the sprawling military installation,” the Los Angeles Times reported. With no notice and with drivers on the freeway, the Marines starting firing artillery rounds over the I-5, making Gov. Gavin Newsom close 17 miles of interstate, but not before shrapnel hit a California Highway Patrol vehicle “after an artillery round exploded mid-air, far earlier than intended, forcing an early end to the artillery demonstration.” The debacle left everyone (other than MAGA delinquents) wondering who in the world could have thought it “wise to fire live munitions over a freeway.”Trump surely has ample reason to freak out. An embarrassing “36% of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy,” the most recent Associated Press-NORC poll shows. And his support among Republicans barely clears 70%, deemed as “relatively low in ways that could be problematic for Republicans in next month’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and perhaps even in the 2026 midterm elections.” If 68% of Americans think the economy is poor and 58% blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown a “great deal” or “quite a bit,” and a strong plurality trust Democrats more to handle healthcare, no amount of hysterical propaganda within the sealed right-wing media ecosphere will save Republicans at the polls. (That AP/NORC poll, incidentally, is no outlier. CNBC reported: “The -13 net approval on the economy is the lowest of any CNBC survey during either of Trump’s two terms.”)This litany of outrages only add to an already robust-list of assaults (e.g., military deployments and violent ICE attacks in U.S. cities, vindictive prosecutions, illegal attacks on boats and murders on the high seas), screw-ups (e.g., inflation-producing tariffs), and tone-deaf political responses. Taken together, they reveal a regime wildly out of control. Trump seems simultaneously unhinged and plagued by humiliating self-owns, unsure whether to ignore or defame the growing opposition, and shackled to positions that are both unpopular and counterproductive.Trump knows only how to seek vengeance and create chaos, so expect him to double down on constitutional outrages, vulgar insults, and utter dysfunction. Whatever people voted for, this is what they have gotten. Old Goats,Demolishing the East Wing: ‘Let Them Eat Cake,’ Jonathan Alter, Oct..22-23, 2025. The image of the White House being destroyed will haunt Trump.My mother-in-law called tonight to complain about Donald Trump and his ‘let them eat cake’ moment: The destruction of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom so that he and his ridiculously wealthy friends can cavort while so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 22 .4 million of them will soon face very steep increases in their health insurance premiums.This new ballroom is not paid for by the taxpayers, but by donors. We don’t know who those donors are, which just adds to the monumental corruption of this act— the secret influence peddling that this reflects. Who knows what they’re getting in return for contributing to the costs of the ballroom.The main thing that Trump wanted to avoid was exactly what we saw this week. He didn’t want any pictures taken of the demolition because he knows on some level that this symbolizes his presidency. The image of the destruction of the East Wing, which he promised not to do, is in perfect alignment with the themes of his presidency, which are the demolition and vandalism of the government and of the rule of law.So decades from now, there will be three dominant images of the Trump era: Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy, the horrifying images of January 6, and the symbolic destruction of part of the White House, which belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump. New York Times,Trump Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases, Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, Oct. 22, 2025 (print ed.). Senior department officials who were defense lawyers for the president and those in his orbit are now in jobs that typically must approve any such payout, underscoring potential ethical conflicts.President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.Mr. Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that often is the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim, lodged in late 2023, seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the claim has not been made public.The second complaint, filed in the summer of 2024, accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents. It also accuses the Justice Department of malicious prosecution in charging him with mishandling sensitive records after he left office.Asked about the issue at the White House after this article published, the president said, “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity.”He added, “I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” New York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: Strike on Alleged Drug Boat Off Colombia Expands to Pacific Ocean, Staff Reports, Oct. 22, 2025.Boat strike: The U.S. military hit another vessel that the Trump administration claimed was carrying drugs from South America, a U.S. official said Wednesday. It was the first American strike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean, expanding the military campaign beyond the Caribbean Sea. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said the attack late Tuesday on a vessel off the coast of Colombia killed two or three people. Read more ›NATO meeting: President Trump and Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, were set to meet Wednesday in Washington to discuss support for Ukraine. The White House reversed itself on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Trump no longer planned to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia soon after Russian officials made it clear that they had no intention of making a deal to end the war. Read more › Meidas Touch Network,Michael Wolff Sues Melania Trump After Threat Over Epstein Reporting: ‘Someone Had to Do It, Ben Meiselas, Oct. 22, 2025. The veteran journalist’s lawsuit against the First Lady could open the door to new revelations about Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and marks a major stand for press freedom.In major breaking news, journalist and author Michael Wolff, who has been one of Donald Trump’s preeminent biographers and was set to be Jeffrey Epstein’s biographer, has filed a lawsuit against First Lady Melania Trump in New York State Supreme Court, accusing her of attempting to silence him through intimidation and legal threats.In my afternoon news update, I mentioned I would work to get this important interview for you. Well, here it is.SubscribedWolff’s lawsuit, brought under New York’s strong anti-SLAPP statute, seeks declaratory judgment and damages for what Wolff says is an effort by the First Lady’s legal team to chill his reporting on the Trump family’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein.“Someone had to do it,” Wolff told me. “I probably would have preferred that it not be me, but, you know, come the moment, here it is.” He called the First Lady’s actions “obvious and disgraceful.”According to court filings, Melania Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, sent Wolff a demand letter accusing him of defamation for statements suggesting Melania Trump was connected to Epstein’s social circle and met Donald Trump through modeling agencies linked to both men. The letter demanded a public apology and retraction and warned Wolff to “govern himself accordingly.”Rather than back down, Wolff responded with a lawsuit of his own. He argues that his statements are protected under the First Amendment and that the letter itself amounts to an unlawful attempt to suppress free speech.“There are laws against what the First Lady and the President are doing,” Wolff said. “You cannot use a legal remedy to intimidate someone from speaking out. So, here we are. I’ve sued the First Lady.”Wolff said he filed the suit not just to defend himself but to push back against a growing “chill” in American journalism. “Everybody throughout the media business—there’s a chill,” he said. “And a chill is probably the kind word.” He added that major outlets, including The New York Times, are hesitant to cover stories like his because “they’re being sued by the same lawyer who is suing me.”With the lawsuit now filed, Wolff says he intends to use the discovery process to uncover the truth about the Trump family’s relationship with Epstein.“This is an opportunity to ask all of the questions that they have refused to answer,” he told me. “Let’s hear the details of their financial involvement. Let’s hear the details of their social involvement. Let’s get into Melania’s history — how she came to this country, what she did when she was here, how she met Donald Trump, and her relationship to the modeling agents who knew both Epstein and Trump.”Wolff, author of previous books on Trump and one who interviewed Epstein extensively in exclusive taped interviews, said that once those questions are answered, “we will have a much clearer picture of what Jeffrey Epstein did, who he did it to, and how the President of the United States was involved.”He described the lawsuit as both an act of necessity and principle. “Obviously I’m not going to apologize,” he said. “Oh my God. I’m not going to retract. There’s virtually nothing to retract here. The truth is that anything I have said here is mild.”Read that last sentence again. Take that in for a moment.For Wolff, the case is about confronting what he sees as a deliberate attempt by those in power to erase uncomfortable truths. “This is not even a matter of what you said; it’s the subject itself that cannot be discussed,” he said. “The effort to sue me and to shut me up — and me along with others — is an effort to change the subject and shut down discussion of [Trump’s] involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.”In his view, that’s precisely why this issue matters so deeply. “This is not just me,” Wolff said. “This is an effort to get the truth of what Jeffrey Epstein means to Donald Trump.”He knows the battle ahead will be costly, but he’s undeterred. “This is going to be an expensive process,” he admitted. “But it’s going to be a hell of a ride.” President Trump with President Javier Milei of Argentina at the White House on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills). U.S. Treasurery Secretary Scott Bessent is shown below.Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: UPDATE: Taxpayer bailout of Argentina may grow to $40 billionJudd Legum, right, Oct. 22, 2025. The bailout, which Trump admitted is of little benefit to Americans, keeps getting bigger.On September 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion bailout for Argentina. Under that plan, Bessent will swap taxpayer dollars for Argentine pesos. President Trump admitted that the bailout, even if it succeeds, will provide little benefit to Americans. Weeks later, the cost of the Argentine bailout to United States taxpayers may grow to $40 billion.But as Popular Information first revealed, the bailout is critical to the economic fortune of hedge fund billionaire Robert Citrone, below left, a personal friend and former colleague of Bessent, who has invested heavily in Argentine assets.Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, desperately needs an influx of dollars to prevent a rapid devaluation of the peso. Controlling the peso’s value is key to Milei’s plan to reduce inflation, which reached 200% in Argentina in 2023.Milei’s policy is to keep the peso’s exchange rate with the dollar within a certain range. At present, the floor is 1,491 pesos to the dollar. If the peso exchange rate threatens to drop below the band’s floor, the Argentine central bank needs to buy pesos with dollars to protect the exchange rate. The U.S. announced the $20 billion swap as the Argentine government ran out of foreign currency.The problem with this approach is that Argentina cannot borrow enough foreign currency to stabilize the peso at an inflated exchange rate. A recent Morgan Stanley analysis found that, even in the most favorable scenario, the Argentine peso will not stabilize below 1,700 pesos to the dollar.So long as the Argentine government is willing to buy pesos with dollars at an inflated rate, demand will be insatiable.UPDATE: Hedge fund billionaire pressed Treasury Secretary for Argentina bailout, Argentine media reports The $20 billion U.S. swap was announced just a couple of months after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) extended its own $20 billion package. On October 15, weeks after Bessent announced the $20 billion swap, he said that he was organizing a separate $20 billion facility financed by banks and private equity.From the beginning, this made little sense. Banks stopped lending to Argentina, one of the most heavily indebted nations in the world, years ago because it is unlikely the country will ever have the means to repay them. Argentina already owes the IMF $60 billion. If banks were willing to lend to Argentina, the initial $20 billion swap from the U.S. government would not have been necessary. Bessent stepped in because Argentina had run out of options.During the press availability, Trump dismissed the concerns of American soybean farmers about Argentina. China has boycotted American soybeans as part of the ongoing trade dispute. Argentina has taken advantage by eliminating its export tax and then selling 1.5 million tons of soybeans to China within days. This has had a devastating impact on American farmers.“It’s not gonna mean anything in the end,” Trump said of the controversy.A report this week by the Wall Street Journal details what is really happening. The group of banks assembled by Bessent to help Argentina, which includes JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs, is demanding “some type of guarantee or pledge to ensure they will get their money back.” Specifically, they are asking “if Washington would plan to backstop the facility.” In other words, these banks are willing to lend Argentina money as long as they can keep the profits, while losses are shouldered by U.S. taxpayers. The Treasury Department did not dispute the Wall Street Journal’s report, saying only that talks with the banks “remain ongoing” and details would be announced “when these talks are complete.”This is all very risky business. Bessent says that it’s a great deal for American taxpayers because the Argentine peso is currently undervalued. If that is the case, why aren’t private investors eager to exchange their dollars for pesos?Since the first $20 billion bailout was formalized on October 9, the Argentine peso has declined from 1,421 pesos per dollar to 1,488 pesos per dollar. According to Bloomberg, the peso would have sunk even lower on Tuesday, but both the Argentine central bank and the U.S. Treasury intervened, buying pesos with dollars.Despite extraordinary support from the Trump administration, the billions in taxpayer dollars — and the promise of billions more — have not salvaged Milei’s economic plans. The Triat via The Bulwark,Political Opinion: We Will Tear Down the Trump Palace Ballroom and Casino, Jonathan V. Last (JVL), Oct. 22, 2025. Thinking like a dissident movement.
1. Demolition
White House East Wing from view of U.S. Treasury Department, whose employees were forbidden by administration security personnel from photographing construction of a new Trump ballroom (at an estimated $250 million cost) at the site)I know we talked about this yesterday. And Mona [Charen] has a very fine piece on it today. But I’m obsessed with Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House.Have you ever tried to put an addition on your home? How long did the process take? You have to:
- Decide what you want to do.
- Decide on an architect to design the job.
- Go through the design process to settle on a final project.
- Bid out the project to at least three contractors.
- Go through the financing approval process.
- Go through regulatory approval for permitting.
That’s months and months of work before you hammer in a single nail. And somehow Trump is doing demo work on a project that will dwarf the White House just nine months into his term.Is a president really allowed to do this?This is a serious question: Is the president the owner of the White House? Can he do literally anything he wants to it? Could he knock down the whole thing and replace it with a ten-story Brutalist cube?I guess so.The good news is this means that the next Democratic inhabitant of the White House can demolish the Trump Presidential Palace Ballroom and Casino and restore the East Wing and the rest of the White House grounds to their pre-Trump state.I can already hear the normie objections.
- Tearing down the structure is a waste of resources. Once a thing is built, you keep it and use it.
- Making the Trump teardown a priority would needlessly antagonize Republicans.
- Where would President Newsom get the money for the project?
- The entire thing would be a distraction from the president’s agenda of making a Real Difference in the Lives of Americans.
Well, allow me to retort:(1) After authoritarian regimes are toppled, monuments to the authoritarians are always removed. If you leave monuments to authoritarians standing, then you encourage (a) resistance from the out-of-power revanchists and (b) future strongmen who believe they can permanently mark history.(2) Would Trump supporters be antagonized by demolition of the Trump Presidential Palace Ballroom? I bet they would. But we’ve tried the strategy of non-antagonism, in which Merrick Garland refrained from aggressively pursuing criminal accountability for Trump while Joe Biden shoveled money into red states to create jobs for Trump voters while building rural broadband and better roads to solve their Kitchen Table Issues. Those acts of goodwill increased Trump’s vote share from 2020 to 2024. So maybe the way to persuade Republican voters to abandon their authoritarian project isn’t conciliation but domination.(3) Where would a Democratic president get funding for the project? AYFKM?Seven million people showed up to the No Kings protests this weekend. I guarantee you that every one of those people would give $25 to have a hand in blowing up Trump’s monument to himself.No need for congressional authorization of funds. If construction can be done with private donations, then so can demolition.(4) Undoing the authoritarian project is not a “distraction.” It is the single most important job of the next Democratic administration.Real talk: “Undoing the authoritarian project” will be incredibly hard when it comes to salvaging the Department of Justice, dissolving ICE, reallocating DHS functions to more professionalized forces, making the District of Columbia a state (in order to safeguard the rights of its citizens), and reforming the Supreme Court.The authoritarians are counting on this being difficult. They believe that the ratchet turns only one way. That they can do what they will and even in the unlikely event they are turned out of office this time, they can come storming back to finish the job.It is maximally important to demonstrate—both to the authoritarians and those who oppose them—that the ratchet can go in reverse. That authoritarian gains are not permanent. That liberal society has the will to undo their grotesqueries.In this way, demolishing the Trump ballroom and restoring the East Wing will be symbolic. But symbolism matters a great deal to authoritarians.Champions of democracy ought to respect that insight and learn from it.If we get another Democratic president, he must tear down this monstrosity, brick by brick, and show the Trumpists that while their project might succeed for a time, liberalism won’t go quietly. That there will be no throne for them. That every time they build one, we’ll tear it down 2. Chicago That was all much too hot. I get it and I’m sorry. Had to get it out of my system. In other news (from the Chicago Tribune):Owner Vanessa Aguirre-Ávalos was busy watching over a small group of young children at Luna y Cielo Play Café when she heard what sounded like a helicopter circling over the neighborhood.Concerned, she stepped outside to figure out what was going on. She watched as federal immigration agents passed by in trucks. Aguirre-Ávalos immediately blew the whistle hanging around her neck.“I was blowing the whistle several times. I don’t know if I was even using the right cadence,” she said about the scene she witnessed last month, which devolved into the agents throwing smoke canisters into the street just steps away from Funston Elementary School and her Logan Square play space. “But it was my first reaction, just to get people to know what was happening.” . . .A short blast means a confirmed sighting of a federal immigration agent, and a long hold is for when an agent is detaining someone. Noise equals more visibility, she said.Why are people reduced to using ordinary whistles in a time of AI and mobile computing? Because the regime forced tech companies to remove apps which helped citizens track ICE activity.Americans are used to talking about being the political “opposition” in something like the British parliamentary sense. There is a party in power that controls the government and then there is the loyal opposition that sits outside the government preparing to take over should the majority falter and lose the consent of the governed.In opposition politics, the loyal opposition does not need to carry around whistles to draw attention to people being disappeared off the street by masked agents of the state.That is something different. It’s the politics not of opposition but of dissidents.The people of Chicago understand that they now live in the realm of dissident politics, where their resources are ad hoc, made up of whatever tools the regime has not taken from them. Yet. And it is focused not on legislative maneuvering or political debate, but on preventing the use of force against vulnerable communities and exposing the regime’s use of force when they cannot prevent it.The people of Chicago are not acting like Democrats engaged in normal politics. They are acting like a dissident movement in an authoritarian system. Elected Democrats everywhere could learn from them.The Daily,Trump Throws A Tantrum After Being Asked About Demolishing The East Wing Of The White House, Sarah Jones and Jason Easley, Oct. 22, 2025. On July 31, Trump said when asked about building his monument to himself, known as the White House ballroom, “It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”Trump was such a big fan of the existing building that he had it demolished.The president ignored the legally required public review process, warning that his ballroom would overwhelm the entire existing White House structure.The East Wing is historic. It was constructed in 1942 during FDR’s fourth term. In recent presidencies, it has been used by the first lady and her staff. However, since the current first lady needs to have her picture on the back of a milk carton because she has vanished, Trump thought the space could be used for a ballroom.A reporter asked Trump about the lack of transparency in the White House ballroom project, “ I just want a quick follow up on that question. Your response to people who said that you haven’t been transparent enough about this.”Trump responded: I haven’t been transparent? I’ve shown, I’ve shown this to everybody that would listen. Third rate reporters didn’t see it because they didn’t look, you’re a third rate reporter, always have been.Meidas Touch Network Uncovered Commentary:Trump DOJ FIRES MORE Prosecutors as CASES GO OFF THE RAILS, Ron Filipowski, Oct. 22, 2025. On today’s Uncovered we started off the show talking about the blatant corruption involved with Trump’s new legal team negotiating a $230 million settlement with his former legal team which is currently running DOJ for supposed malicious prosecutions of him by Jack Smith.Next we talked about Trump’s complete destruction of the East Wing of the White House and all the other building projects he is undertaking in an around the National Mall and the financing behind it.I did a deep dive into the backstory behind the reasons why Trump just cancelled his summit in Hungary with Putin, where I think we are at with Ukraine, and how I see this playing out over the next few months.Anthony and I both talked about how attending the No Kings events was a powerful emotional experience for us. Of course, we also talked about Trump and Mike Johnson’s comments about it both before and after and why I think their messaging on it was a huge mistake for them politically.I also talked about how Trump’s peace deal between Israel and Gaza unravelled almost immediately and why my position on the entire situation has completely changed over the past 10 months.We also discussed the situation with Trump continuing to blow up boats in the Caribbean as well as the implications of the admin allowing the two men to go free who survived one of the murder attempts.I talked about what Trump is doing to farmers and ranchers who have supported him overwhelmingly in the past and continue to do so. We talked about how this also plays into the bailout of Argentina and the background of what Bessent is doing exactly with the currency swaps.We also talked about Pete Hegseth and JD Vance’s stunt to do a live fire exercise over I-5 in southern California so Vance could make a video for TikTok, and the lies that they told about it.I also went into how ICE has lowered standards for new recruits since they are so desperate to double the size of their agency, and yet a huge percentage of them still can’t pass the physical fitness test.News RoundupsLetters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 21, 2025 [Critic Shutout of Shutdown Unity Gathering], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 22, 2025. On this, the twenty-first day of the government shutdown, President Donald J. Trump invited all but one Republican senator to lunch today at what he calls the “Rose Garden Club,” a patio where the White House Rose Garden used to be.The missing senator was Rand Paul (R-KY), whose determination to cut the national debt has led him to vote consistently against measures that will increase it, including the Republican continuing resolution to fund the government.Trump boasted that the shutdown was enabling the administration to cut funding for what he continues to say are Democratic priorities, although the executive branch has no legal power to stop appropriations for congressionally approved projects, and Republican voters will also be hurt by the administration’s attempts to cut public programs and infrastructure projects. Trump called out director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, calling him “Darth Vader” as he slashes through funding and fires government workers.Jay O’Brien of ABC News reported this afternoon that a number of states are warning that they will not be able to continue to provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits after November 1 unless the shutdown ends. SNAP serves about 42 million Americans and was already under pressure because the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act—cut about $186 billion out of the program over ten years. Now, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New York have warned they cannot fund the program if the shutdown continues.Meanwhile, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), right, is refusing to call the House into session, keeping its members out of Washington, D.C., and thus continuing to jam the Senate into passing the House continuing resolution. As Mychael Schnell of MSNBC noted, keeping the House out of session also keeps members away from the congressional press corps, where the divisions in the Republican conference could go public.Johnson also insists that keeping the House out of session is preventing him from swearing in representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), left, who was chosen by voters on September 23, although speakers have sworn in representatives during pro forma sessions in the past. Grijalva has said she will be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.Today the state of Arizona and Grijalva sued the House of Representatives over Johnson’s refusal to swear Grijalva in, thus depriving her Arizona constituents of representation. Arizona Attorney General Kristin Mayes wrote: “This case is about whether someone duly elected to the House—who indisputably meets the constitutional qualifications of the office—may be denied her rightful office simply because the Speaker has decided to keep the House out of ‘regular session.’” Mayes has asked the court to authorize someone else to swear Grijalva into office.Kate Riga and Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo note that the lawsuit addresses Johnson’s excuse for delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in by saying that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) delayed the swearing-in of Representative Julia Letlow (R-VA) until about a month after her election. In fact, Pelosi contacted Letlow to see when she would like to be sworn in. “Ms. Grijalva would be delighted if Speaker Johnson would contact her to commit to a mutually agreeable time, as Speaker Pelosi did for Dr. Letlow,” the lawsuit notes.Johnson called the lawsuit “absurd” and said it was “a publicity stunt.”Meanwhile, Michael Stratford of Politico reported today that the United States has signed an “economic stabilization agreement” with Argentina’s central bank, offering extraordinary assistance to Argentina as its economy under Trump ally Javier Milei plummets. The agreement commits the U.S. to swapping $20 billion in currency to prop up the Argentine peso, in addition to at least two previous direct purchases of pesos.Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has also said the government is arranging for private lenders or sovereign wealth funds to put another $20 billion into the Argentine economy. But, as Alexander Saeedy and Santiago Pérez of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, banks want security from the United States that they will get their money back if the Argentine economy continues to sink.On Sunday, Trump suggested to reporters that the U.S. might also buy Argentine beef, saying such a purchase would help bring down prices in the U.S. But with Argentina having undercut U.S. soybean farmers in the Chinese market, U.S. cattle farmers met this suggestion with anger. As Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC reported today, they say that their own herds are dwindling because of drought and the parasitic screwworm and that the government isn’t doing enough to address those problems.Bessent claims that Argentina is a “systematically important ally” of the U.S., but as economist Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter last week, that importance is not economic. Unlike Mexico, which borders the U.S. and which accounted for 10% of U.S. exports when the U.S. stepped in to help stabilize its economy in 1994, Argentina is not geographically close and accounts for less than 0.5% of U.S. exports.Argentina’s systematic importance to the administration is, as Krugman notes, both that the administration wants a Trump-like politician to succeed and apparently that some of Bessent’s hedge-fund billionaire associates invested heavily in Argentine bonds in a bet on Milei. Bailing out the government even for a short while will let them get their money out.In contrast to the administration’s approach to Argentina, with its right-wing government, Trump announced on Sunday that the U.S. would raise tariffs on Colombia and end funding to the country, although Jeff Mason, Andy Sullivan, and David Ljunggren of Reuters note that funding in the past primarily came from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has already shut down. Trump claimed that leftist Colombian president Gustavo Petro is “an illegal drug leader,” calling him “low rated and very unpopular.” He added that Petro “better close up” drug operations “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.” Trump complained that Petro has shown “a fresh mouth toward America.”For his part, Petro posted on social media that “U.S. government officials have committed murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters.” He was referring to a September 16 strike by U.S. forces on a boat in the Caribbean that killed at least one Colombian national. “The United States has invaded our national territory, fired a missile to kill a humble fisherman, and destroyed his family, his children,” Petro wrote. Yesterday, Colombia recalled its ambassador to the U.S.Catie Edmondson of the New York Times reports that despite the shutdown, the administration has found $172 million to buy two Gulfstream private jets for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other Homeland Security officials. The initial request of the department was for $50 million for a single new plane. The Department of Homeland Security called the new purchase “a matter of safety.”Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. Now his own appointees will decide whether the American taxpayers should pay the compensation Trump wants.When Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the demand tonight, Trump answered that media outlets had paid him settlements because “what they did was wrong. And, you know, when somebody does what’s wrong—now, with the country, it’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes a decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.”The demolition of the East Wing of the White House continued today.This afternoon, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) took the floor of the Senate to hold it through the night “to protest Trump’s grave threats to democracy.” He said: “We cannot pretend this is normal.”The Parnas Perspective,Trump Struggles to Recruit ICE Agents as Most Can’t Pass Basic Fitness Tests, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2025. White House demolition accelerates, Trump makes firearm examiners essential employees allowing gun purchases.This morning, I am tracking several major developments:Trump’s plan to double the ICE workforce is faltering as over a third of recruits fail basic fitness tests, with officials reporting “athletically allergic” candidates who misrepresented their condition, raising concerns about the agency’s ability to meet its aggressive hiring goals without compromising standards.Over one-third of recruits have failed the physical fitness test: 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and a 1.5-mile run in 14 minutes, hindering the agency’s goal to hire and train 10,000 deportation officers by January.New images of the White House East Wing show a much larger demolition site. This is why the White House ordered employees not to share any new photographs or videos of the demolition process:Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued House Speaker Mike Johnson for refusing to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, arguing the delay disenfranchises her district; Johnson says he’ll seat her once Democrats agree to reopen the government, while Democrats allege he’s stalling to block her vote on releasing Jeffrey Epstein investigation files.Senator Elizabeth Warren has demanded that the U.S. Treasury disclose whether taxpayer funds were used to buy Argentine pesos as part of a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, criticizing the Trump Administration for a lack of transparency and questioning the bailout’s timing, scope, and potential political motivations amid a government shutdown. Trump’s nominee for the federal whistleblower office, Paul Ingrassia, right, withdrew after reports surfaced of racist texts in which he called himself a “Nazi,” marking rare GOP pushback; meanwhile, Trump-Putin talks were postponed, VP JD Vance touted progress on a Gaza ceasefire, and Arizona sued Speaker Mike Johnson over blocking Democrat Adelita Grijalva’s swearing-in.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a new Pentagon memo requiring all staff to get approval before communicating with Congress, tightening control over information flow and prompting criticism from lawmakers who say it reflects growing secrecy and paranoia within the Defense Department.Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has spoken for over 12 hours on the Senate floor protesting what he called President Trump’s “grave threats to democracy,” accusing him of undermining the Constitution and using authoritarian tactics amid the ongoing government shutdown.As the government shutdown enters its third week, Democrats are urging President Trump to engage in negotiations, accusing him of being “disengaged,” while Republicans admit his involvement could help but remain aligned with his stance to reopen the government before talks resume; the stalemate persists amid partisan blame and stalled discussions over health care funding.After lobbying from the gun industry and Republican lawmakers, the Trump administration deemed firearms examiners “essential” during the shutdown, allowing sales of silencers, short-barreled rifles, and pre-1986 machine guns to resume while other federal services remain halted.California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that the prolonged Trump administration shutdown could delay SNAP food benefits for millions, accusing Trump of “endangering lives” as federal aid programs stall ahead of Thanksgiving while Republicans blame Democrats for the funding lapse.President Trump paused planned peace talks with Vladimir Putin after Russia launched deadly new attacks on Ukraine that killed at least 13 people, including at a kindergarten; the breakdown followed tense exchanges between U.S. and Russian officials over ceasefire terms, as Kyiv urged for long-range missiles and Russia insisted on continued military operations.Russia launched massive overnight missile and drone attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing six people including two children and hitting a kindergarten, just hours after a planned Trump-Putin peace meeting was canceled, as energy infrastructure was heavily damaged and power outages spread nationwide.Billy Joe Cagle, arrested for allegedly planning a shooting at Atlanta’s airport, was a convicted felon and longtime Trump supporter who frequently defended the Confederate flag and gun rights online; authorities say his family’s alert prevented a potential tragedy.Elon Musk escalated his public feud with Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, mocking him as “Sean ‘Dangerously Stupid’ Dummy” on X amid Duffy’s controversial suggestion to fold NASA into the Department of Transportation and ongoing silence from Trump.At least 46 people were killed and several injured in western Uganda when two buses attempting to overtake collided head-on, marking one of the country’s deadliest crashes in years and highlighting ongoing issues with reckless driving, poor enforcement, and unsafe road conditions.Golf legend Jack Nicklaus won a $50 million defamation verdict against his former business partners at Nicklaus Companies after a Florida jury found the firm damaged his reputation by spreading false claims that he considered joining LIV Golf and was suffering from dementia.A driver was arrested after crashing a car into a Secret Service security checkpoint near the White House late Tuesday night; no injuries were reported, and authorities found no explosives or ongoing threat after assessing the vehicle.Global NewsNew York Times,Russia Hits Kindergarten and Power Plants Hours After Trump Delays Summit, Maria Varenikova, Oct. 22, 2025. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the overnight assault showed that Russia “clearly doesn’t feel enough pressure to stop prolonging the war.”Russia on Wednesday unleashed a broad attack that hit Ukrainian power plants, a kindergarten and other sites, killing six people. The barrage came hours after President Trump said he was putting off a planned meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to avoid a “wasted” effort toward ending the war.Mr. Trump had said late last week that he would meet soon with Mr. Putin in Hungary to continue peace talks. But on Tuesday, after discussions between American and Russian officials, the White House said no summit meeting was planned “in the immediate future.”The Trump administration announced the delay after Russian officials made clear that they would not budge from their maximalist demands to halt their invasion of Ukraine, again rejecting a proposal for a cease-fire that freezes the current front lines.On Wednesday, video footage posted by officials on social media showed emergency workers carrying toddlers from a burning kindergarten in the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The strike on the kindergarten killed one person and wounded several others, officials said.New York Times,Firing Squads and Forced Death Leaps: A Tipping Point in Syria, Christina Goldbaum, Arijeta Lajka, Reham Mourshed and Sanjana Varghese, Oct. 22, 2025. Ten months after rebels toppled the long-entrenched Assad regime, little-checked bloodshed has led many Syrians to abandon hope that the years of brutality may be over.U.S. Law, Crime, CourtsNew York Times,Habba’s Office Told to Release Videos in Assault Case Against Democrat, Tracey Tully, Updated Oct. 22, 2025. A federal judge overseeing a case involving a New Jersey congresswoman accused of assaulting immigration agents ordered the Justice Department on Tuesday to turn over additional videos as he reviews a defense request to dismiss the charges altogether.The judge, Jamel K. Semper, also told federal prosecutors to encourage the Department of Homeland Security to take down social media posts about the case that he described as prejudicial and “fact free.” Emptywheel,Analysis: Kash’s “lockbox in a vault…in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 22, 2025. Kash Patel, above, has ratcheted up his efforts to turn his past shoddy propaganda into prosecutions.There were two competing letters published yesterday designed to frame Kash Patel’s efforts to frame Democrats with being mean to Donald Trump, for which (the NYT reports) Trump wants to be paid $230 million. They are:
- A letter Lanny Breuer sent to Chuck Grassley, scolding him for the irresponsible way Grassley fearmongered Jack Smith’s analysis of toll records affecting nine or ten members of Congress. (Zoe Tillman wrote about the letter here.)
- A letter Jim Jordan sent to Pam Bondi, effectively recycling debunked Kash Patel claims to support a claim that John Brennan, below right, lied. The ostensible purpose is to refer John Brennan, right, to DOJ (but, significantly, not FBI) for testimony Brennan gave — in a hearing about the letter truthfully saying a bunch of spooks thought the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information op — that mentioned the Steele dossier in passing.
This may be an effort to predicate a case in DC after the case in Philly has stalled, but anyone aware of the law would question how comments about the Steele dossier were material to a hearing about the Hunter Biden letter, a point that Brennan even made at the time: “I don’t see any relevance to the Hunter Biden laptop issue now,” as quoted in Jordan’s letter.More importantly, the letter appears to be an effort to launder debunked propaganda Kash Patel did years ago through Congress back into an investigation led by Kash Patel. The key paragraph makes a number of claims, some of which are fabrications (and therefore commit the crime that Jim Jordan is referring), others of which are misrepresentations of prior reports that were themselves propaganda.The key claim in here — that what Jordan falsely says is the key claim of 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which he describes as, “that Russia ‘developed a clear preference’ for President Trump and ‘aspired to help’ him win the election,” is based on the Steele dossier — is based off two reports Kash substantially wrote (marked in blue).Never mind that it is only the key claim of the Intelligence Community Assessment if you have the thin skin of a Narcissist, never mind that any dispute is about how much evidence there was before discovering the June 9 meetings or Paul Manafort’s sharing of campaign information with Russian spies. That key claim had nothing to do with the subsequent investigation of Trump, which investigation had already been set into motion by Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec.But as I wrote extensively, the one dated 2020, showing that Congressional Republicans packaged up older claims and Russian spycraft after the Mueller Report definitively showed the Russia did prefer Trump and Trump did welcome that help, is an attempt to create a time machine to go back to the halcyon time before we knew all that. Jordan, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to lay out how all this fits together. He outsources it to a right wing propaganda outlet, outsourcing to them their credulity about the time machine effect going on.Jim Jordan lied, shamelessly, when he alleged that that claim was shown to be false. And he lied, shamelessly, when he said that a report that affirmatively did not incorporate intelligence from the Steele dossier, choosing instead to only link it and specifically say it was not incorporated into analytical work (which backs Brennan, not Jordan), instead relied on the dossier.More On U.S. Governance, Politics
Friends for Life: Lee Oswald (left) and Ernst Titovets (right), c. 1960. Prof. Titovets has provided his view of Oswald in the memoir “Oswald: Russian Episode,” shown below at a right.JFK Facts,The Lee Oswald I Knew: Political Thinker and Activist, Guest column Ernst Titovets, M.D., Ph.D., Oct. 22, 20225. Prof. Ernst Titovets, a still-active biomedical researcher based in the Belarus capital city of Minsk shown above at right as a student, talks about his friend, the accused assassin Lee Oswald, shown also above at left, and what Oswald called ‘The Athenian System.’I first met Lee Oswald in Minsk in September 1960. We became friends. I spoke his mother tongue. We were of the same age. Neither of us smoked or drank alcohol.Lee had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and requested political asylum. Instead, he was granted only residential status and was sent to live in the city of Minsk, the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. He was given an apartment and a job at a local radio and television factory. He live in Minsk for almost two and a half years. In May 1962, he returned to the United States with his Russian wife and their baby daughter.I must confess that at first I viewed my American friend mainly as sparring partner to improve my fluency in English. Before long, I discovered him to be an intelligent guy with a good sense of humor and many interests in his life.Among other things, we shared love for music and literature.I thought of devoting some time to studying my American friend’s English — an ambitious project of mine. Lee did not object to this idea and, rather flattered, was all ready to oblige his friend. Poor thing, he had no idea what awaited him. To put Lee through his paces — phonetically speaking — I made numerous tape-recordings of his English.Conclusion: Lee’s concept of “The Athenian System” was his intellectual response to President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural challenge: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”Oswald looked forward toward a better America, a reformed America — and so did JFK. They shared similar progressive views and a deep concern for the fate of America. They both did their best to make their plans come true.They both were killed. Kennedy was eliminated by dark forces controlled by those in power who opposed his “subversive” foreign policy, while recklessly pushing the world toward the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Oswald was killed and framed as the main suspect in Kennedy’s assassination— an act of gruesome cynicism to top it all. The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary:We Do a Little Nation-Building, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 22, 2025. You may remember that not long ago Donald Trump and his crew were, they stressed, trying to save some money.In the first few months of his second term, a great mania for belt-tightening gripped the White House. Its premier initiative was DOGE, which rampaged through the federal government, slashing contracts and payroll with abandon. The dismantling of USAID, which Elon Musk bragged about feeding through a “wood chipper,” was their crown achievement. No more would the United States spend tens of billions of dollars a year on useless frivolities like food aid for refugee children in war zones! Americans demanded, Elon insisted, that we spend their hard-earned tax dollars only on stuff that really mattered.I’ve been thinking about USAID and its $35 billion in annual aid spending a lot this week as Donald Trump has forged ahead with a new pet project: bailing out the nation of Argentina, whose economy has been faltering and whose president, Javier Milei, is facing the prospect of a major rebuke in his country’s midterm elections next week. On Monday, the U.S. Treasury agreed to purchase $20 billion in Argentine pesos in an “exchange-rate stabilization” operation. Other interventions are likely. When all is said and done, the White House hopes to provide $40 billion in rescue money for Argentina.It’s been funny listening to Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talk about this, as the rationales they offer diverge quite a bit. Bessent goes to some trouble to dress it up in the language of economics, casting it as a canny investment for America: “The success of Argentina’s reform agenda is of systemic importance, and a strong, stable Argentina which helps anchor a prosperous Western Hemisphere is in the strategic interest of the United States,” he tweeted this month. But Trump’s been explicit: He’s doing it to prop up his buddy Milei. “I’m with this man because his philosophy is correct,” Trump said of Milei last week. “And if he wins, we’re staying with him, and if he doesn’t win, we’re gone.”Whatever the rationale, it’s not clear their strategy is helping much. The Argentine peso sank to record lows yesterday, with little indication that the midterms were going to turn in Milei’s favor (who could have guessed that voters may not like the idea of being run by an American-puppet government?) and traders seemingly unimpressed by Bessent’s pitch of the currency as a prudent investment. The United States is now the proud owner of $20 billion in increasingly worthless Argentinian currency. America First, baby!Meanwhile, Trump is encountering some domestic problems of his own. It’d be one thing if he were just sending a slush fund of cash down Milei’s way. But Trump has suggested other interventions too—like the United States buying a bunch of Argentinian beef. He cast such a possibility as a win-win on Sunday: “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.”U.S. ranchers saw it differently. Lawmakers from agricultural states have been venting their displeasure all week, telling Trump that under no circumstances should the federal government take deliberate action to undercut the market. “Ranchers are finally getting prices that are going to make up for some really bad years in the past with the drought, low prices and high costs,” Texas A&M livestock economist David Anderson told the AP this week. “And we start talking about government policy to bring down prices.”Some of the criticism has come from unexpected places. The most strident GOP opponent of Argentina bailouts of any kind has been MAGA darling Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who demanded to know “how it’s America First to bailout a foreign country” in an X post last week. She doubled down in an interview yesterday: “It is mind-boggling why we would do this with Argentina,” she told Semafor. “There’s a lot of people in MAGA that try to always stick with the talking points . . . but there’s a lot of people that can’t spin this one.”Hey: When she’s right, she’s right.Trump’s economic “policy” has no real philosophy—it just involves throwing money at people he wants to help and tariffs at people he decides to punish. There’s no other rhyme or reason to it, and now even MAGA is starting to notice. The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary:Lessons of ‘No Kings,’ William Kristol, right, Oct. 22, 2025. No Kings Day was a remarkable success. Effective political movements learn from their successes and build on them. What lessons can we learn from No Kings?Let’s begin with the obvious: The core message of No Kings was—by its very name—negative. Some nice, sunny-side-up people shy away from this bracing fact. They say, “We can’t just say ‘no.’ We’ve got to be for something!” Ultimately, that’s true. But at first, and for a while, it’s fine to just say “no.”After all, political movements often begin—I dare say, they usually begin—as a rebellion against an existing situation. They define themselves by what they oppose. This is especially so if they emerge in periods of widespread discontent, when people think things are on the wrong track. In such a time, a powerful political message will always be, in its main thrust, negative. You have to resolve to get off the wrong track before you can work out exactly what the right track is.The day after the No Kings protests, the New York Times published a front-page piece with the headline, “It’s 2025, and Democrats Are Still Running Against Trump.” The article quoted worried “Democratic strategists” who “see a missed opportunity to forge a more positive message.”If the Times had existed on July 5, 1776, one has to think it would have run an article finding “Revolutionary strategists” worried that, “It’s 1776, and the revolutionaries are still running against King George III.” The strategists would have been concerned that the Declaration, with its long list of complaints and accusations against King George, was a missed opportunity to forge a more positive message. And anyway, the paper would have asked, would all this talk of liberty and rights really move the famed swing voters of Pennsylvania?One sometimes wonders about Democratic strategists: Have they never noticed that negative ads and messages work? They might consider the fact that this goes way back. Half of the Ten Commandments are negative.But like the Ten Commandments, No Kings also had a positive message. And the heart of that message was patriotic. The term “No Kings,” after all, harked back to the origins of the republic, to the American Revolution, to the Declaration of Independence.SubscribedThere were those who criticized the slogan for this reason, as sounding kind of old-fashioned. The modern analogies to Trump aren’t, after all, actual kings. Wouldn’t it speak more accurately to this current moment and this current threat, some argued, to talk of No Tyrants or No Authoritarians or No Autocrats?But the old-fashioned character of No Kings is part of what made it work politically. The right understands the appeal of invoking history. Think of the Tea Party. Or, for that matter, of “Make America Great Again.” Progressives, on the other hand, don’t much like backward-looking themes. That’s part of what it means to be a progressive.They’re not entirely wrong to be uncomfortable with such nostalgic appeals. But that’s also one reason progressives often fail politically. Americans are proud of their country and its history. Perhaps they’re at times too proud, or too uncritical. But the term “No Kings” helped give resistance to Trump a (partly) “conservative” cast.But a movement that appeals back to “No Kings” needn’t be mindlessly conservative. Edmund Burke is thought of today as a founder of modern conservatism. But he was also a Whig reformer. And he was a strong supporter of the American Revolution.And distaste for a vulgar patriotism needn’t mean shying away from patriotism altogether. It can instead lead to a more elevated patriotism. It was Burke who wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” The conservative side of No Kings can emphasize love of country. The progressive side can emphasize making our country more lovely.And so the big-tent patriotism of No Kings can rally the admirers of both Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, of both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, of both Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. It can be an intellectually broad and politically effective form of patriotism.But as No Kings suggests, to say “yes” to patriotism one has to first say “no” to Trumpism.New York Times,‘Medicaid Cut Me Off’: A Rural Health Center Faces New Pressures, Emma Goldberg, Oct. 22, 2025. As cuts to federal health care take hold, local clinics like Delta Health Center in Mississippi will be stretched more thinly than ever.“Make sure they are removed,” Judge Semper said, noting that lawyers for the congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, should “not be in a position to play Whac-a-Mole when there are government officials who are saying things that are not factual.”Ms. McIver, a Democrat, was charged in May with assaulting two federal agents and impeding the arrest of Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark outside a migrant detention center in New Jersey. Mr. Baraka was handcuffed and accused of trespassing in a chaotic, 68-second clash in a public area outside the gated perimeter of the Newark facility. The Real Michael Cohen,The Day The Senate Remembered Itself,Michael Cohen, right, Oct. 22, 2025. In a rare flash of conscience, the Senate remembered it still has a spine; and perhaps, buried beneath the politics and fear, a flicker of moral instinct.It’s not often I use the words “Senate” and “morality” in the same sentence without irony. But here we are. Maybe, just maybe, the United States Senate; that exhausted, self-protecting club of career politicians and opportunists, remembered that its job isn’t to rubber-stamp the President’s every whim.Because this week, in a rare flicker of conscience, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his colleagues made it clear that Paul Ingrassia, below left, the 30-year-old wunderkind who once bragged about having a “Nazi streak,” would not be confirmed as the new head of the Office of Special Counsel. And so, just like that, Ingrassia withdrew his nomination before the hearing ever began.Now, let’s not start handing out medals. This wasn’t a moment of moral heroism; it was a moment of political survival. But in Trump’s Washington, where sycophancy is a currency and integrity is an antique, even the faintest act of resistance feels almost revolutionary.POLITICO broke the story (excerpted above) that Ingrassia; already under investigation for alleged sexual harassment, had exchanged text messages with fellow Republicans describing himself as having a “Nazi streak” and making other offensive remarks. His lawyer tried the usual dance, claiming the texts were “manipulated” or “lacking context,” but the damage was done. Within hours, Thune and other top Senate Republicans distanced themselves. The numbers weren’t there. By sundown, Ingrassia was out.He posted his surrender on Truth Social and X, whining that he “did not have enough Republican votes at this time.” Translation: the same senators who have tolerated chaos, corruption, and criminality for years suddenly discovered that open flirtation with Nazism was a bridge too far. Not far enough to condemn it entirely, mind you; just far enough to avoid political blowback.Still, credit where it’s due. The Senate; this 119th Congress, which has spent nine months acting like an annex of the West Wing, finally pushed back. This is the same chamber that greenlit Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth at Defense, both appointments that made career staffers consider early retirement. Yet somehow, Ingrassia was a step too far.What makes this moment interesting isn’t that the Senate did the right thing; it’s that it remembered it could. A co-equal branch of government is supposed to act as a check on presidential overreach. For years, that principle has been as dead as decency itself in Washington. But Ingrassia’s collapse shows there are still limits, however faint, to what Congress will stomach. When a nominee becomes too toxic even for Trump’s enablers, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the significance.Of course, this wasn’t an act of moral clarity from the White House. Quite the opposite. Ingrassia still holds a position as liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s right; the guy who joked about his “Nazi streak” remains in a government role tied to immigration enforcement. Think about that for a second. The Senate decided he was unfit to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but the administration apparently thinks he’s perfectly suited to liaise with DHS. That’s not oversight; that’s negligence dressed up as loyalty.Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board; not exactly a bastion of liberal outrage, urged Trump to “make clear that this kind of garbage isn’t wanted in his MAGA political movement.” But let’s be honest: Trump’s movement has long been defined by its tolerance for garbage. The louder the outrage, the tighter the embrace. From Charlottesville to January 6th to “very fine people on both sides,” this isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.And then there’s the deeper sickness. The Ingrassia scandal wasn’t an isolated blip; it was the second GOP “Nazi text” controversy this month. The language of hate, once whispered on message boards, now circulates freely in group chats among staffers and officials. The fringe has become the feed. The virus isn’t just ideological; it’s cultural. These are people raised on trolling, desensitized by irony, and convinced that cruelty is just another form of authenticity.But here’s where this story turns from pathetic to profound: even in this political climate, some line was finally crossed. Maybe it was the word “Nazi.” Maybe it was the timing. Maybe Thune, a man who’s built his career on calculated restraint, decided he wasn’t going to be remembered as the Senate leader who confirmed the guy with the Nazi jokes. Whatever the reason, the machine blinked. The rubber stamp hesitated. The Senate; that hollowed-out institution we thought was incapable of shame, found just enough of it to matter.Ingrassia’s withdrawal won’t cleanse Washington’s conscience. But for one brief, flickering moment, morality wasn’t a punchline; it was policy. And in this era, that’s progress.White House East Wing from view of U.S. Treasury Department, whose employees were forbidden by administration security personnel from photographing construction of a new Trump ballroom (at an estimated $250 million cost) at the site)Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion,Is this a photo of the East Wing, or Donny Convict’s brain? You be the judge, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Oct. 22, 2025. Meanwhile, the Dead Pedo Bestie Files coverup continues.Yesterday, the Convict-in-chief summoned Republican Senators to an exclusive soiree at Club Parking Lot™, that cement travesty where our beloved Rose Garden used to be. Naturally, the deteriorating dotard used the occasion to brag.“And I will say this, we have Darth Vader. you know Darth Vader, right? Darth Vader is a man who, uh, I think he’s sitting, right? is that Darth? stand up please, Darth Va— stand up. does everybody know— this is— they call him Darth Vader, I call him a fine man. but he’s cutting Democrat priorities and they’re never gonna get them back.”Donny has no idea that Darth Vader is the bad guy, does he?Apparently Star Wars is some kind of Shakespearean tragedy for Donny, where the awesomest hombre in the galaxy keeps getting defeated.Anyway, the ‘Darth Vader’ who Donny was encouraging to ‘stand up,’ is, of course, Russ Vought, the architect of Project 2025 who is now Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Russ has been hard at work hollowing out government to the point where it no longer functions. He’s also been, as Donny was proud to point out, ‘cutting Democrat priorities.’You know, ‘Democrat’ priorities, like ‘healthcare should be affordable,’ and ‘food and drugs should be inspected.’Hey — speaking of Donny and his relationship with Russ the Impaler, here’s a fun story that’s not at all creepy or vomit-inducing.Apparently, after Vought’s wife left him in 2023, America’s Poon-Hound-in-Chief made it his mission in life to get Russ laid. “Trump spoke to Vought, left, a self-described Christian nationalist who’s now one of the president’s most hardline enforcers, about the ‘gorgeous’ and ‘beautiful ladies’ who roam Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, so often that it ‘weirded out’ some of his advisers,” sources told Zeteo. “And Trump spoke crudely of all the ‘pussy’ that Vought would surely get as the president’s favorite ‘bachelor.’”Yes, I know. I just had the same reaction you did.Come on, Russ — how could you resist the Sirens of Motel-a-Lago? But I digress. we need to get back to Donny, because he’s been getting all shouty at his TV again:“The great George Washington, all the way to— [pauses as his mind goes blank] well, I think we have to rate him above me. so, less than great. less than George. as somebody went up the other day, they say, ‘you’re the third-best president of the Uni—’ this was on television, ‘third best.’ and they said who are the first two? ‘George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,’ and I got extremely angry at this man, heh heh, you know? you can’t— it’s— it’s gonna be— it’s gonna be tough to beat [gestures] Mister Senator, it’s gonna be— John, it’s gonna be very tough to beat Washington and Lincoln, but we’re gonna give it a try, right? hey, they didn’t put out eight wars, nine coming. all right, we put out eight wars, and the ninth is coming, believe it or not.”Let’s set aside this fever swamp hallucination, where Donny actually believes he deserves the Nobel Bestest President Ever Prize for “putting out” eight (now nine) wars.Instead, let’s focus on how Donny’s brain has gone f….ity-bye. Listen to him ramble incoherently, and struggle to finish a single sentence without losing his train of thought.This is the clownish figurehead they put in front of the camera to distract us all with his dog-and-pony show, while Stephen Miller and Russ Vought and all the other sewer clowns run around in the background and do the actual work of fucking our country into oblivion.Everyone knows this. It’s the worst-kept secret in Washington.Meanwhile, every Republican Senator present at Donny’s Parking Lot Club luncheon, and every reporter watching from the wings, sits there with a grin frozen on their face, and pretends that all of this is normal, and acts like nothing’s wrong.Hey, why should they complain? When the whole thing was over, they all got cool swag bags full of Trump-branded merch as a parting gift.U.S. Education, Media, ReligionNew York Times,Colleges Face a Reckoning: Is a Degree Really Necessary?Alan Blinder, Oct. 22, 2025. Wyoming is one of many states that embraced a campaign to encourage more people to enroll in higher education. Some leaders and students wonder if they reached a limit.On the outskirts of Wyoming’s capital, two advertisements about a minute apart offered starkly different paths.A nonprofit group’s billboard promoted a way to earn money for college. The other, from Walmart, dangled pay exceeding $30 an hour.The dueling choices underscored a fundamental tension for the nation’s teenagers and adults alike, one that has become vivid in the Trump era: Is college something all Americans need?For decades, it was close to an article of faith among education leaders, scholars and politicians, regardless of political ideology, that most people should go to college. But in many places, most jobs do not require college degrees, and doubts over the value of higher education have metastasized as student debt has soared and the ranks of dropouts have grown.College has become a sharp dividing line in American life, and the disconnect between higher education’s promises and its sometimes-frustrating reality has helped fuel a conservative movement to upend academia. Over the last decade, though, nearly every state tried to get more people to earn a certificate or a degree after high school.Wyoming, which has just one public university, was among the states that bought into the campaign to push more of its residents toward higher education. Like most others, it made headway, but far less than it had hoped. And an uncomfortable question still lurks after seven years of trying to entice more students, even for people like Joe Schaffer, the Laramie County Community College president who both championed the state’s ambition and warned of the siren song of Walmart’s wages.“How do we make education much more relevant to the student?” New York Times,White House Moves Toward Settlement With First Public University, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender, Oct. 22, 2025 (print ed.). The Trump administration is closing in on a deal with the University of Virginia, four months after government pressure forced the school’s previous president to resign.The University of Virginia and the Trump administration are close to striking a deal that would end a monthslong standoff that included the ouster of the school’s president in June, according to five people briefed on the matter.The White House was reviewing the terms of the deal on Tuesday, the people said.A settlement would be the first time a public university has cut a far-reaching deal with the Trump administration as part of the White House’s extraordinary pressure campaign to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system. In recent months, the government has finalized similar agreements with Brown, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, all private institutions.Among the terms reached in the past week, the University of Virginia would not pay a financial penalty nor submit to a direct monitoring arrangement, according to three people briefed on the negotiations.The university would be required to continue to take steps to come into compliance with the administration’s expansive interpretation of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended explicit consideration of race in admissions to higher education, according to three people briefed on negotiations.Other details in the potential deal, hashed out in secret negotiations in recent weeks by Justice Department and school officials and lawyers, were unclear.Higher education leaders have increasingly viewed the administration’s insistence on an outside monitor, like Columbia agreed to include in its deal in July, as a potential infringement on academic freedom. Instead of including a monitor, who would report to the government on the university’s compliance, the University of Virginia would instead agree to provide regular updates to the government on how the university was addressing the administration’s civil rights concerns, two of the people said.In return, the Justice Department would suspend federal investigations into the university, while reserving the right to resume those inquiries if the administration deemed the school was not making sufficient progress on its civil rights goals.The five people briefed on the potential agreement spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential negotiations and a deal that had not yet been publicly announced.A spokesman for the University of Virginia did not immediately comment. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.The known terms of the agreement suggest that the settlement will be more favorable to the university than those reached by other schools.Brown, for instance, committed to spending $50 million over 10 years on work force programs, while Columbia agreed to a $200 million fine, as well as a $21 million contribution to a claims fund. Penn’s agreement did not include a financial component. The administration has been unable to reach terms with its biggest target, Harvard, despite months of negotiations.Three people briefed on the terms said that the University of Virginia was receiving a favorable deal because of how cooperative it has been with the Justice Department. The school’s former president James E. Ryan stepped down under pressure from the administration. The university also had taken steps in recent months to show the Justice Department that it was complying with its interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision about race in admissions.While legal experts and university officials have argued that schools can still consider race as part of a holistic review of a student’s application, the Trump administration has applied a broader view of the ruling to justify its attacks on policies and programs aimed at promoting racial diversity.Without having to pay a fine, the University of Virginia agreement may make a settlement easier to steer through the state government because no public money will be spent. But in forging a cost-free settlement with the school, the Trump administration may wind up giving other schools — especially public ones — room to negotiate.The government, for example, demanded months ago that the University of California, Los Angeles, pay a settlement of more than $1 billion. School leaders have signaled that such a demand would be nearly impossible to meet.The New York Times reported in June that Justice Department lawyers demanded that the University of Virginia oust Mr. Ryan to resolve an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts being led by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the department’s top civil rights lawyer, and Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. The following day, Mr. Ryan resigned.Democrats in Virginia have painted Mr. Ryan’s resignation as an act of capitulation. Republicans have pushed back on that notion, claiming that Mr. Ryan had been planning to leave and was a liability to the school because he was the wrong person to try to bring the school into line with the Trump administration’s agenda for higher education.Oct. 21 The Triad via The Bulwark,No Kings and the Laws of Power, Jonathan V. Last (JVL), above, Oct. 21, 2025. Understanding the Republican will to power and what Democrats must do to counter it.Before we get started: The stated policy of every Democrat seeking the presidency should be that the first thing they will do is demolish the Trump ballroom and restore the East Wing of the White House and the White House grounds to their pre-Trump state.Period. It’s the easiest layup in the history of politics. Trump’s transformation of the People’s House into a presidential palace is undemocratic. Presidents are not kings. Erasing this monstrosity is fundamental statement about the right-ordering of our project in self-government.Why is this so hard? Why haven’t Democrats already laid out a marker on this?Oh, and one other question: Is the East Wing teardown and creation of a new structure that dwarfs the existing White House the kind of thing someone does with a rental?If the Trump 2028 hats he passes out aren’t indicative of the man’s intentions, surely this construction project is?One last question for the people who keep saying, “Oh JVL, you scamp. Of course Trump won’t try to remain in office after 2028.”How many elected Republicans can you find who will say, on the record, unequivocally, that Trump cannot run for a third term? I’ll take your answers in the comments.Now, on to the main event. Because I have some advice for Democrats about how they should be thinking about power.1. People PowerThe October 18 No Kings protests were impressive. Some 7 million Americans showed up. That’s 2 percent of the entire country and 10 percent of the total number of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. They assembled in cities and towns. They did so with no—zero—violence.These protests were a demonstration of power. But before we get to them, I’d like to show you a different demonstration of power.Here’s the front page of the New York Times on October 19, the day after the largest coordinated protest in the nation’s history:The big stories?
- Syrian prisons
- Dems in disarray, “some see it as a missed chance”
- Trump is winning the shutdown
- Italian food in Italy
- Construction of the Obama presidential center
Would you care to read about the No Kings protests? Go to page 23.What a stunning piece of editorial judgment. What a clear statement of editorial priorities.Anyway, the No Kings protests were impressive because they showed that the pro-democracy movement is working with what it has. Shut out of power at the federal level, people are organizing at the community level to assemble a mass movement that (hopefully) can be used to mobilize voters in November 2026 and, possibly, to do more than just mobilize voters.¹But Republicans have also been thinking about power.2. State vs. StateWe are used to states pushing against the federal government in order to better reflect the will of their voters within their own borders. We have now entered a world in which some states are attempting to impose their will on other states.Texas is at the center of this revolution.First came the county-level Texas laws prosecuting women who sought abortions outside of Texas. The goal here was for citizens in Texas to assert control of what people could do in other states.Second is the 2025 redistricting, in which Texas changed its laws so the state could send fewer Democrats and more Republicans to Congress. The goal here was for Republicans in Texas to be able to impose their will on Democrats everywhere else.And third was the governor of Texas volunteering his state’s National Guard troops to be deployed to Illinois and Oregon, against the wishes of the governors of those states. The goal was . . . I dunno? Invasion?Point is: We haven’t seen states trying to impose their will on other states like this since Reconstruction.²Now where do you think this sort of thing ends? What happens when voters in Texas choose leaders based not on policy preferences for themselves, but on their eagerness to impose Texas’s will on the voters of Illinois?³But this isn’t really about state-on-state conflict. It’s about how the Republican party thinks about power—and what that means for how the Democratic party should be thinking about power.Republicans have realized that they can leverage supermajorities in red states to use the states themselves as instruments of power against their Democratic enemies elsewhere.We should not be surprised. This chart explains the Republican decision-making process when it comes to power: Graphic design is my passion.This was the decision-making process for:
- Denying a vote on Merrick Garland’s SCOTUS nomination in 2016
- Rushing a vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS nomination in 2020
- Attempting to overturn the 2020 election
- Refusing to convict Trump on impeachment
- Filing baseless libel suits against media companies with business before the federal government in order to secure settlements/payoffs
- Firing vast swaths of the federal workforce in early 2025
- Refusing to implement the law concerning the sale of TikTok
- Declaring an end to birthright citizenship
- Implementing unconstitutional tariffs
- Sending detainees to El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison
- Firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
- Revoking immigrant visas based on disfavored speech
- Firing federal prosecutors who refused to either drop existing charges against Trump’s friends, or indict Trump’s enemies
- Cutting off government grants to universities as political extortion
- Accepting personal hundred-million-dollar gifts from foreign governments
- Leveraging government approval for technology sales to countries provided they use the Trump family’s crypto exchange to consummate the transactions
- Unilaterally changing immigration statuses for whole classes
- Sending the military into Washington, D.C.
- Firing Fed governor Lisa Cook
- Sending the Texas National Guard to Illinois and Oregon
If an action is not expressly illegal, then Trump and Republicans will attempt it.That’s a problem because most things in life are not expressly illegal.Rick Santorum used to have a riff about America, virtue, and the rule of law. The citizenry had to be virtuous, he’d say, because the law can’t proscribe every possible bad thing. You need to have a baseline of good will. If you let gangsters into government, they will find pathways to power that haven’t been expressly prohibited by because a body of law that tries prohibit every bad thing will become so byzantine and expansive that it collapses under its own weight.He was right.And it’s not just the stuff that’s not illegal that creates problems. Without virtue, even expressly legal processes can be perverted.The Texas redistricting gambit, for example, is perfectly legal. I expect that Missouri, Florida, and possibly Indiana will also redistrict before the next election. Which would give Republicans an additional five or six seats in the House. (In addition to the seats gained in Texas.)Unprecedented? Yes. Bad faith? Definitely. But legal?It’s totally legal and totally cool, baby.And if the Supreme Court strikes down the Voting Rights Act on an expedited basis, then Republican-controlled states will redistrict away another dozen Democratic seats in what will be another perfectly legal exercise of power.Game theory tells us that the only way to convince Republicans to stop using their current decision-making rubric is for Democrats to adopt it themselves. Tit for tat.Democrats should be using every lever of power available to them by law.The No Kings protests—people power—is one of those levers. But at the level of elected Democrats, there seem to be very few people who understand the strategic realities of our position.The governors of Illinois, Maryland, and New York should be moving ahead aggressively to counter red-state redistricting. The only way to stop Republicans from pulling any lever of power legally available is by retaliating in kind.There are other things Democrats should be preparing to do.Normal people in the pro-democracy space seem to understand what time it is. Most elected Democrats do not. And these elected Democrats also do not seem to understand that weakness is a provocation. New York Times, In a Reversal, Trump Will Not Meet With Putin in Coming Weeks, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 21, 2025. The back-and-forth was the latest example of President Trump teasing a breakthrough, only to be pulled back by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.The White House reversed itself on Tuesday and said that President Trump no longer planned to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in “the immediate future,” after Russian officials made clear they had no intention of making a deal to end the war in Ukraine.The announcement punctured the rosy picture that Mr. Trump had presented just five days ago, after he spoke on the telephone with Mr. Putin and came away with a plan for a “pretty quick,” in-person meeting in Budapest to discuss ending the war.“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday when asked why the meeting was put off. “I don’t want to have a wasted time, so I’ll see what happens.”The back-and-forth is the latest example of the cycle between the two leaders, in which Mr. Trump teases some kind of diplomatic breakthrough, only to be pulled back by Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump has by turns courted the Russian leader and threatened him — but has never taken action to punish Russia in a meaningful way.In the process, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine seems to lose any traction that he has built up with the United States.“The question is, will Trump, and when will Trump, understand that to get results he wants, he has to put pressure on Putin?” said Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and longtime senior U.S. diplomat. “Putin keeps playing him.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Hungary, Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.After Mr. Trump spoke to Mr. Putin last week, he also backed off the possibility of selling long-range missiles to Ukraine that would allow Kyiv to strike deep into Russia, dashing Ukraine’s hopes of gaining the kind of leverage that would force Russia to negotiate.The next day, Mr. Trump held a contentious meeting at the White House with Mr. Zelensky, who later told Europeans that Mr. Trump unsuccessfully pressed him to hand over territory to end the war — a development that would be on Russia’s terms.On Tuesday, Ukraine’s allies in Europe released a joint statement rejecting the prospect of territorial concessions.“Russia’s stalling tactics have shown time and time again that Ukraine is the only party serious about peace,” the statement said. “We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction.”At a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said he told Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a phone call that Russia’s position on the war had not changed: that a peace deal must come before a cease-fire.That strategy allows Mr. Putin to continue the war indefinitely, pending negotiations for a more concrete deal that could take years to reach.“It is now being said from Washington that there is a need to stop immediately, that there is no need to discuss anything further, and that ‘history should judge,’” Mr. Lavrov said. “If we just stop, it means forgetting the root causes of this conflict, which the American administration clearly understood and voiced this understanding upon Trump’s assumption of power.”After the call between Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Rubio, Mr. Trump’s aides believed an in-person meeting between the senior officials would not be necessary, according to two White House officials. While Mr. Trump’s aides left open the possibility of a meeting with Mr. Putin down the line, one White House official said there was no date on the books. In reaction to the Oct. 18 “No Kings” protests across the United States and in scattered other locales worldwide, President Trump used his Truth Social website to display a brief video of himself created via Artificial Intelligence portraying himself with a crown and piloting a military airplane dropping massive loads of excrement on peaceful protesters in New York City (Screenshot).New York Times,How Trump Is Using Fake Imagery to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters, Stuart A. Thompson, Oct. 21, 2025. The era of A.I. propaganda is here — and President Trump is an enthusiastic participant.After nationwide protests this weekend against Mr. Trump’s administration, the president posted an A.I.-generated video to his Truth Social account depicting himself as a fighter pilot, careening through major cities and dropping excrement on protesters.It was the latest example in a yearslong shift by Mr. Trump to deploy fake imagery, generated by artificial intelligence, as part of his social media commentary.Mr. Trump has posted A.I.-generated images or videos at least 62 times on his Truth Social account since late 2022, according to a review by The New York Times of his posts to the social network. The fake imagery has included blistering attacks on his political rivals, flattering depictions of himself, and misleading political campaign materials made entirely by A.I. tools.Overall, he has attacked his opponents, including top Democratic leaders and his Republican rivals, with A.I. imagery at least 14 times. President Trump promoted on his Truth Social website images portraying him and Vice President J.D. Vance as American kings and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries,, below at left, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as adorning themselves with sombreros. Meanwhile, construction crews were demolishing part of the White House East Wing exterior to build a ballroom rump wants while security personnel forbade nearby Treasury Department employees from recording the deconstruction on their cellphones.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 20, 2025 [Trump Floats ‘Trump As King’ Imagry], Demolishes White House East Wing Wall Section , Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 21, 2025. Over the weekend, as millions of Americans attended “No Kings” protests, President Donald J. Trump’s social media accounts responded by posting images not just of Trump as a king—defecating on Americans, even—but also of Vice President J.D. Vance in a royal crown, suggesting that American democracy has been supplanted by tyranny that will last past Trump into the future.In the United States, no man is a monarch: the law is supposed to be king. In January 1776, newly arrived immigrant Thomas Paine published Common Sense, explaining to his new countrymen why they should declare independence from the King of England. He called for a new government based not in heritage or tradition, but in the law. “[I]n America the law is king,” Paine wrote. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”But under Trump, the law is under attack.Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley, Aaron Weisz, Aliza Chasan, and Ian Flickinger presented the story of Erez Reuveni, a former lawyer for the Department of Justice (DOJ) who alleges that the Trump administration is destroying the rule of law in America.Reuveni, shown above at left with Pelley was part of the first administration of President Donald J. Trump, where he defended Trump’s travel ban order, prohibiting travelers from Muslim majority countries from coming to the United States. He was so effective, the journalists note, he quickly took on a prominent role in Trump’s second term.On March 14, the same day he was promoted to become the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s immigration section, Reuveni and others in his section met with Emil Bove, who had once been Trump’s criminal defense attorney and was then the third-highest official at the DOJ. Bove told the lawyers that Trump would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 100 Venezuelan migrants the administration claimed were terrorists. They would not receive due process.According to Reuveni, “Bove emphasized, those planes need to take off, no matter what. Then after a pause, he also told all in attendance, and if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f*** you.’”“I felt like a bomb had gone off,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “Here is the number three official using expletives to tell career attorneys that we might just have to consider disregarding federal court orders.”The next day, some of the prisoners sued, and U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg called a hearing. Boasberg asked Drew Ensign, representing the DOJ, whether the planes would be leaving that weekend. Ensign said he didn’t know, even though, according to Reuveni, Ensign was at the same meeting with Bove he was. Reuveni called that moment in court “stunning.”“It is the highest, most egregious violation of a lawyer’s code of ethics to mislead a court with intent,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes.Boasberg ordered the planes not to leave and ordered the government to return any planes in the air. But instead, more than five hours after Boasberg’s order, the planes carrying the migrants arrived at the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador.“And then it really hit me. It’s like, we really did tell the court, screw you. We really did just tell the courts, we don’t care about your order. You can’t tell us what to do,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.” “That was just a real gut punch.”Then it turned out that Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador whose deportation to El Salvador a U.S. court had prohibited, had been rendered to CECOT. Reuveni told CNN that one of his superiors called him and ordered him to say that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang and a terrorist. Reuveni said he couldn’t say such a thing because it was a lie.“What’s to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore, to say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13, you’re a terrorist,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “What’s to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie? And now that’s you gone and your liberties changed.”When Reuveni refused to sign a brief calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist, the administration fired him.John Hudson, Jeremy Roebuck, and Samantha Schmidt of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the day before Reuveni was promoted and Bove called a meeting with him and other DOJ lawyers to tell them “the planes need to take off, no matter what,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a phone conversation with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. The Trump administration wanted to send hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, but Bukele had a price.Bukele, right, wanted nine leaders of the MS-13 gang returned to El Salvador with the other prisoners. The individuals he wanted had threatened to expose the relationship between Bukele and MS-13. Bukele’s government has allegedly cut deals with MS-13 leaders to reduce the number of “public murders” to make it look as if homicide rates are falling, a development that boosts Bukele’s popularity.The Washington Post journalists report that Rubio promised to return the MS-13 leaders. But some of those leaders were informants who were under the protection of the U.S. government. For years, U.S. law enforcement had worked first to capture high-ranking members of the deadly MS-13 gang and then to secure their cooperation with the promise of protection by the U.S. government. Rubio told Bukele the U.S. would renege on those agreements and turn the informants over to the government whose corruption they were exposing.“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” said Douglas Farah, a contractor who had investigated and helped U.S. officials to dismantle MS-13. “Who would ever trust the word of U.S. law enforcement or prosecutors again?”The 60 Minutes story noted that the nonpartisan law journal Just Security has discovered more than 35 cases in which judges have said the government is lying to them. One judge warned that “trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.” Republicans in the U.S. Senate confirmed Bove, shown above, as a U.S. appeals court judge in July, although Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined all Democrats in voting no. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Bove: “He has a strong legal background and has served his country honorably. I believe he will be diligent, capable and a fair jurist.”At the same time the administration undermines the rule of law that the Founders expected would rule the nation, it is illustrating the destruction of the people’s government with a symbolism that is hard to miss.Although the U.S. government has been shut down now for 20 days, leaving vital public servants without pay, work on Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom has continued. In July, when he announced the project, Trump said: “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”The facade of the East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on October 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. The demolition is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to build a ballroom reportedly costing $250 million on the eastern side of the White House. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images.)Trump’s promise notwithstanding, demolition crews have begun to tear down the East Wing of the White House, the “People’s House.” Jonathan Edward and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post noted that today a backhoe began ripping through the structure. The National Capital Planning Commission, which approves construction of federal buildings, has not signed off on the destruction, but in September, Will Weissert of the Associated Press reported that the Trump-appointed head of the commission, Will Scharf, who is also the White House staff secretary, said the board has no jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation. “What we deal with is essentially construction, vertical build,” Sharf said during the only public meeting about the ballroom.But White House officials do not appear to want to advertise their destruction of part of the historic building. Natalie Andrews and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials at the Treasury Department, which has a front-row seat to the demolition, have told employees not to share photos of the grounds. According to Trump, funding for his ballroom has been provided by dozens of companies, including Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and Coinbase. As of September, the White House had not yet submitted building plans to the National Capital Planning Commission.The first president to live in the White House after its construction was a contemporary of Thomas Paine, John Adams. When he moved into the house in 1800, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.” The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary,Assassination Threat, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 21, 2025. Breaking news this morning:
CBS News reports that a man was arrested after sending texts that he planned to “eliminate” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at an event in New York City last weekend. “I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” Christopher Moynihan said in a text message, according to a court filing. “Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated, I will kill him for the future.”The kicker: Moynihan was a convicted January 6th rioter. He was among those pardoned by Donald Trump in January. Emptywheel,Analysis: Donald Trump Owns Christopher Moynihan’s Alleged Death Threat against Hakeem Jeffries, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 21, 2025. One of the January 6 rioters Trump pardoned was arrested Sunday for making terroristic threats against Hakeem Jeffries.It has taken longer than I expected, but the pardoned Jan6ers have begun to get back in legal trouble.In May, Zach Alam (the guy who busted open the door through which Ashli Babbett jumped) was arrested and, last week, convicted, of larceny for a burglary in Henrico, VA.Alam was always unbalanced; had he remained in prison he might have gotten badly needed treatment.The case of Christopher Moynihan, who was arrested Sunday in New York after threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries, is less predictable (though not in any way surprising).Court documents obtained by CBS News said Christopher Moynihan was arrested Sunday after saying in text messages that he planned to “eliminate” Jeffries when the top House Democrat spoke at an event in New York City on Monday.Jeffries spoke at the Economic Club of New York on Monday.According to a court filing by prosecutors in the New York state criminal case, Moynihan wrote, “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live.”Moynihan also allegedly stated: “Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated, I will kill him for the future,” the filing said.Moynihan faces a felony charge of making a terroristic threat, according to court filings shared by prosecutors.While FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force reportedly provided the lead to local cops, thus far these charges are state charges; Trump cannot pardon Moynihan this time.Unlike Alam, Moynihan was not detained pre-trial nor charged with assault for January 6 (though he remains detained now).After crowding in the East side of the Capitol and rushing directly to the Senate floor, he rifled through Ted Cruz’ desk, describing that he was looking for “something we can fucking use against these scumbags.”Along with everyone else who breached the Senate with the clear intent of obstructing the vote certification, Moynihan was charged with and convicted, in August 2022, in a stipulated trial of obstruction under 18 USC 1512(c)(2) — one of the same crimes with which Trump was also charged. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison in February 2023 — Judge Christopher Cooper recommended he get mental health and drug treatment while in prison. But he only served a year, after which he was released pending the SCOTUS opinion that would ultimately throw out the obstruction charges against many defendants.Moynihan might have been one of the January 6 defendants against whom the obstruction charge might still have stuck — after all, he had paper relating to the vote certification in his hands and he explicitly sought to use that information against “these scumbags.”But he was pardoned along with everyone else.And now, he is repeating the same kind of eliminationist language about Democrats — calling Jeffries a terrorist — that Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi have been pushing of late.It’s only a matter of time until one of Trump’s pardonees succeeds in carrying out the violence so many continue to support. And when that happens Trump and his lackeys will own that crime, too. New York Times,Shutdown With No Clear End Poses New Economic Threat, Lydia DePillis, Oct. 21, 2025. The effect is rippling beyond missing paychecks to federal services that support much of the economy.The economic effect of past government shutdowns has been straightforward. The economy loses some activity for a few weeks, then gains it back after the government reopens. The net cost is basically zero.This time, the math may not be so benign.As Washington’s stalemate continues into its fourth week with no end in sight, it’s looking like this could become one of America’s longest funding lapses. During the previous record-holder, a 34-day closure in 2018, Congress passed enough appropriations bills to keep more of the government funded. This time, none have been passed.And the White House is attempting to lay off thousands of people and threatening to withhold back pay for furloughed workers, despite a 2019 law requiring that they be paid. “That would obviously make it a larger macroeconomic impact,” said Michael Zdinak, a director on the United States economics team at S&P Global Market Intelligence.Then there are the services those workers aren’t providing, including national park tours and new drug reviews, that support commerce. For many businesses, the timing couldn’t be worse, with the holiday season approaching and economic uncertainty already high.“If you’re worried about the potential for those indirect impacts, those only increase the longer the shutdown goes on,” Mr. Zdinak said.Economists estimate that the shutdown will trim between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points off annual growth in economic output for each week it drags on. That amounts to between $7.6 billion and $15.2 billion a week based on hours that government employees aren’t working, according to Oxford Economics. The 2018 shutdown trimmed slightly less than 0.1 percentage points off annual growth per week, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.That estimation does not capture the ways federal services support economic activity in other sectors, where the effect could be narrow but deep. Consider visa processing. Much of it is performed by contractors, who were told to stop work on Oct. 1. Unlike government employees, they will not be paid back when the shutdown ends. More On U.S. PoliticsNew York Times, How Trump Played ‘Budgetary Twister’ to Pay Some Workers During the Shutdown, Tony Romm, Oct. 21, 2025. By paying troops and law enforcement officials, the president stretched the limits of his spending powers, posing a fresh test to Congress.Tucked among the many pages of President Trump’s signature tax cuts is a single paragraph that provisions money for the Department of Homeland Security.Totaling $10 billion, and created to help “safeguard” the border, the funds received scant attention when Republicans in Congress adopted the mammoth law this summer. But the money has since taken on greater significance, as one of the obscure accounts that have enabled the White House to manage the fallout from the government shutdown.Three weeks into the fiscal stalemate, the Trump administration has taken a series of unorthodox steps to reprogram billions of dollars in enacted spending, marking an escalation in its campaign to wrest control of the budget away from Congress.The moves, which are highly unusual during a shutdown, have allowed the president to pay military service members, immigration agents and other federal law enforcement officials, even though lawmakers have not approved new money for their wages.Normally, federal workers do not receive income until the shutdown concludes, creating hardship for millions of troops and civil servants, who are either furloughed or forced to keep working without pay. But the White House has stretched its authority in recent days to assist certain employees who are seen as central to Mr. Trump’s political agenda, including those who conduct deportations.Using a set of funds in the president’s tax law, the Trump administration has promised pay to thousands of ICE agents and other law enforcement officials, who otherwise would not have received checks while the government is closed. And for the troops, Mr. Trump has turned to a special set of funds meant to develop weaponry, while ordering the Pentagon to explore other sources to pay the military throughout the shutdown.Few in Congress have publicly challenged the president over his recent actions, given the broad, bipartisan desire to spare government employees, especially the troops, who are caught in the middle of the funding debate.But many legal scholars, budget experts and congressional Democrats remain uneasy with Mr. Trump’s expansion of presidential power. They view it as just the latest instance in which the White House has encroached on congressional authority — one that could open the door for Mr. Trump to reprogram the budget in more drastic ways once the shutdown ends. New York Times,North Carolina State Senate Approves New Congressional Map in Effort to Add a Seat, Eduardo Medina, Oct. 21, 2025. The Trump administration has pushed Republican leaders to redraw House district maps before the midterm elections next year.Republican state senators in North Carolina approved a new congressional map on Tuesday to further favor their party and help the Trump administration’s efforts to retain control of the U.S. House in the midterm elections next year.The new map would likely give Republicans an extra House seat. The Senate approved it just over a week after Phil Berger, the chamber’s leader, and Destin Hall, the speaker of the State House of Representatives, said in a joint statement that they were taking action to protect President Trump’s agenda and safeguard Republican control of Congress.The state House of Representatives is likely to approve the new map later this week. Republicans currently hold large majorities in both chambers, and Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, cannot veto redistricting plans, per the State Constitution.The redistricting plan has received significant criticism in the state and across the country, partly because of North Carolina’s political identity: It is still considered a swing state with an almost evenly divided electorate, but that is hard to glean from its already heavily gerrymandered map, which was approved by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2023.Republicans already have control of 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats. The new map could give them an extra seat in the First Congressional District, which previously included all eight of the state’s majority Black counties and has now been redrawn to include more conservative-leaning counties. The district is currently held by Representative Don Davis, a Democrat.North Carolina’s new map could face legal challenges rooted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to weaken a key provision of the landmark civil rights law, by sharply limiting the ability of lawmakers to use race as a factor in drawing voting maps.The proposed redrawing in North Carolina comes as the Trump administration has pushed Republican-led states to redraw House district maps to strengthen his party’s majority in the chamber before the midterm elections. That effort took off over the summer in Texas, at the urging of Gov. Greg Abbott. Lawmakers there approved a map that could give Republicans up to five more seats in the U.S. House.In response to Texas’ actions, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, pressed his state’s Legislature to approve a new map that could flip as many as five Republican-held House seats to favor Democrats. That map requires the approval of California voters in November.Since then, other states, including Missouri and Indiana, have either taken part in gerrymandering or threatened to do so before 2026.Mr. Trump praised the Republican lawmakers in a social media post on Friday, before the Senate approved the new map, saying that securing an additional Republican seat would amount to “a huge victory” for his agenda.The timing of Mr. Berger’s willingness to engage in redistricting has raised eyebrows in North Carolina. He is in a contentious and possibly close primary race for re-election against a popular sheriff, Sam Page. Mr. Berger has denied claims that the redistricting plans are part of a deal to secure Mr. Trump’s endorsement. The facade of the East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on October 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. The demolition is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to build a ballroom reportedly costing $250 million on the eastern side of the White House. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images.)The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary,Demolition President, William Kristol, right, Oct. 21, 2025. In October 1943, the British Parliament debated the rebuilding of the House of Commons, which had been destroyed a couple of years before in the Blitz. Against others who favored using a more modern, semicircular design—more like that of many other parliaments—Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the case for preserving the original shape of the Commons.Part of Churchill’s argument was simply the case for honoring tradition. But Churchill also argued that the original, rectangular layout of the House, with benches facing each other in close proximity, encouraged vigorous and direct debate between the parties. And he claimed that the small size of the House, with not enough seats for every member, created a sense of intimacy and urgency for the discussion, especially during important moments.How much did all this matter? Well, as Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”Eighty-two years later, the president of the United States is reshaping the White House. In July, Donald Trump announced he wanted to add a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to the existing building. The ballroom would dwarf the 55,000 square feet footprint of the main part of the White House. Still, Trump assured one and all, “It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building.”It turns out Trump was lying. Shocking, I know. Yesterday, construction workers began the demolition of part of the East Wing in order to build a new, Mar-a-Lago-like ballroom.Trump hasn’t gotten approval for this project from the National Capital Planning Commission, which regulates the construction of federal buildings. The Trump-appointed head of the commission, Will Scharf—who, conveniently, is also the White House staff secretary—said during the only public meeting about the matter that the board has no jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation.While Trump is proud of his new ballroom, others in the administration seem touchy. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the Treasury Department instructed employees not to share images of the demolition, after photos of construction equipment dismantling the front of the building made their way online.It’s unclear what legal authority the Treasury Office of Public Affairs has to tell employees what photos they can take during their lunch break. But why would that matter to the Trump administration?In any case, Trump—aided and abetted by all the corporations and wealthy donors who have contributed money to his project—will presumably be able to do as he pleases. And perhaps it’s foolish to object. If we’re going to transition under Trump’s rule from a (mostly) dignified democratic republic to an ostentatious oligarchic autocracy, our buildings should reflect and reinforce that progress. After all, we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.New York Times,No Education Department? No Problem, Trump’s Education Secretary Says, Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender, Oct. 21, 2025. The shutdown means there is, essentially, no Education Department.The latest round of layoffs would leave few workers to enforce special education and civil rights laws.What could it look like if President Trump succeeds in his promise to shut down the U.S. Department of Education?The last three weeks offer something of a glimpse.So far this month, the Education Department has stopped most of its work during the government shutdown, and the Trump administration has laid off more than 460 employees, cutting deeper into an agency that had already laid off half of its work force in March.The new layoffs, if they survive a legal challenge, would functionally wipe out the offices that handle two of the agency’s core functions: dispersing federal money to states and school districts, and enforcing federal special education and civil rights laws. In March, the layoffs eliminated the agency’s research arm dedicated to tracking U.S. student achievement, which for many students is at three-decade lows.Mr. Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, right, has argued that the latest developments only prove that the Education Department is unnecessary and should be shut down.“Millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal,” Ms. McMahon posted on social media last week. “It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.”The federal government indeed plays a small role in the day-to-day operations of schools, which are locally run and paid for mostly with state and local dollars. But it is responsible for sending out billions of dollars a year in funding for schools, about 10 percent of all public school funding. And it plays a key role in enforcing federal law in schools and universities.The latest layoffs would make it nearly impossible for the Department of Education to fulfill those obligations, current and former employees said, potentially bringing the Trump administration one step closer to its goal of shutting down the department.U.S. Media, Politics Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: A month in the manosphere, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 21, 2025. One of the most significant political developments in the last few years is the emergence of the “manosphere,” a loose network of longform podcasts that are especially popular with young men. Although the top manosphere podcasts are not primarily about politics, they have been credited with effectively promoting right-wing viewpoints.During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was interviewed by manosphere podcasters Joe Rogan, Theo Von, AndrewSchulz, and Shawn Ryan. On election day, Trump won 56% of the votes of young men 18-29. That was a huge improvement over 2020, when Trump was supported by just 41% of young men.At Trump’s November 2024 victory party, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO Dana White took the stage and thanked Rogan (shown below left in a social media photo), Von, and other manosphere podcasters for contributing to Trump’s win.Why are these podcasts so influential? What is actually discussed? The answers to these questions are difficult to ascertain. Yes, the podcasts are public, but they are also extremely long. Rogan, for example, puts out around three podcasts a week and each one can be three or even four hours. The only people who regularly listen to these podcasts are fans.To pull back the curtain on the manosphere, Popular Information reviewed every edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, and The Shawn Ryan Show published in September. Collectively, these podcasts have over 30 million subscribers on YouTube and millions of additional listeners on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms. The shows and hosts also have tens of millions of followers on social media platforms like X and Instagram.In September, these four shows published 35 episodes with a combined runtime of 94 hours and 55 minutes.Nearly 95 hours of content includes little overt discussion of public policy or political philosophy. But the episodes frequently feature crude racism, outlandish political conspiracy theories, brazen misogyny, medical quackery, and homophobia.Wealthy Democrats are reportedly spending tens of millions of dollars to identify “the next Joe Rogan” for the left. The people financing these efforts do not seem to have grappled with the kind of content Rogan and other major players in the manosphere create to attract a loyal audience.Rogan: Soy protein gives men “tits”In a September 2 episode with comedian Dave Landau, Rogan claimed that people who get their protein from soy are being feminized, asking, “Why do I have tits? Why am I lactating? Why am I always crying?” He also asserted that lab-grown meat causes cancer, a false claim that appears to have originated from a Facebook post. Later in the episode, Rogan referred to Beyond Meat as “trans burgers,” prompting Landau to reply, “You’re getting the patty that basically shoots up a school.”Von: The Postal Service is like “handing a letter to a Black guy”In an episode with comedian and podcaster Jim Norton on September 5, Von insinuated that the United States Postal Service (USPS) cannot be trusted. Using the USPS, Von said, was like “handing a letter to a Black guy and hoping he takes it where it’s supposed to go.” Norton agreed, responding, “Yeah, just here you go. Please bring that… to the government.”Rogan suggests the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is partially trueOn a September 4 episode with comedian Tim Dillon, Rogan promoted the false Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which involves the claim that powerful Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant (that does not have a basement). “There’s a lot of misinformation that gets attached to true stories to make the stories goofy,” Rogan said. “This is the Pizzagate thing.” Dillon responded, “Something’s weird with that though.” Rogan replied, “Oh fuck yeah, something’s weird with that,” before offering to “send [Dillon] a documentary” about it.Flagrant guest claims that Israeli agents probably knew about 9/11 in advanceIn a September 3 episode, the Flagrant hosts asked guest Andrew Bustamante, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, whether he believed a conspiracy theory that Israeli intelligence agents had information about 9/11 before it happened, but withheld it from the U.S. government. “I think there’s actually probability to it,” he said. “Whether or not Israel nefariously held that information back is a different story.”Rogan: Immigrants are “outbreeding” the English in the UK, creating a risk of Sharia lawIn an episode with Dillon on September 4, Rogan complained that immigrants in the United Kingdom are “outbreed[ing]” English people. “But what they’re doing with allowing mass migration in the UK… It’s really weird because like where does this end up?” Rogan said. “Because it seems like it ends up with some places that have Sharia law.”“Especially when you consider like how many babies they’re having versus how many babies the English people [are having]. I mean they’re openly talking about it. ‘We’re going to outbreed you,’” Rogan said.Ryan: Hollywood stars perform child sacrifices in exchange for powerDuring a September 2 interview with country musician John Rich, Ryan claimed that certain people in Hollywood have engaged in child sacrifice in exchange for power. Ryan said, “I know that there are people that trade things for power, sacrifices, child sacrifices, all that kind of stuff… Have you seen it?” Rich said that he had been invited to participate in such rituals, but had never actually seen them.Rogan: Nancy Pelosi has “some big yabos”Rogan and Dillon joked that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband is married to her for her body in a September 4 episode. “Why marry that old witch if you can’t get your beak wet?” Dillon asked. “Because she’s got some big yabos,” Rogan responded. Dillon agreed, saying, “She does have big yabos.”Von: I use the f-word to refer to “gay folks,” but only “really fast”On September 19, in an episode with comedian Louis C.K., Von said that he doesn’t trust people that “won’t say the f-word about gay folks,” but will say the n-word. Von said that he’ll “say [the f-word] really fast because some people don’t like hearing it,” before saying the slur, which is bleeped out.Rogan falsely claims that “almost every school shooter” used anti-depressantsIn a September 9 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Brigham Buhler, founder of a “restorative medicine” company, claimed that pharmaceutical companies “tried to hide” evidence that certain anti-depressants lead to increased suicidal ideation and violent thoughts in children. “They’re also connected to almost every school shooter,” Rogan responded. There is no evidence that SSRIs increase violent behavior and only 4% of mass shooters in the last several decades took SSRIs in their lifetime.Ryan suggests God will soon bring plagues to AmericaIn the September 2 edition of the Shawn Ryan Show, Rich discussed the biblical story of the plagues that God inflicted on Egypt. He wondered when the U.S. would receive a similar punishment. Rich asked, “When is God going to remind America who he is?” Ryan replied, “I feel like it’s coming.”Rogan laments society is “celebrating” women for taking male jobs like CEOIn the September 9 episode of his show, Rogan complained that society no longer celebrates “traditional” roles for women. He said, “We’re criticizing normal femininity, especially like traditional wife roles. But we are celebrating women who assume roles in society of toxic men, which is CEOs. We’re celebrating a woman becoming more manly. We’re celebrating men becoming feminists… Clearly, we’ve lost our way.”Von said he was surprised to meet a Black doctorIn the September 19 episode with Louis C.K., Von said “the first time a Black man touched my hand… was different.” Von went on to describe his first experience with a Black doctor. “I’d never walked into a room in my life with a Black doctor,” Von said. “And I was like, whoa.” Von compared the experience to “like when you’re at Foot Locker and there’s a white woman working in there.”Rogan claims Charles Manson was a CIA assetOn September 11, during an interview with Charlie Sheen, Rogan said it was “very likely [the CIA] had groomed [Charles Manson] when he was in prison and taught him mind control techniques when people were high on acid … [to] shape their mind and even get them to commit murder.” He also claimed that the CIA used Manson as a “psyop” to stop the anti-war movement of the 1960s.Ryan guest compares learning about LGBTQ identities to sexual abuseJohn Tiegen — who is a survivor of the 2012 Benghazi attack, a Colorado militia leader, and a two-time Colorado Springs mayoral candidate — said on the September 11 episode of the Shawn Ryan Show that teachers are “forcing all that LGBT… stuff” on students and telling them to hide it from their parents. He compared this to child sexual abusers telling their victims not to tell their parents they are being abused. “If anybody says ‘don’t tell your parents,’ you should be telling your parents [because] what they’re doing is something that is wrong,” Tiegen said.Rogan guest suggests that Epstein might be alive and living in OhioIn Rogan’s September 4 episode with Dillon, the pair discussed a conspiracy theory that convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is still alive. “Is it possible that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t die in his cell and that’s all horseshit?” Rogan asked. Dillon explained that he heard that there is a “tiny” possibility that Epstein is alive and living in Ohio at the house of Les Wexner, who is the founder of L Brands, the former parent company of Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. “If that was true, there would be… a service that delivers masseuses to that house. There’s no way that guy’s stopping doing creepy shit,” Rogan said.Von: Lauren Boebert “got them bumpers”The Contrarian,Opinion: Words & Phrases We Could Do Without, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 21, 2025. Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals…’ and antifa too!White House mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt declared last week that Democrats’ “main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” That followed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson smear of 7 million people preparing to turn out for peaceful No Kings Day protests. Johnson declared that millions of fellow Americans were the “Hate America” crowd, the “pro-Hamas wing and the, you know, the Antifa people.”Who knew there were 7M such people in the United States?! And how clever they are—terrorists disguised as grandmothers, babies in strollers, aging veterans, young parents, and spirited folks wearing inflatable animal costumes. Those sly “Hate America” types decided to bring American flags, hold up images of the Declaration of Independence, dress in 1776 garb, and reaffirm in hundreds of thousands of signs proclaiming their love for America. It turns out this hateful crowd is everywhere: in big and small cities, rural areas, mountain ranges, and beach towns. The Villages in Florida; Bozeman, Montana; all across Texas; in hundreds of red cities and counties; and even those beyond our borders are stocked with such signs.To be clear, ten times the number that turned out on Saturday (roughly 70M) turned out to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. That’s an awful lot of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Person wearing hoodie with ‘make antifascism great again’ text. Photo by Alex GruberWe have to remember that the worst act of domestic violence in our lifetime was perpetrated by anti-democracy extremists on Jan. 6 at our Capitol, where Trump supporters attacked police, smashed windows, defaced the halls of Congress, and bore the flag of traitors (the Confederacy). Trump pardoned all of them, including the most violent criminals.Yes, on one level it is absurd—stupid, even—for MAGA Republicans to denounce an entire party, tens of millions of Americans citizens, as outside the body politic. (They no doubt helped drive turnout.) Republicans are now effectively suggest that about half of the country should be arrested, deported, or worse. In going full partisan, Trump is in essence conceding that he is not president of the United States; he is just the leader of an increasingly unpopular cult. Likewise, in declaring it open season during the shutdown to hurt Democrats who benefit from programs, fire Democrats who run them, and dismantle programs Democrats like, Trump is only reaffirming that he only cares about those who support him. (Of course, he is hurting those supporters even more severely, given the overrepresentation of red state Americans who benefit from Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies.)This is more than rhetorical hypocrisy. MAGA politicians who, for instance, insist Charlie Kirk’s murder was the result of “hate speech” (notice how—as of yet—no sound evidence has emerged that the killer was motivated by leftwing ideology) have no business demonizing and dehumanizing Democrats. They certainly have no basis to flyspeck Democrats’ accurate descriptions of the views and rhetoric of MAGA politicians (including the vice president, who blithely excuses adults spewing bile about rape, the Holocaust, and Black people, and knowingly fomented baseless vitriol against Haitian immigrants).If their rhetoric was “merely” irresponsible, hypocritical, and disgusting, MAGA pols’ attacks on millions of Americans would be bad enough, but along with excluding half of the country from “real America,” the administration is simultaneously launching a terrifying legal offensive involving every aspect of federal power from ICE to the IRS to the FBI to the Justice Department.Trump’s executive order to identify “antifa” as a domestic terror organization becomes all the more dangerous when he and his party label everyone and anyone it dislikes as terrorist, Hamas operative, or a member of antifa. Those phases emerging from the mouths of autocrat bullies have lost all meaning. If “terrorist” or “antifa” can apply to grandmas, parents with kids, veterans, students, teachers, government workers, scientists, elected Democrats, and other patriots who peacefully demonstrate, then these labels applied by Leavitt, Johnson, and Trump apply to millions of Americans become farcical.It is past time to acknowledge that the whole antifa/Hamas/illegal immigrant/terrorist demonization shtick is a clumsy, unconstitutional maneuver to weaponize the federal government against anyone who does not fall into line in Trump’s autocracy.Anti-fascist is the most accurate term to describe the vast cross-section of Americans of different ages, races, creeds, ethnicities, beliefs, geographic locations, jobs, specific complaints, and political affiliations who turned out to demonstrate peacefully (unlike ICE agents who kidnap and brutalize Americans in the streets, use pepper spray and other weapons, and show up masked and unidentified).If Republicans bothered to pay the slightest attention to what demonstrators say, write, and do, they would know that anti-fascism is what has bound them together, just as anti-fascism bound together the Allies in WW2, the men and women who fought Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and liberated the death camps, the opponents of dictators like Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro and Vladimir Putin, and the civil rights protestors who marched and died to liberate the Black population from white oppression, violence, and persecution.So let’s dump these absurd slurs. In their anger, hatred, and panic in the face of a diverse democracy, MAGA politicians have made a mockery of the vocabulary they are using against their opponents. If MAGA wants to declare war on or silence millions of patriots, they cannot complain when we identify them as autocrats or fascists. They define themselves by what they are against.That still leaves open a question for Trump and his fellow slanderers: If anti-fascists who pay tribute to democracy, free speech, nonviolence, empathy, the rule of law, and our founding documents are the target of MAGA’s ire, what does that make Leavitt, Johnson, Vance, Trump, and the rest?The Parnas Perspective,Big Personal News, Aaron Parnas, Oct. 21, 2025. We are breaking through in ways I never thought possible, and I want you to know.I want to share something that’s unfolded over the past seventy-two hours—something that has genuinely surprised me and reminded me why I started all of this in the first place. I’ll talk more about it below, but over the past three days, I’ve heard from dozens of Republicans and Independents who told me they watch this platform regularly. At the same time, we’ve climbed into the top five media outlets in the world in impressions and views. That’s incredible — and it shows that people across the spectrum are hungry for truth. If you believe in what we’re doing—real journalism that breaks through the echo chambers—please subscribe. Your support is what keeps this alive and growing.SubscribedIt started on Sunday during No Kings Day. Throughout the afternoon, at least a dozen Republicans and Independents came up to me, unprompted, to say that they watch my content regularly and that they appreciate the news updates I provide. That moment hit me hard. For a long time, I’ve believed that we live in a series of echo chambers where people only consume information that reinforces their own beliefs. Yet there I was, standing in a crowd that represented a cross-section of America, and hearing from people who don’t share my politics but still value the information I share.At first, I thought maybe it was just the environment. After all, No Kings Day attracts a politically aware audience, and perhaps it wasn’t so unusual that people from different backgrounds were there.But then the next two days proved that it was much more than that. On multiple occasions, while walking through the city or grabbing coffee, people stopped me. They recognized me from the platform and told me they were Republicans, Independents, or Trump voters—and that they tune in regularly.They said they appreciate that the reporting feels grounded, not reactionary. Those moments stunned me.When I launched this platform, I did it with one clear belief: that accurate, honest information is more powerful than simply fighting misinformation. I never wanted to create a space that reacted to lies with louder noise. I wanted to build something rooted in truth, clarity, and ethics.I’ve always felt that one of the biggest problems in America is that ethics, media literacy, and civics are no longer central to our education system. Without those, people are left vulnerable to manipulation, disinformation, and fear. I wanted this platform to help fill that gap—and slowly but surely, it seems like it is.This has never been, and will never become, a partisan project. The truth is not a partisan thing. Facts don’t belong to one side of the aisle. I believe deeply that if we keep focusing on the truth, we can reach people who have been written off by mainstream media as unreachable. The past seventy-two hours have shown me that this is possible, that we are reaching beyond the bubbles and building something real.The impact is showing up in the data too. Over the past thirty days, our reporting has surpassed major outlets like CBS News, ABC News, BBC News, and others in terms of online engagement. Imagine that—an independent platform, run almost entirely by one person, outperforming media organizations with hundreds of employees and multimillion-dollar budgets. The chart that tracks online media influence even labels this platform as “progressive,” but after what I’ve seen and heard, I’d say that label doesn’t fit anymore. What’s happening here is broader. We’re building a community that values substance over spin.We’re breaking through the barriers that have kept Americans divided for too long. We’re proving that people are hungry for something that doesn’t insult their intelligence, something that respects their ability to think critically.The conversations I’ve had this week make it clear that people want honesty. They want news that doesn’t talk down to them or manipulate their emotions for clicks. They want something that helps them understand the world better, not something that tells them what to think.And it could not come at a more important time. Right now, the media landscape is being reshaped by political pressure, corporate influence, and censorship. The current Administration is using every tool at its disposal to suppress independent voices, redefine journalism, and control the narrative. In times like this, independence isn’t just a choice—it’s a necessity.That’s why the idea of “sane-washing” has resonated with so many people. It’s the idea that political and media elites are trying to make manipulation and suppression seem normal, calm, and reasonable—something we should all just accept. But we can’t. We have to keep pushing back against that normalization, against the erosion of truth and transparency.So I want to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who has shared, supported, and stood by this platform. Every message, every conversation, every view matters more than you know. What we are building together is proof that honest media still has a place in America. Let’s keep going, keep growing, and keep fighting for truth, wherever it leads.New York Times,Opinion: Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It’s a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives, Michelle Goldberg, Oct. 21, 2025 (print ed.).This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”It is not at this point surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as a group of restive colonies to be brutally subdued. This is a man who told the military it should use our cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations, and who has sent both troops and federal agents to terrorize Los Angeles and other cities. The president’s attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine they barely make headlines anymore.What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders, after all, do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. (French farmers, for example, have vented their fury at ruling authorities by dumping piles of manure in front of government buildings.) Rulers, by contrast, tend to jealously guard their dignity. But not Trump.A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the profoundly cynical, curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” A similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the president and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling.There’s a tension, however, when people in power adopt this oppositional stance. On the surface, Trump longs for grandeur. But on some subconscious level he and those around him have a deep instinct for degradation. The administration purports to venerate traditional aesthetics; an August executive order on federal architecture disavowed modernism and called for classical designs that convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of America’s system of self-government.”At the same time, Trump paved over the lawn of the White House Rose Garden to make it look like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that his construction crews have begun demolishing the facade of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom.The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from A.I. slop, the tackier and more juvenile the better. (Think of the White House’s image of a crying migrant rendered in the style of a Japanese Studio Ghibli animation.) Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded, “Your mom did.” She was obviously trying to insult and delegitimize a representative of the liberal media. But the result was to reveal herself as a gross parody of a professional press secretary. The administration plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn, an idea that seems ripped from the scabrous 2006 satire “Idiocracy.”The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. I expected it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities in both red and blue states when they’re beset by disasters.Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the old-fashioned small-government fanaticism of administration personnel like Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandize the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. And part of him seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits of his dominance.In “The Emergency,” an allegorical novel coming out next month, the writer George Packer captures some of the lust for desecration animating the Trumpist right. The book hinges on a conflict between self-righteous Burghers, who live in cities, and resentful, paranoid rural people known as Yeomen. In a narrative turn that appears, in light of Trump’s video, quite prescient, the Yeomen make plans to bombard the Burghers’ city with fecal cannons. It’s as if Packer managed, for a moment, to tune into the president’s wavelength.“There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” he writes, adding, “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”Fights over resources and beliefs can be settled. It’s much harder to imagine rapprochement with those who want, above all, to befoul us.3That’s actually a a pretty good way of describing the GOP’s value-proposition right now: Elect us and prices may or may not go down, but we will punish the people you hate. The Bulwark False Flag Reporting, How a Bizarre Healing-TV-Screen Tycoon Is Funding MAGA Media, Will Sommer, Oct 20-21, 2025. For today’s issue, I drove out to Northern Virginia and paid $60 to take a nap in a dark room, bathed only in the light of some mysterious screens.Why would I do this? Because some big names in MAGA media believe that these screens not only offer a gateway to vitality and, perhaps, immortality, but could be foundational for the future of their business. I had to find out more. And what better way than by scoping out the scene in person?To sweeten the deal, I received some bath salts magically “charged” with “energy” “waves” by the devices. Thank you for being a Bulwark+ member—your support makes possible all of our commentary and journalism, including ridiculous stunts important fact-finding missions like this!TUCKER CARLSON HAS NEVER BEEN AVERSE to appearing alongside idiosyncratic oddball figures. But Carlson’s recent decision to hang out with a wannabe pundit named Elizabeth Lane struck even fellow travelers in MAGA media as confusing.Lane, a native of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, has made no secret of her fondness for Vladimir Putin. Until recently, she had a small presence online, with fewer than 1,000 followers each on YouTube and X. Yet in early October she secured a sitdown interview with Carlson in his Maine cabin. As soon as a preview of it went up on X, others on the right began asking: Why?“How did she secure an interview with someone as big as Tucker Carlson?” RedState blogger “Bonchie” asked. Elizabeth Lane and Tucker Carlson. (Screenshot via X)The interview—which saw Lane asking the former Fox News host such newsworthy questions as “What is love for Tucker Carlson?”—did its job: Lane’s following on X is now up to roughly 20,000 people. And while her previous YouTube videos struggled to crack 1,000 views, the Carlson interview has passed a quarter million.It was, undoubtedly, a boon for Unifyd TV, a burgeoning new right-wing streaming platform where Lane is the most prominent host and chief operating officer.¹Unifyd pitches itself as a place for “groundbreaking” shows and “powerful investigative content” that, at first blush, appears to be supported by subscription fees ($11.99 per month or $95.88 per year). But that may not actually be its primary funding source.According to court records, millions of dollars have come in to Unifyd from sales and promotion of a device called the “Light System”—or, if you take prefer the nomenclature of the other side of a bitter lawsuit over its origins, the “EESystem”—whose supporters claim it can cure nearly every ailment, from tumors to autism.The devices have been compared to a real-life version of medbeds, the mythical medical tanning beds some conspiracy theorists believe will fix anything that’s wrong with you (which recently got a boost from President Trump). The system includes a screen, identical to a computer monitor, running on what looks like a form of the BASIC programming language and flashing symbols of different colors. Those symbols, proponents say, are sending out waves of healing power to anyone who sits in front of one of the screens.SubscribedBecause the promise of these devices is so massive (a person’s health and well-being is basically the whole ball game this side of eternity), the money around them is vast. A twelve-unit system goes for $54,200, according to court filings, on top of a one-time $125,000 licensing fee. More than 800 centers across the world have the machines installed, according to an internal report filed in court and reviewed by The Bulwark for one company that makes the devices. Total revenue for that company is approaching $100 million after just a few years of selling the machines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a presidential candidate, with Jason Shurka in front of EESystem devices in 2024. (Screenshot via Unifyd TV)But the “Light System” is more than just a machine. It is a key component to a conspiracy theory that a shadowy, benevolent cabal—made up of thousands of people, some essentially immortal and others non-human—is on a mission to elevate human consciousness through things like mass adoption of meditation and veganism, and further, that they’re doing so to accelerate our species’s progress on the way to contact with alien races.Buckle up: Here’s how this aliens-walk-among-us conspiracy theory and these mystical medical devices are supporting this new right-wing media venture.The man who has played the central role in pushing that conspiracy is Jason Shurka, a self-styled reverend and the founder of the organization UNIFYD World, whose initiatives include Unifyd TV, the network that hosts Elizabeth Lane’s show on which Carlson mysteriously appeared.As far as I can tell, Shurka is not your average aspiring media tycoon. He’s an entrepreneur, a conspiracist, a social media presence, and a new-agey spiritualist who operates as a spokeshuman for the aforementioned Light Systems organization. He circulates in powerful political circles and has been drawn into improbably dramatic legal battles.In 2022, Shurka teamed up on a commercial venture with fellow New Age health practitioner “Dr.” Sandra Rose Michael, a self-described expert in “energy wellness” who claims to have invented the “EESystem” device.² Shurka said he joined forces with Michael because the energy from an EESystem healed his sister’s dog of a large tumor. For two years, Shurka used his social media platform to promote EESystems and to encourage people to patronize the independent centers that had purchased them for tens of thousands of dollars. Sales of EESystems exploded, and everyone profited. Michael’s son, Michael Bertolacini—CEO of EESystem LLC—praised Shurka in an email to me as “the Morpheus that I needed to become my own Neo.”Shurka courted fellow prominent figures along the way, with motivational speaker Tony Robbins praising the EESystem. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a machine set up in his home for an interview with Shurka in 2024, and later received it as a gift from him. Right-wing undercover video provocateur James O’Keefe even staged an ad for an EESystem center to look like one of his stings, saying in a video that he was bringing in a camera to investigate only to emerge feeling less anxious. According to court filings, Michael’s son gave Shurka $2.8 million to spend on influencer marketing for the devices.But the relationship between Shurka and Bertolacini went south in late 2024 after Bertolacini refused to buy Shurka’s “Unifyd Healing,” a website and sales platform he used to promote the machines, for $10 million. Bertolacini alleged in a lawsuit against Shurka filed earlier this year that he received sinister letters from the Light System organization warning him of serious consequences if he didn’t pay Shurka. Only belatedly, he claims, he came to believe that the letters were coming from Shurka himself.³Having been cut off from EESystem LLC, Shurka started marketing his own device. He dubbed it the “Light System.” And he teamed up with Robert Religa, a former EESystem LLC programmer who claimed Sandra Rose Michael actually stole the real “technology” from him.In January 2025, EESystem LLC responded, predictably, by suing Shurka, alleging breach of contract and tortious interference.Things got more bizarre from there.After the lawsuit was filed, Shurka recorded a video with “Ray,” a supposed member of the Light System cabal, who hid his identity by wearing gloves and a hoodie. In the video, Ray said that the EESystem LLC team had fallen out of favor with the Light System cabal and urged Shurka to release damaging, unspecified information on Bertolacini and his mother. “I will only go that route if I have no other choice,” Shurka responded.In the court filings, meanwhile, EESystem LLC claimed Shurka ripped them off on a joint $500,000 investment they made in the child-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom. Religa, who is countersuing EESystem LLC alongside Shurka, claimed people tried to kidnap him, while his lawyer described, in court, people “portraying themselves as bounty hunters” somehow being involved in the case.But if these are kooks—and they, uh, certainly give off the vibe—they’re unusually rich ones. A profit-and-loss statement submitted as evidence in one lawsuit claims that EESystem LLC made $86.7 million in revenue since 2002, nearly all of that since 2022. According to a company business report filed in court, EESystem LLC cleared at least $30 million in revenue in one year, boosted by Shurka’s promotion and a pandemic-fueled interest in alternative healing.Both Shurka and EESystem LLC declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuits.Legal AF,Analysis: Trump EXPOSED as PROSECUTOR’S TEXTS LEAK, Michael Popok, Oct. 21, 2025. One of the reasons you don’t appoint an incompetent, inexperienced lawyer as your Top Prosecutor in the DOJ to go after your political enemies list, like Trump’s pick of Lindsey Halligan, is because she may just end up screwing up the prosecution by LEAKING information accidentally to a reporter on the Signal platform.Popok reports on the bombshell report released on the same day Former FBI Director Comey files his motion to disqualify Halligan, where LawFare’s Anne Bower discloses that she was an involuntary pen pal with Halligan about the Leticia James prosecution who forgot to say “off the record” before she began texting incriminating texts, an event so bad that Trump’s DOJ tried to cover it up with a press statement that only made it worse!U.S. National Security, Public SafetyThe Steady State,Analysis: The Administration’s New ‘War’ on Drugs– Show Me the Evidence!Charles A. Ray, Oct. 21, 2025. The Trump administration continues to up the ante on its naval combat operations in the Caribbean against alleged drug-smuggling operations, which administration officials and the president himself claim are carrying fentanyl to the United States.Since September 2, there have been at least five U.S. strikes on small boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least 27 people. Two survivors of an October 16 strike were captured and repatriated to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia for ‘detention and prosecution’, according to Trump in a Truth Social post on October 18.So far, the administration has offered no evidence that any of the boats attacked were actually carrying drugs. U.S. officials have claimed that the boats were carrying illicit drugs bound for the U.S., and that they were operated by the Tren de Aragua cartel, which Trump has designated a foreign terrorist group, in an apparent effort to get around the Congressional notification requirement before armed attacks.Legal experts say that the U.S., despite not being a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, should ‘act in a manner consistent with its provisions,’ which state that countries should not interfere with vessels operating in international waters. The exceptions are that a country is allowed to seize a vessel that has been chased from its territorial waters to the high seas. While force can be used to stop such vessels, generally it is non-lethal, and the force used must be ‘reasonable and necessary.Article 2(4) of the UN charter allows countries to use force when under attack and deploying the military in self-defense.None of that appears to be the case in any of the five attacks so far. In addition, Trump’s armed conflict with drug cartels is centered on Venezuela, which is a minor player in smuggling drugs to the United States, rather than Mexico or Haiti, where most of the organizations actually operate. And none of these boats were being chased from our own territorial waters – and there is no evidence that reasonable force was even contemplated before lethal force was used.Using the so-called justification that has been offered so far, any boat in international waters, anywhere, can be destroyed and its occupants killed, because they might someday commit a crime in another nation? Have these decision-makers considered for a moment that this could come back to harm Americans at sea?We know so little about what’s actually going on, other than that people are being killed, and the administration is offering no evidence to fill the information gap, only often wildly inaccurate propaganda. There has been zero hard evidence on the type and quantity of drugs on the boats destroyed. Trump has claimed that each boat destroyed saves 25,000 American lives, a claim that does not make sense when records show that 73,000 people died from drug overdoses between May 2024 and April 2025. If Trump’s claim is valid, the five boat strikes would have saved nearly double the lives lost during that period. Someone needs to do the math and provide some ‘real’ evidence.Legality and proof of drugs intended for the U.S. aside, another administration action issue that calls this operation into question is the repatriation of the two survivors of one strike to Colombia and Ecuador. If these people were part of Tren de Aragua and engaged in smuggling fentanyl to the U.S., one would think the administration would be parading them before the press at a minimum. Instead, we’re left with more questions, questions made all the more important by Colombian President Gustavo Petro accusing the U.S. of murdering a Colombian fisherman when it attacked one of the boats. Rather than providing evidence that the boat actually was carrying drugs, Trump responded by slashing assistance and imposing new tariffs on Colombia.As U.S. actions push us closer to open warfare in our backyard, it’s time for Congress to pull up its big boy britches and assert its constitutional authority on executive oversight and the declaration of war.The first question Congress needs to ask the administration: Show me the evidence!Charles A. Ray spent 20 years in the U.S. Army with two tours in Vietnam. He retired as a senior US diplomat, serving 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, with assignments as ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Republic of Zimbabwe, and was the first American consul general in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He also served in senior positions with the Department of Defense and is a member of The Steady State. Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 340 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions. Lincoln Square Media,Commentary: Donald Trump has Made Chicago A Target, But Residents Are Rising Up, Edwin Eisendrath, Oct. 21, 2025. Despite the aggressive tactics of the feds, Chicagoans are responding peacefully.Here’s what we know: About a quarter-million Chicagoans showed up for No Kings Day rallies in the city on Saturday.Here’s what we don’t know: How many people the feds have arrested or detained in this city. We don’t know how many they’ve arrested anywhere. ICE no longer shares data with Americans. The online data portal is no longer updated. Private groups are trying to piece together the facts, but dishonest press releases from the government are meant to reinforce their power, rather than to share facts with the public.The Trump administration’s opacity hides its lawlessness. Recall that some 1,800 migrants held in that terrible prison camp in the Florida Everglades simply disappeared. Efforts to find out what happened to these men continue, but the government will not cooperate. According to the Miami Herald, lawyers cannot find their clients. Disappeared. In America.SubscribedOn our streets — our streets — Americans citizens have been tased and had our necks knelt upon like George Floyd. We’ve been held outside in the rain in our underwear, we’ve had the doors to their homes blown off, we’ve had to watch as armed men in camo gear zip tie our children. U.S. citizens. We are not being protected by our government; we are being attacked.ProPublica found more than 170 American citizens held in captivity. Not for crimes. But on suspicion that we might not be Americans. While in detention, reporters found incidents where Americans were kicked and dragged and otherwise abused. Many were not allowed to contact their families or their attorneys for more than 24 hours.Americans are also held when ICE accuses us of impeding their work. But in example after example, those accusations are lies. When the evidence is finally heard, ICE’s claims don’t hold up. In fact, more often than not, if you take a picture when ICE is aiming a gun at you, you are the one that gets arrested.Chicago Is Ground ZeroThis is America today. And right now, ground zero is Chicago. One man was murdered by ICE here. Others have been shot. Many have been gassed or shot with non-lethal ammunition. Cars have been rammed by ICE vehicles. A priest attacked and mocked by federal agents. ICE claims to have arrested more than 1,500 people here. Those claims cannot be verified.Last week a judge’s enjoined ICE from attacking the press and protestors without cause or warning. Ignoring her order, without warning or provocation, ICE agents against tear-gassed protestors and the press. That led the judge this week to order ICE to wear body cameras going forward.ArticlesChicago Is the Frontline in the Battle for American FreedomEdwin Eisendrath· Oct 9Chicago Is the Frontline in the Battle for American FreedomOperation Midway Blitz, a name that conjures Chicago Bears football, is the Trump Administration’s cynical branding of what can only be described as escalating government violence by ICE and other federal agents in Chicago. One man is already dead. Many others have been injured. Homes have been ransacked;The government, using its Palantir software, has the ability to identify and arrest those who are violating their visa status and who have committed crimes. Instead, it is choosing to attack the whole city.Chicagoans are not having it. We are doing what we can to protect each other. By now, most of us know what rights we still have, and how to assert them. We are documenting the occupation. Reporters are embedded with protesters. The truth is coming out.And the truth is, that despite the aggressive tactics of the feds, Chicagoans are responding peacefully. I see this everyday. Now even the New York Times is reporting it. “Residents have begun forming volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods for federal immigration agents,” the reported, “Others honk their horns or blow whistles when they see agents nearby.”The video evidence leaves no doubt. Armed ICE agents in camo gear and masks can be seen throwing tear gas canisters at peaceful citizens guilty of nothing except bearing witness and taking pictures.Instead of a city subdued, Trump faces a city determined to be free. Instead of city eager to believe his lies he faces a city determined to make sure the truth comes out. And, as government violence escalates and Chicagoans continue to resist, Americans everywhere are inspired.This may be the city where American fascism dies.Edwin Eisendrath hosts “It’s the Democracy, Stupid” on Lincoln Square and “The Big Picture” on WCPT820 AM/ Heartland Signal. U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Justice Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell with her co-trafficker and sometime boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein (Getty images).Newsweek,Virginia Giuffre Book: 7 Biggest Revelations, Jack Royston (Chief Royal Correspondent), Oct. 21, 2025. Virginia Giuffre’s posthumously released memoir contains harrowing allegations of abuse at the hands of her own father, being trafficked to Prince Andrew at 17 and being silenced to protect Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.Giuffre, one of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s most high-profile accusers, died by suicide in April. Here are some of the biggest revelations from her book, Nobody’s Girl:Virginia Giuffre Says She Was Abused by Her FatherGiuffre wrote. “As a child, I experienced nearly every kind of abuse: Incest, parental neglect, severe corporal punishment, molestation, rape. As a teen, I had been sexually trafficked by another paedophile even before I met Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.”And she described her father telling her to stand up in the bath so he could clean in between her legs: “That night in my room, Dad touched me in ways nobody had before. He told me I was his special girl, his favourite, and that this was his way of giving me ‘extra love.’ He used his fingers at first. Then, days later, his mouth.”Sky Roberts, her father, was approached by the book’s ghostwriter and is quoted as saying: “Just to straighten this out, I never abused my daughter and didn’t know that Forrest did that either. If I had known about that, I would have been very angry and taken care of the situation.”Forrest refers to a friend of Giuffre’s father, whom she said also abused her.“I gave my daughter everything she ever wanted and never touched her sexually,” Roberts said.Virginia Giuffre Feared She Would ‘Die a Sex Slave’The book describes abuse at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell: “In my years with them, they lent me out to scores of wealthy, powerful people. I was habitually used and humiliated—and in some instances, choked, beaten, and bloodied. I believed that I might die a sex slave.”Prince Andrew Guessed Virginia Giuffre Was 17 Because of His DaughtersMost of Giuffre’s account of being trafficked to London, New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands has emerged before in court filings, including her own suit against Andrew. Some passages directly quote her sworn depositions, which have been published previously.He has always denied the allegations and has not admitted liability.One new line came during her description of her first meeting with the prince, at Maxwell’s London townhouse, hours before she alleged that she was forced to have sex with him for the first time in March 2001.Andrew, she wrote, was asked to guess her age: “The Duke of York, who was then 41, guessed correctly: 17. ‘My daughters are just a little younger than you,’ he told me, explaining his accuracy. As usual, Maxwell was quick with a joke: ‘I guess we will have to trade her in soon.'”Giuffre went on to describe having sex with Andrew, stating he was “particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches.”A Gag Order for the Platinum JubileeGiuffre sued Prince Andrew at civil court in New York and settled for an undisclosed sum in early 2022, months before Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations that June.As the deal was being struck, Giuffre said Andrew asked for a temporary gag order to protect the royal celebrations: “I agreed to a one-year gag order, which seemed important to the prince because it ensured his mother’s Platinum Jubilee would not be tarnished any more than it already had been.”Giuffre’s Suicide AttemptsGiuffre described how in 2022 she attempted suicide, weighed down by nightmares about her abuse and the smears on social media, as well as a hospital visit with COVID-19.”I was weary of defending myself against vicious, hurtful words,” she wrote, “liar, sellout, extortionist, drug addict, whore. I was sick of the nightmares: greedy, heaving men on top of me, men whose faces I recognized and would never forget, men whose faces I didn’t recognize.”Alarmingly, I see now, I wasn’t afraid anymore; instead, I just felt hollowed out. So when my trauma tricked my brain into telling me lies, I listened: ‘It would be better for everyone if you weren’t here,’ my brain said.””I believed my brain,” she continued, “so I reached for the painkillers that I had smuggled into the hospital and I swallowed as many as I could.”She survived and tried again days later, but was found by her son.Why Giuffre Was Left Out of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Trial: ‘So Many Names’Giuffre described her disappointment at not being allowed to testify against Maxwell during the New York sex trafficking trial that saw Maxwell found guilty in December 2021 and jailed for 20 years in 2022.”The lead prosecutors, [Lara] Pomerantz and Maurene Comey, had broken the news to me that I would not be testifying because, essentially, I would be too big a distraction,” Giuffre wrote.”If I were a witness, all the men that I had previously named as my abusers would likely be called by the defense as rebuttal witnesses, the prosecutors said. They feared such theatrics would dilute jurors’ focus, taking the spotlight off Maxwell.“At its heart, prosecuting a case is about creating a clear narrative that jurors find easy to follow. My narrative was complicated, if only because I’d named so many names.”Prince Andrew’s Ex-Girlfriend Allegedly Called Her a ‘Whore'”The prince was not without his supporters,” Giuffre wrote. “On January 31 [2022], a former girlfriend of his, a socialite named Lady Victoria Hervey, took to Instagram to say that in her opinion, I was ‘a complete whore.'”Then, just in case anyone had forgotten that this story is not just about sexual abuse but also about class, she added that I was ‘just a ghetto opportunity whose [sic] seriously mixed up.'”Never one to shirk her public duty, Lady Victoria—the daughter of the sixth marquess of Bristol, half sister of the seventh marquess, and sister of the eighth marquess, whatever all of that means—would give many mean-spirited interviews about me in the coming months.” Former FBI Director James Comey, shown in a file photo at his U.S. Senate testimony on June 8, 2017, filed two motions on Oct. 20 to dismissed the false statement and obstruction charges that the Trump Justice Department brought against him in September regarding his congressional testimony on another occasionCivil Discourse,Legal Analysis: Comey Moves To Dismiss, Joyce Vance, right, law professor and former federal prosecutor, Oct. 20-21, 2025. As expected, former FBI Director James Comey asked a federal judge to dismiss the indictment against him.He filed two motions
- A motion to dismiss the indictment because “the government has singled out Mr. Comey for prosecution because of his protected speech and because of President Trump’s personal animus toward Mr. Comey.” The defense argues that the case is “a vindictive and selective prosecution” and that it “violates the First Amendment, Due Process Clause, and equal protection principles.” The motion argues that the only proper remedy is dismissal of the case, with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. Comey’s lawyers write that “Any lesser remedy would be insufficient in light of the government’s flagrant misconduct and the need to deter the government from bringing further unconstitutional prosecutions.”
- A motion to dismiss the indictment, arguing it’s “fatally flawed” because the appointment of Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, left, violated the Appointments Clause and the statute authorizing appointments of interim U.S. Attorneys. That provision allows a president to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. After 120 days elapses, if the president hasn’t managed to put a Senate confirmed nominee in place, the local district court selects a U.S. Attorney to serve until that happens. Comey’s lawyers argue that because Halligan, “who purported to secure and sign the indictment was invalidly appointed to her position as interim U.S. Attorney … the indictment is a nullity and must be dismissed.” Again, they argue for dismissal with the prejudice, so that the government cannot refile charges against Comey at a later date.
Both motions are strong and it would be unsurprising, after briefing and oral argument, to see one or both of them granted and the prosecution dismissed.There’s a subtle factor at work here too, one that’s more difficult to explain. These motions aren’t just substantively meritorious, they are exceptionally well researched, organized, and written. Sometimes, judges find themselves in the position of having to sift through the arguments one or the other of the parties to a lawsuit has made in order to do justice. In other words, judges, at least to some extent, try to do the right thing and reach the right conclusions in a case, not penalizing the client if the lawyer’s argument is poorly organized and the judge has to piece it together to determine who has the right of it.That won’t be necessary here. The analysis in the defense motions is immaculate. And while that might not seem like a matter worth noting, it speaks volumes about the quality of the legal representation Comey has. It also inspires confidence. The Judge will understand which lawyer can be replied upon when the parties are in his courtroom. These motions make the right arguments and cover all the points necessary to support them. They are winners.Comey defense lawyer Pat FitzgeraldIn advance of today’s motions, Halligan went on the attack against Comey lawyer, Pat Fitzgerald, right. She wants him out of the case. She’s smart to be afraid of him, because in the battle between prosecutor and defense lawyer, she is clearly outmatched. She did it with an obscure procedural motion, one asking the Judge to expedite his decision on a motion she had filed previously.That motion was one for “Implementation of Filter Protocol,” which requires a little explanation. Stick with me here.DOJ uses “filter teams” to screen evidence seized in an investigation, including evidence involving attorney client privilege, where it wants to be able to use that evidence, but some of it may be privileged, which means prosecutors can’t have access to it. So a “taint team” or “filter team” is used to evaluate the evidence and make sure nothing privileged goes to the case team. Back on October 13, the government filed a request to use a filter team to review electronic evidence (likely emails) that it said was “obtained from an attorney” in a prior investigation.It wasn’t at all clear what they were talking about. But under local rules in the Eastern District of Virginia, the defense had 14 days to respond. Sunday night with no warning, the government asked the Judge to require a quicker response. One problem, the government was out of time to make that request to expedite under local rules. Monday evening, Judge Michael Nachmanoff denied that request on that basis—an embarrassing error for a U.S. Attorney to make and one that suggests she is still operating without the counsel of anyone familiar with the local rules in her district.But the story doesn’t stop there, because in her motion to expedite, Halligan came out with a startling explanation for why she needed to fast track the filter team process. She alleged that Comey defense lawyer Fitzgerald had been complicit with Comey in an improper disclosure of classified information in the past. She argued that meant Fitzgerald has a conflict and should possibly be disqualified from participating in the Comey’s defense.For starters, the argument that Comey would have to be removed over such a conflict is just wrong. Even if Halligan had gotten it right (and she didn’t), this is the kind of conflict Comey could waive if he wanted Fitzgerald to stay on as his lawyer.But more importantly, Halligan got the facts wrong. And Fitzgerald promptly fired back, writing that the government’s claim that Comey used him “to improperly disclose classified information” and the government’s implicit assertion that Comey and Fitzgerald were involved in criminal activity together is “provably false” based on publicly available information.The defense offered two main reasons as to why the Judge should reject Halligan’s motion to expedite:• Comey is entitled to all the time the rules provide him with with to respond. The defense wrote that “based on the defense’s review to date, it appears that the government’s continued review of the materials is unlawful.” They couched the argument as “it appears”, because it’s not at all clear in the government’s motion what they want to look at and prosecutors declined, before filing their filter team motion, to discuss it with the defense, as prosecutors typically do, to see if they could work out an agreed upon process.Comey’s argument is heavily redacted. He explains why in a footnote: “The government designated discovery containing some of the information in these sentences as Protected Materials under the Protective Order in this case. Although the defense sees no reason why this information cannot be made public, out of an abundance of caution, the defense is redacting these sentences from public filing in the first instance.” That makes it difficult to understand all the details here, but we can piece together enough to support the defense’s conclusion that they share “the government’s desire to avoid delay. But that desire does not give the government license to conduct an unlawful review or run roughshod over Mr. Comey’s privilege.”• The government’s defamatory comments accusing Comey’s lawyer, Fitzgerald, of committing a crime with him fail to provide a basis for granting the government’s motion to expedite. The implicit allegations against Comey and Fitzgerald appear to stem from events shortly after Comey was fired by Donald Trump. Fitzgerald seems to have been among Comey’s lawyers, and Comey shared some memos with him, after scrutinizing them to make sure they didn’t contain classified information (Comey, as head of the FBI, would have been the classifying authority).At a later date, the government “upclassified” some information to “confidential”—the lowest level of classification. Upon learning this had taken place, Comey had his lawyers contact the FBI to advise them they were in possession of material that had been newly reclassified. It took the FBI months to get back to them, quite an indication of how important they thought the information was, but Fitzgerald was ultimately asked to destroy it and did so immediately and voluntarily.The defense makes their position clear: “The implicit assertion lead defense counsel and Mr. Comey engaged in criminal activity by doing so, is provably false and in any event provides no basis to grant the motion to expedite.”They have the receipts. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that there was no leaking of classified information to the press by either Comey or his counsel. “Full stop,” Fitzgerald writes.DOJ declined to prosecute anyone over the allegations. In a footnote, we get a little more worthwhile detail about the upclassification. “The portion of the memorandum the review team determined should be classified as ‘Confidential’ concerned the President’s reference to then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s questionable judgment in not having notified the President sooner of a call from the leader of a particular country…In that context, President Trump compared certain countries to a smaller country and the upclassification treated the name of a smaller country as classified for fear of offending that country…Mr. Comey’s reaction to the upclassification was: ‘Are you guys kidding me?’…A federal court in unrelated litigation brought under the Freedom of Information Act (‘FOIA’) ultimately rejected all but one of the subsequent classifications…The classification of the memorandum has been addressed in subsequent litigation and the single word that remains ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ is the name of a single country.”That vignette illustrates the abject weakness of Halligan’s claims about Fitzgerald.The defense argued that Halligan lacked a good faith basis for the smear. It’s a reprehensible tactic for a federal prosecutor to use, something that would have had consequences in any other administration. There is little if any prospect of that happening here, short of referral to a bar grievance committee.Halligan may have had some experience with the law surrounding filter teams, because she was at least tangentially involved in Trump’s efforts to prevent one from reviewing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case so the government couldn’t use it against him. She is on the Supreme Court brief, although along with other lawyers, including people with both experience with filter teams and Supreme Court advocacy, so it’s unclear how much she participated in or learned from this process. But as she’s roundly criticized as being inexperienced, it’s only fair to point out she may have some here. Of course, that could also hurt her, as it means she should understand that violating the rules in this area can result in a taint that forces the removal of agents and/or prosecutors from a case if they’ve reviewed prohibited evidence.The defense has until October 27 to formally respond to the government’s request to expedite. There are pitfalls everywhere for the unwary in criminal cases. Attorneys are like doctors. You probably wouldn’t see an obstetrician for brain surgery. An insurance lawyer may not be qualified to be a prosecutor. And in either setting, not sticking to your area of expertise can have fatal consequences, with doctors to the patients, with lawyers, to their cases.Lindsey Halligan is no Pat Fitzgerald. The attempt to besmirch his reputation was a cheap shot, and one that will undoubtedly misfire. We’ve already seen the Senate balk at Trump’s choice of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., and Alina Habba for New Jersey.If Comey’s motion arguing Halligan was illegally appointed succeeds, it will fall to the local district court to appoint a suitable replacement. There are good reasons presidents aren’t permitted to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate confirmation (or judicial intervention in the case of undue delay). We’re seeing them on full display here. Trump may have set out to get revenge in this prosecution, but the defense is charting a different course. The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary,The Golden Age of Sh*tpostersI, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 21, 2025. Another young Republican operative just had his insanely racist text messages leaked.But the latest guy in the barrel isn’t some random right-wing apparatchik. He’s Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s 30-year-old nominee to lead the Office Special Counsel, one of the federal government’s key internal watchdogs. In a Truth Social post from May, Trump, who has shared Ingrassia’s content dozens of times, called him a “highly respected attorney, writer, and constitutional scholar.”
He’s also quite the group-chatter. Politico reported yesterday afternoon on a set of text chains in which Ingrassia, speaking to other young GOP men, offered his opinion about Martin Luther King Jr.—the “1960s George Floyd” whose holiday “should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs”—while admitting that “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time.” Other comments about the merits and demerits of various population groups piled up from there:“We need competent white men in positions of leadership . . . The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal.”“Blacks behave that way because it’s their natural state. . . . All of Africa is a shithole, and will always be that way.”“Never trust a chinaman or Indian.”What a guy! In response to the story, Ingrassia’s lawyer offered the most hilariously wishy-washy statement imaginable: “In this age of AI, authentication of allegedly leaked messages, which could be outright falsehoods, doctored, or manipulated, or lacking critical context, is extremely difficult . . . We do not concede the authenticity of these purported messages.”Which to us sounds a lot like: Look, man—Paul says a lot of insanely racist stuff about a lot of ethnic groups. How can we possibly know if these particular instances are real or not?A few things about all this.The first and most obvious: As I wrote about a similar story last week, the kids are not alright. For many young Republican professionals coming up today, especially men, performative ultrabigotry is social currency—a way of showing you’re an edgy freethinker who isn’t afraid to hold dangerous opinions and, as importantly, not some crypto-lib. A lot of times it starts out as a posture of semi-irony—before long, it becomes a habit of mind, then hardens into actual belief.The second is about the Hill response. The timing of the leak is terrible for Ingrassia, who was scheduled to have his confirmation hearing Thursday. If that were still weeks or months out, GOP senators might be able to sit back and wait to see if the story goes away on its own.¹ As it is, they were compelled to respond immediately.“He’s not gonna pass,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters yesterday.“I’m not supporting him,” said Florida Sen. Rick Scott. “I can’t imagine how anybody can be antisemitic in this country. It’s wrong.”²But the White House has so far been silent—which brings us to the third thing. During Trump’s second term, his team has modeled a hard-and-fast rule on scandals like these: Young Republicans are never, ever to face consequences for horrible texts.The field general here has been Vice President JD Vance, who has rushed again and again to the defense of young MAGA bigots. When 25-year-old DOGE staffer Marko Elez was fired in February over year-old X posts like “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance successfully campaigned for him to get his job back. “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance said.Last week, it was Vance who laid out the playbook for the GOP response to obscenely racist texts from Young Republican leaders: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.”³That grace, of course, only extends where Trump supporters in good standing are concerned. Vance has been among the loudest voices, for instance, encouraging the MAGA faithful to try to ruin the lives of anyone posting terrible things about the murder of Charlie Kirk. And he hasn’t had a problem with the administration’s punishing of the social media activity of literal college kids, revoking their visas and booting them from the country.All this makes the Ingrassia storyline particularly tricky for the White House. It suggests there may finally be a level of shitposting that even loyal MAGA footsoldiers can’t get away with and still expect to get through the GOP Senate. And it shines a 450-watt floodlight on the ludicrousness of Vance’s ridiculous talking point. These “young boys” are too immature and half-formed to refrain from pouring pure hatred against minorities out at all times. But they’re not too immature, apparently, to run major government agencies. They’re the fearless foot soldiers of MAGA who are going to take this country back—but hush, don’t be mean—can’t you see the baby is sleeping?New York Times,G.O.P. Senators Oppose Trump Watchdog Nominee After Report of Racist Texts, Robert Jimison, Oct. 21, 2025. At least four Republican senators, including the Senate majority leader, signaled their opposition to Paul Ingrassia, the president’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel.The nomination of Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel, appeared to be in jeopardy on Monday night after Politico reported that he had sent a series of racist text messages.At least four Republican senators, including the Senate majority leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, have signaled that they will oppose his nomination to the office, which is a traditionally independent corruption-fighting agency that safeguards federal whistle-blowers and enforces some ethics laws.Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, told reporters on Monday evening that he had spoken with the administration about Mr. Ingrassia but did not share details. He told reporters, “I do not support him.”Mr. Ingrassia, 30, is set to testify on his nomination on Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Four Republicans opposing him would be enough to kill his nomination if all senators were present and the entire Democratic caucus voted against him.The New York Times was unable to independently verify the text messages, which Politico said included telling a group of fellow Republicans that he had “a Nazi streak” and that the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”A lawyer for Mr. Ingrassia did not confirm the texts were authentic and said they might have been manipulated or were missing context, Politico said.The report of the messages adds to a swirl of controversy around both Mr. Ingrassia, a self-described “constitutional law” expert who hosted a far-right podcast with his sister, and Mr. Trump’s role in trying to bend the Office of Special Counsel to his will. It also comes just days after a separate Politico report showed that young Republican officeholders and activists had routinely used racist and homophobic language and glibly invoked Hitler and the Holocaust in a Telegram chat.During the 2024 Republican primary, Mr. Ingrassia pushed a fake theory that Nikki Haley was ineligible to run for president, which Mr. Trump then promoted on social media. In December 2020, as Mr. Trump was contesting his election loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Ingrassia’s podcast posted on Twitter, “Time for @realDonaldTrump to declare martial law and secure his re-election.”Mr. Ingrassia, who graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile, also represented the “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who is facing rape and human trafficking charges overseas.Mr. Trump kicked off a legal battle early this year when he fired the previous head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, challenging a foundational precedent that said Congress can limit the president’s power to fire leaders of independent agencies.Global NewsNew York Times,Nations Hesitate to Send Troops to Gaza, Fearing Clashes With Hamas, Adam Rasgon, Michael D. Shear, David M. Halbfinger, Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer, Oct. 21, 2025. The Trump peace plan calls for an international security force in the Gaza Strip, but countries that might send troops are wary of danger, an unclear mission and being seen as occupiers.The fragile cease-fire in Gaza that came into force last week rests on some key assumptions: that Hamas militants give up their weapons and that an international troop presence keep the peace as Israel withdraws its military from the enclave.But the countries that might make up that force are skittish about committing soldiers who could potentially come into direct conflict with Hamas while it is still an armed group, diplomats and other people familiar with the deliberations say.President Trump’s 20-point plan, which led to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, envisioned the immediate deployment of a “temporary International Stabilization Force” in Gaza. The idea was for the international corps to secure areas where Israeli troops have withdrawn, prevent munitions from entering the territory, facilitate the distribution of aid and train a Palestinian police force.The creation and deployment of an international force in Gaza could determine whether the current cease-fire has a chance to evolve into a lasting agreement, and whether Israelis and Palestinians move toward the broader aim of a durable peace.Diplomats and other officials from several countries who are familiar with the situation say there has been little progress on when the force might be assembled because of confusion over the force’s mission, which appears to be the most serious stumbling block.Representatives from several countries seen as likely participants have said privately that they will not commit troops until there is more clarity about what the force will be expected to do once it arrives in Gaza, according to two diplomats briefed on the discussions in recent days.New York Times,Vance Lands in Israel as U.S. Tries to Shore Up Gaza Truce, Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 21, 2025. With the cease-fire deal under strain, Vice President JD Vance is set to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders.Vice President JD Vance arrived in Israel on Tuesday for meetings with the country’s leaders, as the Trump administration rushes to shore up the hard-won, fragile cease-fire deal in Gaza.Israel and Hamas agreed this month to a truce in their two-year war, based on parts of a plan outlined by President Trump. On Oct. 13, the Palestinian armed group handed over the 20 living Israeli hostages it was still holding in Gaza, while Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange.Though less than two weeks old, the cease-fire is already under strain as Mr. Vance lands for his trip to Israel, which is set to last until Thursday. Analysts said that the visit was intended to send a warning to both Israel and Hamas not to undermine the truce.Mr. Vance joins Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Mideast envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, both of whom were already in Israel to monitor the truce. The two were instrumental in brokering the deal, alongside Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators.Several Trump officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, told The New York Times on Monday that there was concern within the administration that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel may vacate the U.S.-backed deal.New York Times,China Has Another Lever to Pull in Showdown With Trump: Factory Lines, Alexandra Stevenson, Oct. 21, 2025. In Washington, China hawks say its economy is too weak to withstand a tariff shock. In the city of Yiwu, factories are showing why, for now, that may be a miscalculation.With trade hostilities between the world’s two economic superpowers back on, China has sent the unmistakable message that it is ready to fight. A week ago, it invoked its grip over virtually the entire global supply of critical materials, breaking a delicate trade détente between the two countries.Beijing feels it has another ace card: its booming factories. Even in the face of sky-high tariffs by President Trump, China’s manufacturing sector is helping to maintain growth and give the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, a stronger hand to face down the United States.The strength is on display in the city of Yiwu, home of the world’s biggest wholesale market, where sellers peddling toys, home electronics and drones are stuffed into complexes that span multiple city blocks. Last week, Yiwu unveiled another trade center, a facility the size of hundreds of football fields to house exporters and “showcase China’s hard-core manufacturing power to the world.”Like many vendors in Yiwu, Gong Hao used to sell his plastic Hawaiian leis, party streamers and bunny ears to Americans. This year, he lost his U.S. customers but gained new buyers in Europe and Southeast Asia.Oct. 20 New York Times,News Analysis: Clashes in Gaza Reveal Cease-Fire’s Fragility, With Rougher Road Ahead, David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 20, 2025. A round of violence on Sunday was short-lived, but analysts expect more tensions between Israel and Palestinian militants that will put the truce under strain.Ten days into a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, relief is giving way to grim acknowledgments of the truce’s tenuousness, and of the need for continued outside intervention to keep it alive, let alone to make further progress.A new round of violence on Sunday showed just how arduous the road to a broader agreement in Gaza will be between the two sides, which have repeatedly accused each other of violating the truce.Two Israeli soldiers were killed and another was wounded when Palestinian militants launched an anti-tank missile at an army vehicle, the Israeli military said. The attack took place in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on the Israeli-held eastern side of the cease-fire line. Israel called it a blatant violation of the agreement’s terms. Hamas officials were quick to disavow the attack.Israel responded quickly, with a punishing bombardment of what it described as Hamas installations and Gaza officials said that 44 Palestinians were killed across the territory on Sunday. Israel said it was cutting off the supply of humanitarian aid to the devastated territory indefinitely, but later tempered that, saying that aid deliveries would be paused only until the bombardment was over.Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, demanded an immediate, open-ended resumption of Israel’s offensive against Hamas. “War!” he wrote in a one-word post on X.CBS 60 Minutes,Fired Justice Department lawyer blows the whistle on what he describes as abuses of power at the DOJ, Scott Pelley, Oct. 19, 2025. Former Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni speaks out about the disregard of due process and for the rule of law that he says he witnessed in his final weeks at the Department of Justice.U.S. Protest, Trump Security News Roundups In reaction to the Oct. 18 “No Kings” protests across the United States and in scattered other locales worldwide, President Trump used his Truth Social website to display a brief video of himself created via Artificial Intelligence portraying himself with a crown and piloting a military airplane dropping massive loads of excrement on peaceful protesters in New York City (Screenshot).The Bulwark and Jack Cocchiarella Analysis,Trump’s VILE New Video Says It All, Jack Cocchiarella, Oct. 19-20, 2025. Jack Cocchiarella takes on Donald Trump’s latest disgrace—an AI poop attack on American cities—and calls out the hypocrisy of a man who claims to love America while literally dumping on it.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 19, 2025 [A King or No Kings For the United States?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 20, 2025. All last week, Republican leaders tried to portray the No Kings protests scheduled for Saturday, October 18, as “Hate America” rallies.G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers partnered with Atlanta-based science newsroom The Xylom to estimate that as many as 8.2 million people turned out yesterday to oppose the Trump administration. The mood at the protests was joyful and peaceful, with protesters holding signs that championed American principles of democracy, free speech, equality, and the rule of law. As the Grand Junction, Colorado, Daily Sentinel put it in a front-page headline: “‘This is America’ ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide.”Then last night, after the protests, the president’s social media account posted an AI-generated video showing Trump in a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” painted on the side. The president sits in the airplane in front of something round that could be seen as a halo. He is wearing a gold crown; weirdly, the oxygen mask is over his mouth and chin, rather than mouth and nose.Once in the air, the plane drops excrement on American cities, including what seems to be New York City. The excrement drenches protesters, one of whom is 23-year-old liberal political commentator and influencer Harry Sisson. Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who shares media clips that reflect politics, commented: “Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping sh*t on America.” Historian Larry Glickman noted that media outlets make much of alleged Democratic disdain for ordinary Americans, but have had little to say about the disdain for Americans embodied by Trump’s video.Several administration videos and images have responded to Americans saying “No Kings” by taking the position “Yes, We Want Kings,” an open embrace of the end of democracy. But they are more than simple trolling. Led by Trump, MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics, which is the process of engaging in debate and negotiation to attract support and win power. What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.The idea that leaders must attract voters with reasoned arguments to win power and must concede power when their opponents win has been the central premise of American government since 1800. In that year, after a charged election in which each side accused the other of trying to destroy the country, Federalist John Adams turned the reins of government over to the leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. That peaceful transfer of power not only protected the people, it protected leaders who had lost the support of voters, giving them a way to leave office safely and either retire or regroup to make another run at power.The peaceful transfer of power symbolized the nation’s political system and became the hallmark of the United States of America. It lasted until January 6, 2021, when sitting president Trump refused to accept the voters’ election of Democrat Joe Biden, the leader of the opposition.Now back in power, Trump and his loyalists are continuing to undermine the idea of politics, policies, and debate, trying instead to delegitimize the Democratic opposition altogether.Yesterday, during the protests, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D Vance, and the official White House social media account posted a video of Trump placing a royal crown on his head, draping a royal robe around his shoulders, and unsheathing and brandishing a sword (an image that raises questions about why Trump wanted one of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s swords so badly that he had the museum director who refused to hand it over fired). In the video, Democratic leaders including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and what appears to be Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first kneel and then bow to Trump.Administration imagery doesn’t simply insult opposition leaders; it undermines the idea of politics by suggesting that Democrats are un-American. Last night the White House continued its racist crusade against Democratic leaders by posted an AI-generated image of Trump and Vance wearing jewel-encrusted crowns positioned above an image of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wearing Mexican sombreros. The caption reads: “We’re built different.”The administration’s hostility to loyal opposition is translating into direct assaults on our government. House speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to seat a member of the opposition. Voters chose representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) , left, on September 23 to fill a vacant House seat, but Johnson has come up with one reason after another not to seat her. Until she is sworn in, she has no access to government resources and cannot represent her constituents. She also cannot be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.Grijalva recorded a video reinforcing the political system, saying: “We need to get to work, get on the floor, and negotiate so we can reopen the government.”But Republican congressional leaders are refusing even to talk with Democrats to reopen the government, let alone to negotiate with them. They are trying to force Democrats simply to do as they say, despite the fact that 78% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, support the Democrats’ demand for an extension of the tax credit that lowers the cost of healthcare premiums on the Affordable Care Act markets. Lindsay Wise, Anna Wilde Mathews, and Katy Stech Ferek of the Wall Street Journal reported today that more than three quarters of those who are insured through the ACA markets live in states that voted for Trump.A video of Trump in a bomber attacking American cities carries an implied threat that the disdain of throwing excrement doesn’t erase. This morning, Trump reinforced that threat when he reminded Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo: “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, I’d rather do this, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that, that you know they it’s not like a part of the radical left movement to have safety. These cities have to be safe.”That “safety” apparently involves detaining U.S. citizens without due process. On Thursday, Nicole Foy of ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents. She reports they “have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”On Friday, the Trump administration pushed its attempt to use the military in Democratic-led cities, asking the Supreme Court to let it deploy troops in Chicago immediately. Chris Geidner of Law Dork notes that four judges, two appointed by Democrats and two appointed by Republicans, have rejected the administration’s arguments for why they must send in troops. Now the Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the so-called shadow docket, which would provide a fast response, but one without any hearings or explanation.The administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court warned that there was “pressing risk of violence” in Chicago—a premise the judges rejected—and said preventing Trump from going into the city “improperly impinges on the President’s authority.”How much difference will the No Kings Day protests, even as big as they were, make in the face of the administration’s attempt to get rid of our democratic political system and replace it with authoritarianism? What good is an inflatable frog against federal agents?Scholar of social movements Lisa Corrigan noted that large, fun marches full of art and music expand connections and make people more willing to take risks against growing state power. They build larger communities by creating new images that bring together recognizable images from the past in new ways, helping more people see themselves in such an opposition. The community and good feelings those gatherings develop help carry opposition through hard moments. Corrigan notes, too, that yesterday “every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you’re…demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and its makeshift gestapo.”Such rallies “bring together multigenerational groups and the playfulness can help create enthusiasm for big tent politics against the monoculture of fascism,” Corrigan writes. “The frogs (and unicorns and dinosaurs) will be defining ideographs of this period of struggle.Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: ICE boosts weapons spending 700%, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 20, 2025. A Popular Information investigation reveals tens of millions in new ICE spending on guns, chemical weapons, and explosives.U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sharply increased its spending on weapons in 2025, according to an analysis of federal government contracting data by Popular Information. Records from the Federal Procurement Data System reveal that ICE has increased spending on “small arms, ordnance, and ordnance accessories manufacturing” by 700% compared to 2024 levels.New spending in the small arms category from January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated, through October 18, totaled $71,515,762. Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”On September 29, 2025, ICE made a $9,098,590 purchase from Geissele Automatics, which sells semi-automatic and automatic rifles. The total spending by ICE in the small arms category between January 20 and October 18, 2024, was $9,715,843.Spending by ICE on guns and other weapons this year not only dwarfs spending during the Biden administration but also during Trump’s first term. In 2019, for example, ICE spent $5.7 million on small arms through October 18. Average ICE spending on small arms during Trump’s first four years was about $8.4 million.ICE spending on “small arms” (January 20-October 18)Create interactive, responsive & beautiful charts — no code required.The data likely understates new spending on weaponry deployed in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, since many other federal agencies beyond ICE have been involved. But it provides a window into how ICE and other agencies are bringing an unprecedented number of high-powered weapons into American cities.No billionaire overlords. No capitulation. No BS. Upgrade to paid to support Popular Information’s independent accountability journalism.More weapons, more violenceThe surge in spending on ICE weaponry has coincided with a wave of violent incidents by ICE officers. Several dangerous situations have been captured on video.Last month in Illinois, a pastor, Reverend David Black, was shot in the face with a pepper ball by an ICE officer. In another September incident, an ICE officer dropped his gun while violently making an arrest and then pointed it at bystanders.An ICE officer also allegedly shot a pepper ball at the vehicle of a CBS News Chicago reporter in September. The reporter’s window was open, allowing chemical agents “to engulf the inside of her truck,” which “caused her to vomit.”In August, US Marine Corps veteran Daryn Herzberg was hospitalized “after being tackled from behind by ICE agents while protesting outside a federal facility in Portland.”At the time he was attacked, Herzberg was criticizing ICE officers “for firing down on unarmed protesters.” A video shows “an agent grabbing Herzberg by the hair and slamming his face into the ground multiple times while saying, ‘You’re not talking shit anymore are you?’”The Contrarian,Opinion: The 7th Circuit rejects lies about Chicago, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 20, 2025. The MAGA Supreme Court must not condone Trump’s lies.Donald Trump, his MAGA lackeys, and the captured right-wing media continue to perpetrate a lie that American cities are war zones where local police are overwhelmed, riots rage, and “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants necessitate a brutal, violent onslaught from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Trump’s white Christian nationalist base (which is significantly rural and small-town) gobbles that up. Trump, however, has run into trouble peddling that fiction in federal courts. Government lawyers repeatedly have presented blatantly false justifications for federalizing and deploying National Guard troops under 10 U.S.C.§ 1240. That statute allows nationalization only if there is an invasion/danger of invasion, rebellion/danger of rebellion, or if “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”It is one thing for Trump and his dissembling minions to make up (or ignore) facts to erect a blatantly false narrative while on friendly MAGA media turf; it is quite another to defend invasions in U.S. cities based on dissembling in sworn declarations to federal judges. Multiple courts have ruled that this government’s declarations are “unreliable,” meaning they were either lies to mislead courts or mistakes that government lawyers used to try to persuade courts to allow Trump’s invasions. Those lawyers either negligently or intentionally proffered false statements to defend Trump’s effort to militarize our cities. (Paul Goyette via Wikimedia Commons)The latest collision between Trump’s misrepresentations and reality came in a unanimous 7th Circuit per curium opinion upholding the U.S. District Court’s opinion finding that there was no legal basis for National Guard deployment in Chicago. (On the three-person panel, one judge was appointed by Trump, another by George H.W. Bush, and the third by Barack Obama.) The court acknowledged that, though deference is owed to the executive, it must not turn a blind eye to a blatantly false portrayal of events. Put differently: Government lies to the country will not fly in court.The court put the Chicago protests in perspective. “According to Broadview Police, the crowd has never exceeded 200, though the administration suggests it may once have reached around 300,” the judges reminded us. Translation: The apocalyptic vision Trump invents to justify a massive crackdown on civil liberties is spun out of whole cloth.When ICE deployed pepper spray and tear gas (against unarmed protestors) on Sept. 26, “[S]tate police and other local police departments sent six cars. The activity near the facility closed a nearby road for roughly five hours, but Illinois law enforcement was able to contain the scene,” the court reiterated. The next week, a few dozen protestors showed up, but “State and local law enforcement quickly responded and controlled the scene. DHS did not have to intervene.”That was reality. The court dismissed as unreliable the Trump regime’s contradictory assertions (in sworn declarations signed under penalty of perjury), finding that they “omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence.” The court, in other words, refused to accept Trump’s fictitious narrative.In making its finding, the 7th Circuit panel distinguished between “rebellion” (one legal basis justifying deployment of the National Guard) and constitutionally protected protest:A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest.The court emphasized that a few violent perpetrators whom local police handle do not erase the “considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.” The court therefore concluded, “The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, does not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority.”Then, turning to the other phony justification (the federal government was unable to enforce the laws), the court found that, too, was factually wrong. “Even applying great deference to the administration’s view of the facts, under the facts as found by the district court, there is insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws.” Federal facilities remained open, local authorities contained “sporadic disruptions,” and deportations and arrests continued as “the administration has been proclaiming the success of its current efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Chicago area.”The Trump regime has appealed to the Supreme Court, hoping that MAGA justices will again undermine lower courts that rejected lies about “war ravaged” cities. If the MAGA justices again undo lower courts’ fact-finding and allow Trump to invade U.S. cities, they effectively will have given Trump wide berth to lie. That would not only further distort the separation of powers (granting unlimited deference to the executive branch) but also signal that there is no price to be paid legally or professionally for government lawyers’ deceiving courts. (Lawyers who knowingly solicited or presented false declarations should face legal and professional accountability.)Lower courts already are up in arms, condemning the MAGA justices’ terse emergency docket edicts disregarding their findings of facts. Trial courts are in the business of determining facts, applying the law to them, upholding the integrity of the judicial system, and sustaining the confidence of the parties and public that the truth will come out. If none of that matters, why have lower courts? The better question is why we should grant far-ranging appellate jurisdiction to lifetime Supreme Court justices who would systematically dismantle the separation of powers and undermine the entire federal bench.If we want to return to a system of laws, we must address MAGA justices’ gross damage to the Constitution and to the credibility of lower courts. That might require everything from Supreme Court expansion to curtailing its appellate jurisdiction. For voters concerned about preventing a full-scale descent into fascism, the Supreme Court must be a top priority. New York Times, Appeals Court Lifts Block on Trump’s Oregon Troop Deployment, Mattathias Schwartz, Oct. 20, 2025. Deployment can move forward, for now, under a preliminary ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But legal wrangling will likely continue.The Trump administration can move forward with deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., under a ruling Monday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.The 36-page ruling lifted a temporary block on the deployment of Oregon and California National Guard soldiers by Judge Karin J. Immergut of the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon. It was not immediately clear whether the order, also allowed the president to use National Guard soldiers from Texas or other states, as he has suggested he might do.The ruling came from two members of the three-judge panel, Judge Ryan D. Nelson and Judge Bridget S. Bade, both appointees of President Trump. Judge Susan P. Graber, a Clinton appointee, dissented.The ruling opened the door to some federal troops being stationed at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland that has been the site of street protests since June.All Rise News, Trump-appointed judges let troops into Portland, Adam Klasfeld live with Harry Litman), Oct. 20, 2025. The dissenting judge warned confidence in the judiciary is at stake.A three-judge panel dominated by Donald Trump appointees allowed the National Guard to be sent into Portland, Ore., inspiring a dissent urging the full Ninth Circuit to stop the deployment immediately.“I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Susan Graber, a Bill Clinton appointee.Graber was calling for the immediate intervention of the full Ninth Circuit bench to block the troop deployment, which could be imminent, adding that a crisis of faith in the federal judiciary itself is on the line.“Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer,” Graber wrote.“Chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all”During a 40-minute conversation, ex-U.S. Attorney Harry Litman and I noted that those are incredibly strong words for a jurist with nearly 30 years of experience on the federal bench.Her colleagues, Ryan D. Nelson and Bridget S. Bade, paused a ruling by fellow Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Susan Immergut, who excoriated the basis for sending the troops into Portland as “untethered to the facts.”Overruling her findings, Nelson and Bade found that there was “colorable basis” for finding that civil unrest left the government “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”Dissenting Judge Graber found that proposition beyond “absurd.”“Given Portland protesters’ well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods employed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd,” Graber wrote. “But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions. I strenuously dissent.”…Sidebars,Trump’s Assault on the Justice System Continues, Randall Eliason, right, former federal prosecutor and law professor, Oct. 20, 2025. In my most recent post, I wrote about Trump’s escalating weaponization of the Department of Justice. Consider this part 2 of that post. Trump continues to use the justice system to punish his enemies and reward his friends, and to trample on the rule of law in the process.Trump regularly complains that the justice system was weaponized against him because it dared to seek to hold him accountable for his criminal acts. One of the many ironies of the Trump era is that it is Trump himself who has weaponized the justice system, in ways that would have been unthinkable in any prior administration.Trump’s corruption of the Department of Justice is causing tremendous damage. But there are still some guardrails, some reasons for hope, and some reminders that Trump is not in fact all-powerful.The Comey and James IndictmentsIn my prior post I discussed how Trump had forced out Erik Siebert, the respected career U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, because he refused to follow Trump’s public commands to indict former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump then installed Lindsey Halligan, one of his personal attorneys with zero experience as a prosecutor, as the head of one of the country’s most important U.S. Attorney’s offices. As I noted at the time, Halligan’s primary qualification appeared to be a willingness to do whatever Trump wants her to do.Halligan wasted no time demonstrating those qualifications. Within a few days of her appointment, and just days before the statute of limitations would have expired, she obtained an indictment of Comey for lying to Congress and obstruction of justice based on his testimony in a Congressional hearing in 2020. Two weeks later Halligan indicted James for mortgage fraud, based on a claim that she falsely said in mortgage paperwork that a property she purchased would be used as her personal residence.As many commentators have noted, both cases appear laughably thin. The indictments are bare bones allegations, not the detailed “speaking indictments” that real prosecutors typically prepare in significant white collar cases. In both cases Halligan apparently had to present the evidence to the grand jury herself because the career prosecutors in her office refused to participate.Even if the government can prove misstatements in Comey’s testimony or in James’s loan paperwork (which is far from clear), proving criminal intent in both cases will be extremely difficult. There are many legal issues and potential defenses in these types of cases. Mistake, confusion, failures to recall, inconsistent paperwork – none of these are crimes. As the career prosecutors in Virginia had concluded, given these slim facts, these are not matters the Justice Department typically would pursue.These cases may never make it to trial. The defense will certainly file motions to dismiss for vindictive or selective prosecution, and Trump’s own actions give them a compelling case. Defense attorneys also intend to challenge the legality of Halligan’s appointment. If the cases do go to trial, prosecutors will need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a unanimous jury that the defendants knowingly and intentionally lied or committed fraud. I frankly would be shocked if either case ends up in a criminal conviction.That does not, of course, negate the harm to these defendants. Simply being indicted causes tremendous emotional, reputational, and financial injury. And that is precisely the point: Trump wants to use the criminal justice system to inflict pain on his political foes, and Pam Bondi and his other lackeys in the Justice Department are willing to help him.Trump has a long list of perceived enemies, and other “revenge prosecutions” are probably coming. I hate to sound like a broken record, but using criminal prosecution to go after the leader’s political opponents is textbook authoritarianism. It’s a violation of everything that DOJ has stood for. In a statement following his indictment, Comey said: “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice.” That’s exactly how I and most of his other former colleagues feel.The Bolton IndictmentLast Thursday John Bolton became the third Trump antagonist to face criminal charges. Bolton served as National Security Advisor in Trump’s first term, but after leaving the administration became a vocal Trump critic. He was indicted on eighteen counts of improperly retaining and transmitting national defense information. Prosecutors allege Bolton improperly retained classified information in his home and transmitted it, in the form of his personal diary entries, over non-secure email accounts to family members not authorized to have the information. Some of those emails allegedly were obtained by Iranian hackers. John Bolton criticizes White House ‘censorship’ ahead of his planned book release – ABC NewsMany, including Bolton himself, were quick to claim this was another example of a Trump critic being punished with an indictment. It’s true that Trump has repeatedly attacked Bolton and that the White House apparently was pushing for this case to be brought. But there are some important distinctions between the Bolton case and the cases against Comey and James.The Bolton investigation was begun several years ago by the Biden Justice Department, not initiated by a Trump social media rant.The indictment was obtained and is signed by career prosecutors from both the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office and the National Security Division of the Justice Department. A judge previously signed off on a search warrant of Bolton’s home, finding probable cause there was evidence of a crime. The 26-page indictment goes into great detail about the alleged criminal violations and is much more typical of an indictment in a significant white collar case. The allegations appear to be serious and to state real crimes.None of that means the Bolton prosecution will succeed. But I wouldn’t automatically lump it into the same category as the indictments of Comey and James. We need to be cautious about a knee-jerk reaction where any indictment of a Trump critic is automatically considered improper. That’s just the flip side of what Trump does: assume that any case against him must by definition be illegitimate.But this is precisely the problem with what Trump is doing. Defendants in politically-charged cases have always claimed their prosecutions were witch hunts brought by political foes. Those claims historically lacked credibility because of DOJ’s independence and its track record of pursuing corruption cases without regard to politics.Now Trump’s actions are making those kinds of claims plausible. When a defendant says he is being prosecuted for political reasons, why shouldn’t the public – and the jury – believe it? After all, we’ve now seen it happen in other cases. Even if the Bolton case is completely legitimate, Trump’s public targeting of his enemies casts a cloud over the prosecution and makes it suspect from day one. That lack of Justice Department credibility will carry forward into future prosecutions and even future administrations.New York Times, Supreme Court Will Weigh Gun Restrictions for Drug Users, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 20, 2025. The Second Amendment case tests a federal law used to convict Hunter Biden that bars drug users and addicts from possessing guns.The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would consider a Second Amendment challenge to the federal law barring drug users and addicts from having a gun, in a case testing the statute used to convict President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter last year.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found the law unconstitutional in most cases and said it could be applied only to those “presently impaired.” The Trump administration urged the justices to reverse the ruling, saying the law should be upheld because habitual drug users with firearms presented “unique dangers to society” and raised the prospect of “armed, hostile encounters with police officers.”The case will require the justices to apply the court’s recently adopted test for examining challenges to gun control measures. Formulated in 2022, the test requires courts to strike down such laws unless they are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”The Supreme Court has issued a series of major rulings favoring gun rights but limited the sweep of the 2022 decision when it found last year that the government could take guns away from people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence. In March, the justices also upheld federal restrictions on so-called ghost guns, the nearly untraceable, homemade firearms that can be easily assembled.At issue in the new case is a section of federal law that bars any person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing a firearm.At least 32 states and territories have enacted similar laws restricting the possession of firearms by drug users and drug addicts.Hunter Biden was convicted in June 2024 on felony gun charges after a jury found he had lied about his drug use when he filled out a form to purchase a gun and then illegally owned the firearm as a drug user. The charges stemmed from Mr. Biden’s purchase and possession of a handgun during a time when he later acknowledged he had been addicted to crack cocaine.President Biden pardoned his son in December 2024, before he could be sentenced for the crime.Challenges to the constitutionality of the law have divided the lower courts.Justice Department lawyers said the statute was consistent with the nation’s history of gun regulation and what they said were harsher, founding-era restrictions on gun possession by “habitual drunkards.” The law, they said, was narrow because it allowed a person to regain access to firearms “simply by ceasing his habitual illegal drug use.”The case before the justices began with Ali Danial Hemani, a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan, whose actions caught the attention of the F.B.I. A search of his phone at a border crossing revealed that he was poised to commit fraud at the direction of suspected affiliates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, court filings show.During an F.B.I. search of his home, agents found a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, marijuana and cocaine. Mr. Hemani admitted to using marijuana about every other day and told the F.BI. that the cocaine, which had been found in his mother’s room, belonged to him. After his conviction on charges of illegally possessing the gun, Mr. Hemani won his appeal at the Fifth Circuit, and the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene.Mr. Hemani’s lawyers told the justices that the government had mischaracterized his actions, and that there was no evidence that he was under the influence of drugs when law enforcement found the Glock.His lawyers acknowledged that historical laws barred intoxicated people from carrying weapons but said those restrictions did not apply to regular drinkers. The Fifth Circuit said the federal law applied too broadly to ban all possession, even when a person was not under the influence of illegal drugs.The courts of appeals have said that the word “user” in the statute means someone who engages in the habitual or regular use of a controlled substance.But the Fifth Circuit concluded there was no historical justification for disarming a sober person who is not under the influence. New York Times,To Fight ICE, Portland’s Leaders Turn to What They Know Best: Zoning, Anna Griffin, Oct. 20, 2025. Portland, Ore., is well known for its dense laws on land use. Now, under pressure from its liberal residents, the city is using those restrictions against immigrant detention.With President Trump and Portland, Ore., locked in a fierce battle over immigration policies, the city’s leaders face increasing pressure from their progressive constituents to become more creative in the fight.So Portland leaders are trying the strategy they know best: land use.Oregon has one of the most complex sets of zoning and land use laws in the nation. Supporters of the policies say they encourage neighborhoods to be walkable and filled with independent businesses while also preserving vast open spaces and farmland. Critics say the rules have stymied housing construction and kept home prices high.But in the city’s fight against the Trump administration, those land-use rules may prove to be a not-so-secret weapon, in large part because the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland may be uniquely vulnerable to the codes.“This is so Oregon of us, so Portland of us,” said Elana Pirtle-Guiney, president of the Portland City Council, “to distill a huge federal policy issue that is also a moral issue that is also about the fundamental question of who we are as a country into a land-use problem.”The General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, typically leases space for ICE from other government agencies or private prisons in industrial areas that are away from residential centers or popular commuter routes. The large ICE facility that has drawn protests in Illinois, for example, isn’t in Chicago, but rather the suburban village of Broadview.Yet when federal officials looked to move Oregon’s ICE “subfield office” from a historic post office near downtown Portland 14 years ago, they chose to lease privately owned property just three miles away in the South Waterfront, a showcase for the state’s history of innovative urban design.That has kept ICE under the intense scrutiny of both protesters and city planners. In mid-September, city leaders issued the owner of the ICE facility, the developer Stuart Lindquist, a land-use violation notice, telling him ICE had breached the terms of their original agreement for the property.New York Times,Judge Demands Answers on Trump Immigration Crackdown in Chicago, Mattathias Schwartz, Oct. 20, 2025. A federal judge has ordered operational leaders of the crackdown to appear before her on Monday to be questioned about their tactics and their use of tear gas.Federal officials are expected to appear before a judge on Monday to answer questions about whether the government violated a court order by using tear gas against protesters and residents in a crackdown on illegal immigration in the Chicago area.The hearing before Judge Sara L. Ellis of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois is shaping up as the latest in a series of confrontations between judges and officials over whether the government is flouting the courts’ authority.As protests against the Trump administration’s deportation campaign have mounted in the Chicago area, Judge Ellis has ordered limits on how federal agents could use tear gas to disperse crowds.Plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the administration say the tactics used by federal agents have violated their constitutional rights. Filings in the case document instances of federal agents using pepper balls, pepper spray and tear gas against protesters, journalists and members of the clergy with little or no warning.Judge Ellis, who was named to the bench by President Barack Obama, found the plaintiffs’ case to be credible enough to issue a temporary order on Oct. 9, barring the use of tear gas and other munitions against protesters throughout the Chicago area “who are not posing an immediate threat.”Since that order, though, federal agents have been captured on video using tear gas in Chicago neighborhoods, and Judge Ellis said she was “profoundly concerned” that the limits she had set were being violated.On Friday, Judge Ellis ordered federal agents who have body cameras to turn them on while conducting immigration arrests and while interacting with protesters and other members of the public in the Chicago area. She imposed that requirement over objections from the government about the practicalities of using the cameras and about the extent of judge’s authority.Judge Ellis has said she wants to question federal officials in court on Monday about their use of tear gas and about two tense incidents in which agents clashed with residents in Chicago.One of those clashes occurred on Oct. 12 in the Albany Park neighborhood on the city’s Northwest Side, when agents stopped a resident and a crowd formed in reaction. Tear gas was used.The other clash happened two days later on the South Side, when agents fired tear gas into a crowd that had gathered after a car crash involving federal agents.Kyle C. Harvick of Customs and Border Protection is expected to appear before the judge on Monday. According to government filings, Mr. Harvick is deputy incident commander of the Trump administration’s Chicago-area deportation operation, which it calls Operation Midway Blitz. The operation began in early September.In court last week, Judge Ellis sounded frustrated as she cited news reports suggesting that the limits she imposed on the use of tear gas were being disregarded. “I don’t live in a cave,” she said. “I’m seriously concerned that my orders aren’t being followed.”More On No Kings Day Protests The Bulwark,Morning Shots: O Frabjous Day!William Kristol, Oct. 20, 2025. You might think that I’m too old and too experienced—dare one say, too jaundiced—to have been moved by the “No Kings” protests. To be honest, I rather doubted I’d really be moved by them.But moved I was. And as we milled around in the party atmosphere in “downtown” McLean—with inflatable characters prancing and witty signs waving and drivers’ horns honking—I thought of these lines from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” in Through the Looking Glass:“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.Carroll apparently invented the portmanteau “frabjous” as a combination of “fabulous” and “joyous.” The mood in McLean—and apparently pretty much everywhere else on Saturday—was certainly joyous. And it was fabulous that some seven million people assembled peacefully and patriotically to protest Donald Trump and reaffirm their allegiance to the American idea.That idea was nowhere better stated than by Thomas Paine in Common Sense: “For as in absolute governments the King is Law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”That was the idea that animated “No Kings.” On Saturday, the American people assembled lawfully on behalf of the rule of law. On Saturday, the American people demonstrated their commitment to keeping this a free country. Mike Johnson and all his fellow pro-Kings propagandists hoped for violence, extremism, and evidence of hate for America. But instead they saw peace, patriotism, and loyalty to America.It was a frabjous day.It was also an appropriately sober one. Those with whom I spoke on Saturday know there’s a long struggle ahead against the sustained attack on our freedom by those in charge. They understand that defeating this assault won’t be easy. So Saturday featured an unusual and impressive combination of joy and sobriety.It all seems to have made Donald Trump very unhappy. I won’t dwell on the bizarre AI-generated video with a crown-wearing Trump flying over and dumping excrement on Americans. Nor will I speculate, as a friend suggested to me, whether this was a “textbook example of disinhibition—a key symptom of dementia” on Trump’s part.But I will note that Trump does seem bothered by the obvious success of No Kings Day. His response was to lash out and double down on authoritarianism. In a Sunday morning interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump asserted, “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. And that’s unquestioned power.” And late that afternoon, in a press gaggle on Air Force One, after claiming the No Kings protests were “very small, very ineffective,” he returned to his favorite thought: “I’m allowed as you know as president [to use] the Insurrection Act. Everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that and there are no more court cases, there is no more anything. We’re trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act.”It would indeed be a dangerous escalation if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act. But as Andy Craig, a fellow at the Institute for Human Studies and a writer for the Unpopulist, points out:The Insurrection Act does nothing except you can then use soldiers as cops. They can enforce laws, but they’re the same old laws. It doesn’t suspend the Constitution. No martial law, no closing courts, no removing state officials, none of that. . . . It means you can use the military to enforce federal laws, but the laws themselves remain the same.Further expansion of the use of the military within the United States would of course be a bad thing. But the Insurrection Act doesn’t do away with the Constitution and the laws. It won’t accomplish what Trump’s fevered fantasy imagines.We’ve gone pretty far through the looking glass in Donald Trump’s America. But Saturday gave me increased hope that the Constitution and the law will hold. It helped me look forward to a time when Trump shuffles off the scene and Trumpism has been decisively defeated. That will be a truly frabjous day.The Parnas Perspective,Trump Mocks No Kings Day as “Small” Despite Record Breaking Attendance, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2025. Massive internet outage as AWS goes down, DHS spends $172 million on private jets for Noem, and Marines launch investigation into artillery shell.This morning, there’s a lot happening: a massive global internet outage after AWS went down for several hours, Donald Trump brushing off No Kings Day as “small” and “ineffective,” and the U.S. Marines launching an investigation into an artillery shell that exploded over Interstate 5.Many of you reached out frustrated that some mainstream outlets barely mentioned No Kings Day. Some ignored it altogether, others tossed out a single article and moved on. I get it. That’s exactly why I started this work: to build something different, something independent, something that actually pays attention.And thanks to you, we’ve already reached tens of millions of people across the country. Let’s keep pushing forward together. Subscribe today to support real, independent coverage that doesn’t look the other way.SubscribedWith that, here’s what you missed:President Trump mocked millions of Americans participating in “No Kings” protests by sharing AI memes depicting himself as a crowned ruler, reinforcing perceptions of authoritarianism as critics warn his actions—ranging from politicized pardons to unilateral military strikes—are eroding constitutional limits and deepening national divisions.The U.S. Marines launched an investigation after a 155mm artillery round may have detonated outside the designated impact area during a live-fire demonstration at Camp Pendleton on October 18; no injuries occurred, firing was halted, and officials emphasized safety protocols and continued commitment to operational readiness.Sources said the Camp Pendleton artillery incident was especially dangerous because live munitions were fired over a freeway with civilians below, a departure from standard practice, and they welcomed an investigation into the conduct of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage temporarily took down major websites and online platforms worldwide, including Roblox, Fortnite, Reddit, Signal, and media outlets, before being resolved early Monday, highlighting the global dependence on a single cloud provider for critical digital infrastructure.When asked about farmers’ concerns that a trade deal favors Argentina, President Trump dismissed the question, saying Argentina is “fighting for its life” and telling the reporter she doesn’t understand the situation.Trump said beef prices are the only ones still high and suggested importing beef from Argentina as a way to bring them down.The Department of Homeland Security is buying two Gulfstream jets through the Coast Guard for Secretary Kristi Noem’s travel, reportedly costing up to $200 million, prompting Democratic lawmakers to question whether the purchases prioritize her comfort over the agency’s operational needs.President Donald Trump meets Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the White House to discuss trade, defense, and the AUKUS submarine deal, with Australia’s vast critical mineral reserves emerging as a key bargaining chip amid U.S.-China tensions, though experts doubt any lasting commitments from Trump.The Secret Service discovered a “suspicious” hunting stand within sight of the Air Force One landing zone in Florida before Trump’s arrival, prompting an FBI investigation; officials said no one was present, there was no impact on movements, and there’s no indication the stand was intended to target the president.After the Secret Service discovered a suspicious hunting stand near Palm Beach International Airport, Trump boarded Air Force One using the smaller, lower stairs as a security precaution; the FBI is investigating the stand, though no individuals were found and officials said there was no impact on the president’s movements.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for 25 additional U.S. Patriot missile batteries and said he is willing to join a proposed Trump-Putin summit in Hungary, after reports that Trump privately urged him to accept Russia’s terms for ending the war and suggested Ukraine cede parts of the Donbas region to secure peace.U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Israel to reinforce the fragile Gaza ceasefire after a brief flareup in which Israel accused Hamas of killing two soldiers; Israeli forces later reaffirmed the truce and said aid deliveries would resume.Lawmakers condemned ICE after reports that U.S. military veterans were arrested and injured during protests against Trump’s deportation campaign, with decorated veterans and Democratic lawmakers accusing federal agents of excessive force and warning that such actions undermine democracy and violate Americans’ right to peaceful protest.Florida city councilmember Chandler Langevin faced national backlash and a formal censure after posting anti-Indian remarks on social media calling for mass deportations, drawing condemnation from Indian American groups, lawmakers from both parties, and local residents who labeled his comments racist and dangerous.Nicholas Rossi, a Rhode Island man who faked his death and fled to the U.K. to evade justice, is being sentenced in Utah for raping two women in 2008 after being identified through DNA evidence and extradited from Scotland; he faces five years to life in prison for each conviction.China’s economic growth slowed to 4.8% in the third quarter, its weakest pace in a year, as U.S. tariffs, weak domestic demand, and a struggling property market weighed on the economy despite strong exports and industrial output gains. Daily Beast, Newsom Explodes at White House After Artillery Fiasco at Vance’s Big Day OutI Julia Ornedo, Oct. 20, 2025. I TOLD YOU SO. The California governor is demanding an apology after his security concerns were proven right.Julia OrnedoGavin Newsom is livid with Donald Trump and his administration.The California governor tore into detractors on X, including the president and Vice President JD Vance, after an artillery shell detonated prematurely over Interstate 5 during a training exercise held for the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary on Saturday. The Bulwark,Morning Shots: A Shot in the Arm, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 20, 2025. Saturday’s protests showed that a resistance can be large and organized. But can it be sustained?So “No Kings” 2 has come and gone. It was a joyous—er, frabjous—day, as Bill notes. It was a peaceful day, with millions of people in the streets and no significant outbreaks of violence. It was a patriotic day, giving the lie to ridiculous MAGA rhetoric about crowds chock-full of America-hating terrorists.But it was still only one day.The marchers have gone home, and Donald Trump remains a president hell-bent on maximizing his own personal power, delivering retribution against his enemies, and bestowing gifts upon his supporters (congrats, George Santos!).Even amid the joy of the marches, the grim sense of how much we’ve already lost was hard to miss on Saturday. Popping in on smaller protests across northern Virginia, I talked to multiple federal workers who were nervous about appearing on camera, fearing they’d be fired if it got out that they’d come. Ten months—that’s how long it’s taken Donald Trump to rewrite the rulebook to make American citizens fear state retribution for First Amendment–protected political expression.And yet, there they were, protesting anyway.Some people have scoffed at such courage as empty posturing. One ordinarily smart GOP strategist I know tweeted yesterday that “the problem with these protests from an action standpoint is that they don’t have an ‘ask’ beyond ‘we would like a democrat to be president instead.’ They are not marching for any legislation (see civil rights protests) or the end of a war (see vietnam, iraq, etc).”This is nonsense. The “No Kings” protests had one specific and concrete aim: breaking the mirage of Donald Trump’s supposed mass popular mandate. As Trump has launched his all-out war on our structures and institutions, as well as on the checks and balances of our government, he has argued he is justified in doing so because he alone, as the winner of the last presidential election, is the vessel of the popular will. Constraints on anything he might happen to want to do, he says again and again, aren’t constraints on him—they’re intolerable constraints on what the American people elected him to do.It’s a powerful argument, one designed to sap the fortitude of anyone who might oppose him. It’s a key part of why so many institutions have bent the knee in recent months without a fight. But it’s a lie. MAGA is an organized mass movement, but it is far from a majoritarian movement. An organized resistance, if it can get organized, could dwarf Trump’s cult in sheer size. MAGA put people in the streets around the country for its Stop the Steal rallies in 2020 and 2021; it even summoned enough firepower to sack the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. But it never put millions of people in motion. Trump’s naked greed for wealth and power, his cruelty, his obscenity, his stupidity, his childishness, his arrogance—all these have galvanized the opposition as never before in recent U.S. history. That’s what “No Kings” was about.Of course, Trump, safely ensconced in his media and personnel bubble, won’t see mass opposition in the streets and decide it’d be prudent to slow down his authoritarian project for a bit, if for nothing else than to take the heat off. I’d be shocked if anyone around him has seen fit to give him any true information about the size and scope of the protest. Even if he got it, it isn’t in Trump’s nature to take constructive criticism. Libs in the streets shouting “no kings” just makes him drool for the scepter all the more.His troops are in the streets. His immigration dragnets are scooping up citizens and migrants alike. He seems perfectly unconcerned about carrying on without congressional funding for anything in government—he’s just keeping the money spigots he cares most about turned on anyway. Every day he krazy-glues more bric-à-brac to the wall of the Oval Office and sticks another rhinestone in his crown.We’re in this for the long haul, so buckle up. “No Kings” showed you aren’t resisting alone.AROUND THE BULWARKHow Maine Became a Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party… Upstart Graham Platner disavows his shitposting past while Gov. Janet Mills’s establishment allies insist she’s not too old. In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN reports on this midterm primary bellwether.
- My Last Day as an Accomplice of the Republican Party… MILES BRUNER on why he is leaving the GOP and why he’s urging his former colleagues to do the same.
- The Actual Human Beings Caught in the Shutdown Vise… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN reports that there’s a reason so many people need help paying for their health insurance.
- How to Fight Mob Boss Politics in America… On How to Fix it, JOHN AVLON talks with SEN. ANDY KIM about Trump’s “mob boss” politics, the rise of fear inside the GOP, and Kim’s plan to build an anti-corruption movement that takes on what he calls “the cowards and the crazies.”
- The Dark Forces Conspiring Against Democracy… On Shield of the Republic, BILL GALSTON joins ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN to discuss his recent book, Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech. They also talk about why the dark passions seem to be so predominant in politics globally and the different schools of thought regarding democracy’s staying power.
More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Politics The late Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre shown in a screenshot from an interview on NBC News.The Guardian,Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre review – a devastating exposé of power, corruption and abuse, Emma Brockes, Oct. 20, 2025. Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir lays bare the life-wrecking impact of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes – but it is also the story of how a young woman becomes a heroThere is a strand running through Nobody’s Girl – a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April this year – in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse. “I know it is a lot to take in,” she writes after a gruelling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.” After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.”Throughout the book, Giuffre beguiles, apologises and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely enabled by Giuffre’s testimony. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.Of course, these assumptions of hers aren’t wrong. Giuffre, who was 41 when she died and whose deft, smart book is co-written with the journalist Amy Wallace, knows that to be a victim of sexual violence is to be at best pitied, at worst reviled. (Sample headline from the Daily News: “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Was Not a Sex Slave, but a Money-Hungry Sex Kitten, Her Former Friends Say.”) I approached Nobody’s Girl with two questions. First, does it give any insight into the so-called Epstein list, the catalogue of prominent men to whom Giuffre and others were trafficked? The closest we get to a fresh allegation is Giuffre’s description of one of the scores of men Epstein forced her to have sex with as a “politician” and “former minister”, who choked and beat her almost unconscious, but who, she writes, is too powerful to name. (When she told Epstein how violent the man had been, he said coldly: “You’ll get that sometimes.”)The book breathes life into Giuffre’s legal status as a victim, showing us a girl like any we knowSecond, does the book make life harder for Ghislaine Maxwell, currently in a low security prison in Texas and sucking up to President Trump to have her sentence reduced? (Her latest appeal was rejected earlier this month.) On this score, Giuffre’s account must shunt the possibility of reprieve further out of reach. It was Maxwell – or “G Max” as she insisted the girls call her – who spotted Giuffre working as a 16-year-old locker-room assistant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, and brought her to Epstein’s house to be “interviewed” as a possible masseuse. Giuffre was forced to have sex with Epstein that day and both then and in subsequent assaults, Maxwell participated. “Maxwell began lashing out at me during our threesomes,” writes Giuffre. “If I complained, she hurt me more.”This brings me to a third question: given its punishing nature, why read this book? I’ve heard more than one person say they “don’t have the stomach” for it – not phrasing any victim needs to hear – but while the book is relentlessly, shockingly hard, it is also a clear-eyed and necessary account of how sex offenders operate. Giuffre’s greatest fear – that being raped and trafficked puts her beyond empathetic reach of most people – is not, in fact, what happens. Narrative does what deposition can’t by taking us into the room with her. The book breathes life into Giuffre’s legal status as a victim, showing us a girl like any we know, like us, and enlivening the reality of those who are trafficked while being “free” to walk away.Abused since the age of six, by the time she met Epstein, Giuffre writes: “I had been sexualized against my will and had survived by acquiescing. I was a pleaser, even when pleasing others cost me dearly. For 10 years, men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of ‘love’. Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”Giuffre’s recollections of Prince Andrew, meanwhile, a man with whom she was allegedly forced to have sex three times – once in the context of an orgy on Epstein’s island – present him in an even more buffoonish and grotesque light. “We disrobed and got in the tub, but we didn’t stay there long because the prince was eager to get to the bed … In my memory, the whole thing lasted less than half an hour.” Prince Andrew denies Giuffre’s allegations that he had sex with her, that she had been trafficked to him by Epstein or that he had ever met her. But so much focus has been put on the prince that after reading this book, it wasn’t him I thought about most; it was the casual visitors to Epstein’s New York mansion, the illustrious men and occasional woman whom Giuffre says she encountered at dinners there.In respect of these people I’d like to ask: who the fuck did they think the 17-year-old at the table was? What did they think she was doing there? Only Melinda Gates, who met Epstein once and cited him as a factor in the breakdown of her marriage to Bill Gates, sensed what apparently none of these people could put their finger on. Giuffre quotes from a statement made by Gates after her meeting with Epstein: “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified.” It was an insight that evidently escaped geniuses like the MIT professors Epstein continued to advise long after he’d become a convicted sex offender.Giuffre was rightly proud of holding Epstein and Maxwell to account. And yet for any survivor of sexual violence, the cost of recovery – let alone of confronting her abusers in front of the world – can be impossibly steep. At the beginning of the book, Amy Wallace shares details of Giuffre’s fraught final months, including multiple health problems and alleged domestic violence at the hands of Robert Giuffre, her Australian husband. (Robert Giuffre’s lawyer has declined to comment on the allegations, citing ongoing court proceedings.) On 1 April, Giuffre wrote to Wallace: “It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time.” Three weeks later, she was found dead on her remote Australian farm, leaving behind three children. In a lawsuit Giuffre brought against Epstein in 2009, her lawyers stated the injuries she suffered as a result of his abuse included “a loss of the capacity to enjoy life”, and were of a magnitude that made them “permanent in nature”. The same might be said for this important, courageous, tragically posthumous book.Legal AF Analysis, Trump DOJ CRUMBLES as Trump SECRET BACKFIRES, Shan Wu (former Justice Department aide to an Attorney General), Oct. 19-20, 2025. Did Lindsay Halligan and President Trump have a secret to keep?Recent reporting by CNN and the NYT suggest that Trump’s hand-picked US Attorney who indicted both former FBI Director James Comey and now New York State Attorney General Letitia James kept the plan to indict AG James a secret from the Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top DOJ officials. Shan Wu breaks down the possible reasons for this from the perspective of a former DOJ insider. Emptywheel,Analysis: Lindsey Halligan Lectures Someone ELSE about Conflicts, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2025. The loaner prosecutors doing Lindsey Halligan’s dirty work are insinuating that Patrick Fitzgerald — and not Halligan herself (shown above) — has a conflict on this case.A filing in the Jim Comey case bearing the name of Lindsey Halligan claims that it is very important to disclose conflicts as early as possible.1 “[Bo]th the Sixth Amendment and the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct invite, indeed compel, prosecutors to alert a trial court to a defense attorney’s potential or actual conflict.” United States v. Cortez, 205 F. Supp. 3d 768, 775 (E.D. Va. 2016) (emphasis added) (Ellis, J.); see also United States v. Howard, 115 F.3d 1151, 1155 (4th Cir. 1997) (Wilkinson, C.J.) (noting that a district court “has an obligation to foresee problems over representation that might arise at trial and head them off beforehand”).Only, the filing is not disclosing conflicts that Halligan, the Trump personal defense attorney turned unlawfully appointed US Attorney who didn’t identify her client at the arraignment, might have.Rather, in a bid to accelerate consideration of the loaner prosecutors’ filter request (which I wrote about here), it insinuates that Pat Fitzgerald, right, has a possible conflict on this case. As it describes, some of the communications that (it all but confirms) Dan Richman designated as privileged back in 2019 include Fitzgerald.Relevant to this motion, the attorney has informed the government that the quarantined evidence contains communications between the defendant and several attorneys. The current lead defense counsel appears to be a party to some of these communications.To turn that into a potential conflict, the loaner prosecutors (and probably also James Hayes, who again shows as the author of the document, but who has not filed a notice of appearance in the case) wildly misrepresent the DOJ IG Report on Jim Comey’s retention of the memos he wrote memorializing his conversations with Trump.[T]he defendant used current lead defense counsel to improperly disclose classified information.22 See U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda, Oversight and Review Division Report 19-02, (August 2019), (located athttps://web.archive.org/web/20250818022240/https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o1902.pdf, last accessed October 19, 2025).(They provide a Wayback Machine link, because Trump killed the DOJ IG site in his bid to kill the main Inspector General organization.)While the IG Report describes that Comey sent Fitzgerald four of the memos — which Comey believed to be unclassified — he sent the memo that Richman shared for this NYT story separately, meaning the report does not substantiate the claim that Fitzgerald was in the loop on that story.May 14, 2017Comey sends scanned copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 from his personal email account to the personal email account of one of his attorneys, Patrick Fitzgerald. Before sending, Comey redacts the second paragraph from Memo 7 involving foreign affairs because Comey deems it irrelevant. On May 17 Fitzgerald forwards these four Memos to Comey’s other attorneys, David Kelley and Richman (right).May 16, 2017Comey sends a digital photograph of Memo 4 (describing the meeting in which Comey wrote that President Trump made the statement about “letting Flynn go”) to Richman via text message from Comey’s personal phone. Comey asks Richman to share the contents, but not the Memo itself, with a specific reporter for The New York Times. Comey’s stated purpose is to cause the appointment of a Special Counsel to ensure that any tape recordings that may exist of his conversations with President Trump are not destroyed. Richman conveys the substance of Memo 4 to the reporter. The New York Times publishes an article entitled “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation.”[snip]As described in this section, on May 14, 2017, Comey transmitted copies of Memos 2, 4, and 6, and a partially redacted copy of Memo 7 to Fitzgerald, who was one of Comey’s personal attorneys. Comey told the OIG he thought of these Memos as his “recollection recorded,” like a diary or personal notes. Comey also said he believed “there’s nothing classified in here,” and so he thought he could share them with his personal attorneys.And even using the FBI classification review of the memos he shared rather than Comey’s own review (he was an Original Classification Authority), he shared just six words, classified “Confidential” with his attorneys, and Richman didn’t share that information with Mike Schmidt.FBI conducts a classification review of Comey’s Memos. The FBI determines that Comey correctly classified Memo 1 (which Comey did not share with anyone outside the FBI); that Memos 4, 5, and 6 are unclassified but “FOUO”; and that portions of Memos 2, 3, and 7 are classified, as follows:Memo 2: Six words from a statement by President Trump comparing the relative importance of returning telephone calls from three countries, one of which the Memo notes the President mentioned twice, are classified as “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN.” Comey did not redact this information before sharing Memo 2 with his attorneys.Memo 3: Information about sources, methods, investigative activity, and foreign relations is classified as “SECRET//NOFORN.” Comey did not share Memo 3 with anyone outside the FBI.Memo 7: An assessment of a foreign leader by President Trump and discussion of foreign relations is classified as “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN.” Comey redacted this paragraph before he sent Memo 7 to his attorneys.As Comey’s response notes, in a subsequent FOIA, a judge determined just one word was Confidential.6 The portion of the memorandum the review team determined should be classified as “Confidential” concerned the President’s reference to then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s questionable judgment in not having notified the President sooner of a call from the leader of a particular country. (Report at 44). In that context, President Trump compared certain countries to a smaller country and the upclassification treated the name of a smaller country as classified for fear of offending that country. (Id. at 44-45). Mr. Comey’s reaction to the upclassification was: “Are you guys kidding me?” (Id. at 47). A federal court in unrelated litigation brought under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) ultimately rejected all but one of the subsequent classifications. (Id. at 3 n.4; 47 n.78; 58 n.100 (citing Cable News Network, Inc., v. FBI, 384 F. Supp. 3d 19, 25-26, 36, 38 (D.D.C. 2019))). The classification of the memorandum has been addressed in subsequent litigation and the single word that remains “CONFIDENTIAL” is the name of a single country.That is, even Richman didn’t release classified information here. There’s even less to suggest Fitzgerald did.The loaner prosecutors (and James Hayes) just made that up. Which is what Comey noted in a response.[T]he government’s effort to defame lead defense counsel provides no basis to grant the motion.[snip][T]here is no good faith basis for attributing criminal conduct to either Mr. Comey or his lead defense counsel. Similarly, there is no good faith basis to claim a “conflict” between Mr. Comey and his counsel, much less a basis to move to disqualify lead defense counsel.Their goal in doing so is now clear: They want to get details of what Richman said while representing Comey after Richman had left and Comey, left, was fired from the FBI, a time period that is irrelevant to charges pertaining to what Richman did as an FBI employee.And to do that, they’re treating the Comey Memos as akin to some kind of grand insurance fraud (the common crime behind the precedent they’re invoking to conduct a highly invasive privilege review), when it was quite legitimately something you would do — sharing your own memorialization of sensitive events — with a lawyer. Which is probably why, per the original filing, Comey plans to challenge the warrant to get to that material.Their filing is at least disingenuous about something else. They claim they need Judge Nachmanoff to make a decision about this quickly so that they can meet their trial deadlines.Prompt implementation of the filter protocol is necessary in this case so the current trial milestones are maintained and met. This has been a point of emphasis from the Court.This desire is also shared by the government.Here, the potentially protected material could contain exculpatory or inculpatory evidence relevant to the defense and the government. Currently, the government is not aware of the contents of the potentially protected material. As a party to some of the communications contained in the potentially protected material, the defense necessarily has awareness.But this bid for a filter team already necessarily disrupts the trial deadlines.As I pointed out here, the current schedule — especially the “the fastest CIPA process you have ever seen in your lives” that Judge Nachmanoff ordered at the arraignment — presumes that Fitzgerald will get clearance quickly.The schedule proposed by the parties assumes that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time, and that all the classified materials to be reviewed are made available to the defense within a reasonable time.You don’t agree to that CIPA schedule and then decide you want to kick Fitzgerald off the case. At that point, you’re effectively fucking with Comey’s Speedy Trial right. If you, as prosecutors, are compelled to identify conflicts, you’re compelled to do so before you build an entire trial schedule around there not being one.And you especially don’t get to do that when this material has been in DOJ custody since 2019.If there were reason to believe the discussions that Comey memorialized about Trump’s attempt to kill the Russian investigation included evidence of a crime, Bill Barr would have pursued it back in 2020. He didn’t.And yet now the loaner prosecutors want to delay Comey’s trial so they can make a mad bid to get material that was clearly privileged. President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025, preceded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer who prefers to call himself “Secretary of War” instead of the congressionally mandated term “Secretary of Defense.” Emptywheel,Analysis: Shit-Posting All the Way to SCOTUS, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2025. If the Supreme Court allows Trump to invade Democratic states based on transparent fabrications, we’re in real trouble. But Trump spent the weekend proving how unreliable he is.I was going to write about how important today’s filing in Illinois’ challenge to Trump’s invasion is.Thankfully, Steve Vladeck [a Georgetown law professor and Supreme Court expert, shown below with excerpts from his blog post) did that, so I don’t have to.As for why it’s this application that presents the Court with a make-or-break moment, it’s worth reflecting on what it would mean if the full Court grants the Trump administration’s request.First, and immediately, it will mean that the Trump administration is allowed to deploy troops onto the streets of Chicago (and Broadview) to effectively militarize the enforcement of our immigration laws. Although the application to the Supreme Court is replete with references to protecting federal property, the federal government doesn’t need the authorities that are currently blocked to do that; it can use regular troops, almost certainly without invoking 10 U.S.C. § 12406 or any other statute. (This is the “protective” power.)The power the Trump administration is seeking here is much broader—and would almost certainly mean that federalized National Guard troops would start accompanying ICE officers on immigration raids and other operations—even if they’re not making the arrests themselves. That would be a … dramatic … escalation relative to where we are today.[snip]Third, and most importantly, it would allow the federal government to obtain emergency relief based upon either (1) a limitless view of what it means to be “unable to execute the laws of the United States”; or (2) an incredibly one-sided factual narrative that was expressly rejected by the district judge, and that the unanimous court of appeals panel refused to disturb. The justices aren’t factfinders, and absent some “clear” reason to believe that the lower courts erred in discrediting the Trump administration’s factual claims (when, in fact, there are lots of reasons to believe that the district court was right), to grant relief in the face of those findings is to not just show stunning disrespect to both the lower courts and the appropriate standard of review; it’s to send the message that the facts just don’t matter—so long as five or more justices personally believe whatever the federal government is telling them.That would be a big enough problem in other contexts (I’ve already written about the casual relationship Justice Kavanaugh’s Vasquez Perdomo concurrence has with the facts), but it would be utterly catastrophic here. After all, armed with a grant of emergency relief on this application, what is to stop the Trump administration from making comparably inflated and/or invented claims about the situations on the ground in other American cities as a pretextual basis for deploying troops? And what’s to stop it from making those claims not (just) tomorrow, but next November—on the eve of the midterm elections?Having outsourced that gloomy contemplation to him, I want to point to several things that might lead SCOTUS to exercise some sanity.First, Vladeck cited from Judge April Perry’s ruling on the lack of credibility of the affiants that the Administration submitted. But he didn’t note the paragraph following the general credibility assessment, in which Judge Perry described how the government threatened to invade the courthouse itself.Finally, the Court notes its concern about a third declaration submitted by Defendants, in which the declarant asserted that the FPS “requested federalized National Guard personnel to support protection of the Federal District Court on Friday, October 10, 2025.” Doc. 62-3. This purported fact was incendiary and seized upon by both parties at oral argument. It was also inaccurate, as the Court noted on the record. To their credit, Defendants have since submitted a corrected declaration, and the affiant has declared that they did not make the error willfully. Doc. 65-1. All of the parties have been moving quickly to compile factual records and legal arguments, and mistakes in such a context are inevitable. That said, Defendants only presented declarations from three affiants with first-hand knowledge of events in Illinois. And, as described above, all three contain unreliable information. [links added]Over the weekend, in response to a question about the Insurrection Act, Trump noted that one benefit (to him) of invoking it would be to shut down the courts.This is not just a threat to the sovereignty of states. It is, explicitly, a threat to the coequal status of the courts, up to and including SCOTUS. That may make them view this threat differently.And Trump hasn’t helped his credibility since then.Perhaps most spectacularly, the details regarding a number of “Kavanaugh stops” have come out since Judge Perry ruled for Chicago, not least the case of a teenaged girl who was violently detained in Hoffman Estates.A teen in Hoffman Estates was thrown to the ground by what appeared to be a federal agent this past weekend, and the teen and two of her friends were detained for hours before they were released.Her parents spoke out Monday after they say their daughter, 18-year-old Evelyn, is still shaken from the experience.Evelyn’s parents said her boyfriend got a call that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in his neighborhood. They went to warn people who live there and recorded the officers. This led to a violent arrest, in which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it did not take part.Video from the Friday incident shows sirens and undercover law enforcement cars flooding the Hoffman Estates neighborhood where the arrest happened.The video shows Evelyn getting pulled out of the passenger seat. She is then thrown to the ground, all while saying she is not resisting arrest, as the officer handcuffed her and appeared to put a knee on her back.[snip]In a post on X, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin commented on Evelyn’s arrest video, saying, “Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago police made over a year ago. This isn’t even ICE.”Hoffman Estates police, however, said ICE was in the area on Friday.Her treatment not only debunks Justice Kavanaugh’s claim that the impact of racial profiling on US citizens is minimal, but it exposes Tricia McLaughlin as a fabricator.Meanwhile, even as Trump is claiming a rebellion in Chicago, as many as 250,000 people showed up for the No Kings protest in Chicago on Saturday. While there were clashes at Broadview, where the ICE facility is, I’ve seen no reports of disturbances at the protest itself. Chicago can rightly point to the peaceful protest as a counter to the inflated claims from the government.Then there’s Trump’s childish tantrums this weekend.Chicago is arguing that Trump is invading not for any reason tied to law enforcement, but out of animus. It’s hard to imagine any more succinct expression of such animus than Trump’s shit post responding to the protests.And finally, the fiasco at Camp Pendleton — where Trump whined after Gavin Newsom shut down the freeway during Trump’s live ammunition display at the base, only to be vindicated when shrapnel from the event hit JD Vance’s motorcade.Vladeck is right: If SCOTUS grants Trump relief here, it will be far worse than any of their earlier shadow docket interventions. Let’s hope that Trump’s weekend tantrums will finally convince the court that he can no longer be indulged.More Global NewsNew York Times,Colombia’s Leader Accuses U.S. of Murder, Prompting Trump to Halt Aid, Simon Romero, Genevieve Glatsky and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Updated Oct. 20, 2025. President Gustavo Petro said a U.S. strike in the Caribbean had killed a fisherman. President Trump said he would cut aid and impose new tariffs on Colombian imports.The feuding between the two leaders reflected rising tensions in the region over the huge U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean targeting Colombia’s neighbor, Venezuela. U.S. forces have killed dozens of people in recent weeks aboard vessels that the Trump administration says were ferrying drugs from Venezuela.The administration has provided no evidence to support the claims beyond descriptions of intelligence assessments and declassified videos of portions of the attacks. Legal specialists have called such killings illegal, because militaries cannot lawfully target civilians who do not pose a threat in the moment and are not directly participating in hostilities.“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Mr. Petro, left, wrote on social media. He said the man killed in the mid-September attack, Alejandro Carranza, was a “lifelong fisherman” whose boat had experienced damage and was adrift, probably in Colombian waters, at the time of the attack. His description of Mr. Carranza and his boat could not be immediately confirmed.Mr. Trump responded by accusing Mr. Petro of not doing enough to curb the production of illegal drugs, calling him an “illegal drug dealer” with “a fresh mouth toward America.” Mr. Trump also said that the United States would halt aid payments to Colombia, which has long ranked among the largest recipients worldwide of U.S. counternarcotics assistance. He later told reporters on Air Force One that he would announce new tariffs on Colombian goods on Monday. Daily Beast,Putin’s Pals Laugh at Trump for Following Secret Kremlin Orders, Julia Davis, Updated Oct. 20 2025. ON A STRING. Russian state media is openly mocking the U.S. and claiming Trump was following Putin’s secret plot to pull a bait and switch on Zelensky.The latest call between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin has proved to be a barrel of laughs for Russian state media propagandists, military experts, and State Duma officials, who are convinced that the U.S. president is following the Kremlin’s plan to help vanquish Ukraine.During the latest broadcast of a state TV show, Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, host Vladimir Solovyov pointed out, “It should be noted that this week, we were able to exhale… New York Times,In China, a Forbidden Question Looms: Who Leads After Xi?Chris Buckley, Oct. 20, 2025. Xi Jinping,shown above at center in a file photo with other Chinese leaders, seems to believe that only his continued rule can secure China’s rise. But as he ages, choosing a successor will become riskier and more difficult.Behind closed doors in Beijing this week, China’s top officials are meeting to refine a plan to secure its strength in a turbulent world. But two great questions hang over the nation’s future, even if no one at the meeting dares raise it: How long will Xi Jinping rule, and who will replace him when he is gone?Mr. Xi has led China for 13 years, amassing dominance to a degree unseen since Mao Zedong. He has shown no sign of wanting to step down. Yet his longevity at the top could, if mismanaged, sow the seeds of political turbulence: He has neither an heir apparent nor a clear timetable for designating one.With each year that he stays in office, uncertainty deepens about who would step in if, say, his health failed, and whether the new leader would stick to or soften Mr. Xi’s hard-line course. New York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: President and Australian Leader Sign Document on Rare Earth Minerals, Staff Report, Oct. 20, 2025. President Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia on Monday signed a document related to the trade of rare earth minerals, critical materials for the production of microprocessors, weapons and other items.Details of the agreement were not immediately released. Mr. Trump said it was finalized just before the two leaders sat down at the White House. “We’re doing a real job on rare earth,” Mr. Trump said.China trade: Rare earth minerals have been one element of Mr. Trump’s broad trade dispute with China, which restricted exports of such resources this month, prompting Mr. Trump to threaten to impose even heavier tariffs on Chinese goods. But Mr. Trump struck an optimistic tone about his trip to an economic summit this month in South Korea, where, he has said, he’ll meet with President Xi Jinping of China. He added that he intended to visit China early next year.U.S. Economy, Jobs, ShutdownNew York Times, Lower-Income Americans Are Missing Car Payments, Sydney Ember, Oct. 20, 2025. Inflation and a tough job market are making it harder for some people to pay back the car loans they signed in better times.More Americans are struggling to make their monthly car-loan payments, a sign that lower-income consumers are under growing financial pressure.The share of subprime auto loans that were 60 days or more past due reached a high of nearly 6.5 percent in January and has lingered near that level, according to Fitch Ratings. Repossessions have swelled, more drivers are trading in vehicles that are worth less than they owe and lenders such as CarMax and Ally Financial have warned investors about auto loan performance. U.S. Media, Technology, Education, ReligionNew York Times,Amazon Disruption Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours, Jenny Gross, Oct. 20, 2025. Amazon Web Services, a cloud service provider, said most services were back up. Hulu, Snapchat and the British government’s official site were among those affected.A disruption involving Amazon Web Services, the cloud service provider that supports much of the internet, took many websites and apps offline for over two hours on Monday, in the latest outage that showed the fragility of the global technology infrastructure.The disruption, which affected websites and apps for some major banks, gaming sites and entertainment services, started shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern. Amazon said in an update at 5:27 a.m. that most websites and apps relying on its services were working normally again, and that it continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.”Major services were affected, including WhatsApp, the British government’s website and government tax services, the payment app Venmo, the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and games at The New York Times. Dozens of other companies and retailers — including Amazon, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring doorbells and McDonald’s — also experienced service interruptions.It was not immediately clear what led to the outage, and there were no indications that it had been caused by a cyberattack.Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Medill’s 2025 State of Local News Project report: News deserts hit new high and 50 million have limited access to local news, study finds, Staff Report, Oct. 20, 2025. Federal funding cuts to public broadcasting may accelerate local news crisisStack of newspapers on a purple background. The number of local news deserts in the U.S. jumped to record levels this year as newspaper closures continued unabated, and funding cuts to public radio could worsen the problem in coming months, according to the Medill State of Local News Report 2025 released today.While the local news crisis deepened overall, Medill researchers found cause for optimism — more than 300 local news startups have launched over the past five years, 80% of which were digital-only outlets.For the fourth consecutive year, the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications conducted a months-long, county-by-county survey of local news organizations to identify trends in the rapidly morphing local media landscape. Researchers looked at local newspapers, digital-only sites, ethnic media and public broadcasters.This year’s report also includes an analysis of a timely issue: the potential impact of the federal defunding of public broadcasting on local news deserts. And for the first time, Medill researchers examined the decline in digital readership at newspapers.Key findings from the Medill study:
- The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025, a jump from 206 in last year’s report.
- In another 1,524 counties, there’s only one remaining news source. Taken together, some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news.
- Twenty years ago, there were about 150 news desert counties, with about 37 million Americans at the time living in news deserts.
- The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week.
- Medill tracked 130 in last year’s report. In a marked departure, most of this year’s closures came at smaller, independently owned newspapers — not those controlled by large chains — signaling that an increasing number of long-time family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures.
- Total jobs at newspapers slumped 7% in the past year. The industry has now lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005.
- More than 200 newspapers changed hands in the past year, down from the number of transactions last year but still a torrid pace by historical standards.
- Nearly 300 public radio stations and more than 100 public television stations are producing local reporting. In nine counties, public radio is the sole news source, making those areas especially vulnerable to becoming news deserts in coming months.
- Utilizing predictive modeling created by the school’s Spiegel Research Center, the Medill team found 250 counties at high risk of becoming news deserts over the next decade.
Web traffic to 100 of the largest newspapers has plummeted more than 45% in the past four years, according to a Medill analysis of data tracked by the media analytics company Comscore.The report counted more than 300 local news startups in the past five years across virtually every state, demonstrating a surge of entrepreneurship that has come along with a wave of philanthropic support.The vast majority of those startups, however, are in metro areas, leaving rural and less affluent areas further behind. The number of local news sites that are part of larger national networks is continuing to multiply. This year, there are 849 sites across 54 separate networks, up 14% from the 742 individual sites across 23 networks. This growth illustrates the increasingly prominent role of digital network sites on the local news landscape.“This report highlights the historic transformation in local news,” said Tim Franklin, professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. “On one hand, news deserts are expanding, and closures are continuing apace. On the other, hundreds of startups are emerging. The questions are what will the local news ecosystem look like in a few years, and will parts of the U.S. be left behind?”Zach Metzger, director of the Medill State of Local News Project, said, “Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a dramatic reshaping in local news. Unlike in previous years, however, the majority of papers shutting down now are smaller, family-owned enterprises. These are often the most trusted active local news sources, and their loss creates new challenges for local news access in many communities.”The Medill State of Local News Project is funded by grants and gifts from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Microsoft, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Foundation, the Myrta J. Pulliam Charitable Trust and Medill alumni John M. Mutz and Mark Ferguson. HuffPost,Karoline Leavitt Shares Screenshot Of Texts With HuffPost Reporter — And It Backfires, S.V. Date, right, Oct. 20, 2025. The press secretary still didn’t answer the question we asked her, either.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt continued attacking HuffPost on Monday but failed to answer the question that led to her childish response last week: Who picked Budapest as the site for the next meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? The Hungarian capital was the site where Russia promised three decades ago not to invade Ukraine if it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited upon the breakup of the Soviet Union — a pledge Putin began violating in 2014 and continues doing so with near-nightly drone and missile attacks targeting Ukrainian civilians.Hungary’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orban, right, is also the only leader in the European Union and NATO sympathetic to Putin’s nearly 4-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.We’ll keep asking Trump’s spokespeople questions — especially the ones they don’t want to answer. Schoolyard taunts won’t deter us. Join us today and stand with a press that is fearless, free and fair.Given that history, HuffPost asked Leavitt and White House communications director Steven Cheung who picked Budapest. She responded, “Your mom did,” and Cheung followed up a minute later with: “Your mom.”On Monday, Leavitt told her 1.6 million followers on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: “For context, S.V. Dáte of the Huffington Post is not a journalist interested in the facts. He is a left-wing hack who has consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points. Just take a look at @svdate’s feed, it reads like an anti-Trump personal diary.”She then posted a screenshot of HuffPost’s question and her responses. “Activists who masquerade as real reporters do a disservice to the profession.”She did not, however, answer the original question.She also did not respond to HuffPost’s query Monday about Trump’s reported pushing of Putin’s talking points during his White House meeting Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine should give up some of its sovereign territory to Russia as a way to end Putin’s war.Trump announced soon after Zelenskyy had left that the current battles in Ukraine should serve as the new territorial lines — effectively rewarding Putin, who has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court for starting a war of aggression.Meidas Touch Network, MeidasTouch Ranks #1 of all Podcast Publishers in October — Beating Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, NYTimes, Staff Report, Oct. 20, 2025. MeidasTouch Podcast also Remains #1 in Country Beating Joe Rogan.The MeidasTouch Network has officially been named the #1 publisher in the country and The MeidasTouch Podcast the #1 podcast overall according to new industry data released by Podscribe, the leading independent audio and video analytics firm.In the rankings published October 15, 2025, Podscribe found that MeidasTouch outperformed every major media company — including Spotify, iHeartMedia, SiriusXM, Wondery, and The New York Times — based on total combined podcast downloads and video views across YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, and RSS feeds over the past 30 days.Hosted by Ben, right, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas, The MeidasTouch Podcast secured the #1 spot among all shows tracked by Podscribe, surpassing global giants such as The Diary of a CEO, The Daily (NYT), and The Joe Rogan Experience.The program continues to lead with record-breaking engagement, driven by its sharp political analysis, authentic conversations, and fiercely pro-democracy message.With more than 283.9 million monthly downloads and views across its shows, the MeidasTouch Network claimed the top publisher ranking, marking another milestone in its rise as the largest and most influential independent news and media network in America.“We’re just getting started,” said Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch. “This milestone proves that the public is ready for a new kind of media — one that fights for truth, accountability, and the democracy-loving people everywhere.Oct. 19Hopium Chronicles,Pro-Democracy Advocacy: 7 Million Proud Patriots Joyously, Peacefully Marched, Rallied, And Protested Yesterday, Simon Rosenberg, Oct. 19, 2025. Enjoy photos and videos from No Kings events from across the country……..Yesterday was a big day. Thanks to all who participated, and who helped organize events in your community. 7 million people participated in 2,700 events, 2 million more than last time. It was an extraordinary collective achievement.What follows are images and videos from this remarkable day gathered from social media and all of you. Send your photos tocommunity@hopiumchronicles.comand we will do another roundup of images from Hopium folks later today or tomorrow. Let’s start with the video above from Washington, DC. A giant copy of the Constitution joined our protest…… No Kings: “History has its eyes on U.S.” (Anonymous photographer during No Kings protest, Boston, Massachusetts, Oct. 18, 2025).News Roundups Trump Posts BIZARREClipof Himself as a ‘King’ Killing Thousands of ‘No King’ Protesters.The Parnas Perspective,Urgent Mid-Day News Update: Donald Trump unhappy following No Kings Day protests,Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 19, 2025. Rubio engaged in quid pro quo with El Salvador which included outing DOJ informants, ceasefire in Gaza is over, Trump deliberates insurrection actHere’s what you need to know: Donald Trump has posted a video depicting himself as a king dropping feces on American citizens. The Gaza ceasefire has effectively collapsed. Marco Rubio is caught up in a quid pro quo scandal that could expose DOJ informants. Trump is openly saying the Insurrection Act is “on the table.” And that’s just the beginning.Let me be clear about one thing: I will not sane-wash what we’re witnessing. For too long, media outlets have shrugged off dangerous behavior as “just Trump being Trump.” I refuse to do that. I will tell you the truth, unfiltered, factual, and accountable.With that, here’s your news updates:Reports suggest that Donald Trump was unhappy with the fact that millions of Americans took to the streets during No Kings Day. This morning, following the No Kings day protests, Donald Trump posted the following bizarre AI generated image of himself as a king dropping feces on Americans protesting during the No Kings Day protest:According to The Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio allegedly told Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that the U.S. would send back nine imprisoned MS-13 leaders, some of whom were government-protected informants, in order to secure U.S. access to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center. The report says the promise, made during a March 13 phone call, was part of a broader Trump administration effort to strengthen ties with Bukele and facilitate deportations to the prison.Trump said, “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power,” asserting that the law gives presidents broad authority to deploy the military within the United States.Trump said that if he were a Democrat, Gavin Newsom would say, “Come on in. What do you have to lose?” When Maria Bartiromo noted he was sending the National Guard to San Francisco next, Trump responded that he was going there because “they want us in San Francisco,” and added that the city “went woke” about fifteen years ago.When asked by ABC News if he could swear in Adelita Grijalva the next day, Mike Johnson replied, “No, not tomorrow. We couldn’t. We wouldn’t,” indicating that he was unwilling or unable to proceed with her swearing-in at that time.The Gaza ceasefire neared collapse as Israeli airstrikes killed at least 11 people following alleged Hamas attacks, with Israel calling the violence a “blatant violation” and vowing stronger responses; Hamas denied involvement, accused Israel of escalation, and warned continued strikes would hinder the return of hostage remains, while both sides’ hardline rhetoric cast doubt on the truce’s survival.Israel has suspended all aid deliveries into Gaza, accusing Hamas of breaching the ceasefire by not returning all deceased hostages, cutting off previously agreed daily convoys and keeping the Rafah crossing closed amid an ongoing famine.Donald Trump lashed out at Colombia, threatening its President and the country.
- In a Fox interview, Donald Trump falsely claimed he had secured $20 trillion in new investments for the U.S., a figure far exceeding the country’s annual GDP and unsupported by any evidence or official data.
- The U.S. carried out its seventh recent strike on a vessel in the Caribbean allegedly tied to drug trafficking, killing three people on board, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the ship was linked to a Colombian terrorist group; the action reflects the Trump administration’s intensified campaign against South American drug operations and escalating tensions with Colombia and Venezuela.
- Senator Rand Paul criticized recent U.S. military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug cartel boats in the Caribbean, calling them “inappropriate” and “against all of our tradition” during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. Paul argued that such actions lack due process and evidence, warning that innocent people could be killed without accountability.
- Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Western allies not to appease Russia after returning from Washington, where he failed to secure US Tomahawk missiles from Donald Trump. Hoping to use Trump’s growing frustration with Vladimir Putin to gain support, Zelenskyy instead left empty-handed as Trump shifted focus toward new diplomatic efforts following a Gaza peace deal.
- The Metropolitan police are investigating claims that Prince Andrew asked his taxpayer-funded protection officer to obtain private information about Virginia Giuffre, hours before the release of a photo showing them together in 2011. Leaked emails suggest Andrew shared Giuffre’s birth date and US social security number, prompting criticism and calls for investigation.
- Thieves carried out a highly professional raid at the Louvre in Paris, stealing “priceless” historic jewellery from the museum’s Apollon gallery, which houses France’s crown jewels. The gang used a truck, basket lift, and angle grinder to break through windows and glass cases, escaping within seven minutes. French officials described the theft as the work of an experienced team that had carefully planned the operation.
- An Ohio man, Connor Weston, 27, was arrested after storming the stage at a Wikipedia conference in New York City with a gun and a sign labeling himself a “non-offending pedophile,” threatening to kill himself during the event’s opening ceremony.
- Georgia faces record electricity demand from AI datacenters, leading Georgia Power to seek $16 billion for 10 gigawatts of new energy capacity. Most demand comes from datacenters, sparking concerns over rising bills, fossil fuel use, and fairness. Public hearings and upcoming elections for the state’s utility commission could shape how Georgia balances energy growth, costs, and clean power.
- Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing democracy with a dictatorship.
Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 18, 2025 [History Has Eyes On U.S.], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 19, 2025. Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing that democracy with a dictatorship.Administration loyalists tried to claim the No Kings protests would be “hate America” rallies of “the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people.” Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas National Guard ahead of the No Kings Day protests, warning that “[v]iolence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas.”In fact, protesters turned out waving American flags and wearing frog and unicorn and banana costumes and carrying homemade signs that demanded the release of the Epstein files and defended Lady Liberty. They laughed and danced and took selfies and sang. City police departments, including those of New York City, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., said they had made no protest-related arrests.In Oakland, California, Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic interviewed a man named Justin, asking him if, as a Black man, he had particular concerns about the actions of the Trump administration.Justin answered: “You know…a lot of times I have a hopeless feeling, but…being out here today just reminds me about the beauty of America and American protests. And, you know, the fact that they tried to…stomp on this, step on this, you know, say it’s non-American, because that’s what I’ve been reading a lot about. No, this is the point of America right here: to be able to have this opportunity to protest…. [This] does not look like Antifa, Hamas, none of this stuff that they’re talking about…. [Y]ou know, this is the beauty of America.”The No Kings demonstrations ran the gamut from hundreds of thousands of protesters in large, blue cities, to smaller crowds in small towns in Republican-dominated states. Together, they demonstrate that the administration’s claims to popularity are a lie. Such a high turnout means businesses and institutions that thought they must cater to the administration to appeal to a majority of Americans will be forced to recalculate.And the protests showed that Americans care fervently about democracy.Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing democracy with a dictatorship.New York Times,‘No More Trump!’: Protesters Denouncing the President Unite Across the Country, Corina Knoll, Updated Oct. 19, 2025. Large crowds turned out at “No Kings” rallies on Saturday that took place in large cities and small towns nationwide.They were teachers and lawyers, military veterans and fired government employees. Children and grandmothers, students and retirees.Arriving in droves across the country in major cities and small towns, they appeared in costumes, blared music, brandished signs, hoisted American flags and cheered at the honks of passing cars.The vibe in most places was irreverent but peaceful and family-friendly. The purpose, however, was focused. Each crowd, everywhere, shared the same mantra: No kings.Collectively, the daylong mass demonstration against the Trump administration on Saturday, held in thousands of locations, condemned a president that the protesters view as acting like a monarch.Many had attended a similar event in June, but the months since had seen President Trump make a dizzying array of changes in quick succession.This time, the crowds included a new round of protesters, those who said they were outraged over immigration raids, the deployment of federal troops in cities, government layoffs, steep budget cuts, the chipping away of voting rights, the rollback of vaccine requirements, the reversal on treaties with tribes and the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.New York Times, Shutdown Fight Reopens Debate in G.O.P. Over Health Care, Annie Karni, Oct. 19, 2025. The spending showdown has highlighted Republicans’ failure to produce an alternative to Obamacare, which many of them assail but concede is too politically risky to undo.The federal shutdown that is nearing its fourth week with no end in sight carries plenty of political risk for Democrats, who Republicans have accused of refusing to fulfill their responsibility to fund the government.But it has also thrust President Trump and the G.O.P. onto the defensive on health care, an issue that has long been a major weakness for the party.Democrats in Congress are holding fast to their position that they will not agree to a spending deal unless Republicans include an extension of expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits that would stave off premium increases and the loss of coverage for millions of Americans.In doing so, they have forced the G.O.P. to wrestle publicly with its divisions about what to do with the health care law, which most Republicans revile but many recognize would be impossible to unravel without bringing political disaster to their party.Some hard-line Republicans are still pressing to repeal Obamacare outright, while others concede it is unwise to do so without a clear plan of what to do instead — something that their party has long discussed but has never been able to agree upon. Mr. Trump, who told Republicans in 2023 to “never give up” in seeking to repeal the 2010 health law, has yet to clearly articulate what he favors instead.For now, Republican leaders in Congress have mostly opted to try to change the conversation, insisting that they have a health care plan but declining to describe what it is.“This is not a health care fight,” Speaker Mike Johnson, right, insisted in a television interview last week when discussing the shutdown impasse. Democrats, he added, “have created a red herring. The subsidies don’t expire until the end of the year. They grabbed that issue from the end of the year and pulled it back into September.”Whether or not Mr. Johnson wants to have a health care debate, the prolonged shutdown has forced him and his colleagues to defend their opposition to tax credits that are popular across the political spectrum.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, for instance, told Punchbowl News on Friday that he would vote against extending the tax credits because they would be used to “bail out insurance companies.”But the majority of people who receive the subsidies live in Republican congressional districts. Fourteen House Republicans, including many of the party’s most vulnerable members who represent swing districts, have signed on to legislation re-upping the tax credits until January 2027. Several G.O.P. senators have signaled a desire to extend them.At the same time, some members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus are once again calling to repeal Obamacare outright, a stance that thrills Democrats and that many G.O.P. strategists concede is politically disastrous.New York Times,Wealthy Americans Are Spending. People With Less Are Struggling, Ben Casselman and Colby Smith, Oct. 19, 2025. Data show a resilient economy. But that largely reflects spending by the rich, while others pull back amid high prices and a weakening labor market.The top 10 percent of U.S. households now account for nearly half of all spending, Moody’s Analytics recently estimated, the highest share since the late 1980s. Consumer sentiment has climbed among high earners but steadily fallen for other groups. Then-U.S. Congressman George Santos, a Republican representing a New York Long Island district before his conviction for defrauding large numbers of organizations and individuals, flashes the “White Power” sign in Congress (file photo). Emptywheel,Analysis: Eagle Ed Martin and George Santos Just Proved Tish James’ Vindictive Prosecution Claim, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 18, 2025. At the very same time Eagle Ed was stalking Tish James up and down the Eastern Seaboard, desperately trying to find some crime to charge her with. he was also busy finding a way to free George Santos, a much bigger, confessed fraudster from prison.Donald Trump’s weaponization of government against his adversaries is a catastrophic assault on rule of law.But in those efforts, he continues to do things that may backfire. I’ve noted repeatedly how poorly he chooses the political martyrs he creates. Just the other day, for example, Tish James, left, got rock star treatment when she introduced and endorsed Zohran Mamdani.In addition, Trump is conducting his vengeance tour in such a ham-handed fashion that that one after another after another after another after another after another after another quit or resigned to much notice. Each will be available as witness to the politicization of DOJ.Aside from LaMonica McIver (whose arrest the chattering class seem to have forgotten), Trump bolloxed the timing — the sequencing of his attacks — as well.He indicted the well-lawyered Jim Comey, thus far the shoddiest case, first, and did so in EDVA’s rocket docket. That means that those who follow will benefit from the work — and possibly even precedents — Comey obtains. By the time Attorney General James is arraigned on October 24, for example, both Comey’s motion to disqualify Lindsey Halligan and his motion for selective and vindictive prosecution will be public.And yesterday, with Trump’s commutation of George Santos’ prison sentence, he botched the timing again.Trump’s clemency has already featured in motions for selective and vindictive prosecution. Both McIver and Sean Dunn (the sandwich guy) have invoked the Jan6ers that Trump pardoned as people who viciously assaulted cops but were freed. But in McIver’s case, as I laid out here, the government claimed — partly by placing an auto-pen in Trump’s hand — that prosecutors who dismissed the pending cases were left with no discretion after Trump issued his order.McIver’s claim faces a threshold, insurmountable defect: the January 6 Defendants cannot be considered similarly situated because they all were pardoned. As a consequence, their ongoing prosecutions had to be dismissed without regard to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and they could not be prosecuted for January 6th related crimes thereafter. Because a similarly situated individual is someone that “could have been prosecuted for the offenses for which [the defendant was] charged, but were not prosecuted,” and the January 6 Defendants on their face do not meet those basic criteria, McIver’s motion must fail. See Hedaithy, 392 F.3d at 607 (quoting Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 470); see also Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 469.But in Tish James’ case, the guy most responsible for her charges — the guy who has been literally stalking her in a dirty old man trench coat — also happens to be the guy who exercised discretion in the commutation of George Santos. Indeed, Eagle Ed Martin, right, who in addition to serving as Trump’s weaponization czar, also serves as Pardon Attorney, boasted of his role in the commutation.To be sure, the kinds of fraud with which Eagle Ed charged Tish James are different than the kinds to which Santos pled guilty. Eagle Ed and Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer are effectively attempting to criminalize James’ generosity, her provision of a $137,000 home to her great niece. Even if she did what is alleged (and all the evidence suggests she did not), any benefit to James herself would be less than $19,000.Meanwhile, Santos defrauded identified victims — some of them vulnerable seniors — of almost $375,000, along with $200,000 in ill-gotten gains himself. The victims include:
- The Republican Party (which matched funds Santos hadn’t earned)
- Donors whose credit cards he defrauded
- Redstone Strategies investors
- New York State’s Unemployment Insurance
- Congress
Whereas Trump claims that the fraud for which James prosecuted him had no victims, because the banks ultimately got paid back (true of the loans James obtained as well), Santos’ crimes had a number of real victims, victims who have not yet been made whole.And Donald Trump made no secret why he sprung Santos from prison: in crafting a false comparison with Richard Blumenthal, Trump declared that, “at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”Alleged Democratic fraudsters get charges whereas far more dangerous Republican fraudsters win a Get Out of Jail Free card. It couldn’t be more clear.It’s certainly possible that, if James used Santos as a comparator (along with other Republicans, like Ken Paxton, who haven’t been charged), DOJ would claim Trump may not have known about the various kinds of financial fraud Santos engaged in.But if he doesn’t know that, it’s the fault of the Pardon Attorney.The guy in the dirty old man trench coat, who has been stalking New York’s Attorney General all the while.DOJ might claim that they can’t share any details of Santos’ commutation. New York Times, For Alaskan Evacuees, Home Is Gone, With No Return in Sight, Julia O’Malley, Christi A. Foist and Sonia A. Rao, Oct. 19, 2025. Their communities devastated from last weekend’s storm, many are in shelters in Anchorage and facing life in a completely different world.At a shelter in downtown Anchorage on Saturday, Arthur Lake, 74, was still dealing with the shock of his new surroundings. Cars buzzed along one of the city’s main thoroughfares with loud mufflers and booming stereos.Mr. Lake and his family recently evacuated from Kwigillingok, a tiny Alaska Native village along the Bering Sea nearly 500 miles away. There, homes and businesses on the soft, grassy tundra were connected by boardwalks, and men had been out hunting bearded seals and other marine mammals to get ready for the winter.“That’s where we belong,” Mr. Lake said. He has been to Anchorage many times. But, he said, “it’s not home.”For Mr. Lake and an estimated 2,000 others who saw their communities in remote western Alaska devastated by the remnants of Typhoon Halong last weekend, life as they know it is gone, and it is not clear when — or even if — they can return.The storm, which killed at least one person and left two others missing, led to what Gov. Mike Dunleavy said was the largest humanitarian evacuation operation in the history of the state. Emergency officials have warned that in many cases, entire villages will need to be rebuilt.Mr. Dunleavy has said it could be at least 18 months before people can go back. But the level of destruction and the cost of rebuilding could complicate that time frame.In the near term, evacuees like Mr. Lake are absorbing the loss of their homes, way of life and a culture they hold sacred.Dan Winkelman, the chief executive of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Heath Corporation, which works with local tribes to oversee health care for about 30,000 people in the area that was most affected, said that evacuees in Anchorage were experiencing layers of trauma.“It’s a series of waves. It’s not just the tidal wave of the storm,” he said.There was the storm that happened in the dark of night, he said. Then there was the experience of being evacuated. Now, they are in mass shelters in an unfamiliar city, many with no money or identification. Some know people who can help them in Anchorage, he said, but others don’t.New York Times,Epoch Times Reporter Resigns After Publication Signs Pentagon Rules, Ken Bensinger, Oct. 19, 2025. The reporter, Andrew Thornebrooke, also cited a recent editorial directive to refer to antifa, the far-left ideological movement, as a terrorist organization.A national security reporter at the right-wing Epoch Times newspaper has resigned after the publication signed on to rules restricting news gathering within the Pentagon.The reporter, Andrew Thornebrooke, submitted his resignation in writing on Friday. Although he did not have an active Pentagon press pass, he regularly covered issues related to the Defense Department and frequently reported from the cavernous military complex while working at the publication.In his resignation email, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Thornebrooke called The Epoch Times’s signing of the pledge a choice to “abdicate our responsibility as journalists in favor of merely repeating state narratives.”He also cited a recent editorial directive to refer to antifa, the far-left ideological movement, as a terrorist organization. There is no designation for domestic terrorism under existing U.S. law. The editorial change came soon after President Trump signed an executive order designating antifa a terrorist group.“I can no longer reconcile my role with the direction the paper has chosen, including its increasing willingness to promote partisan materials, publish demonstrably false information, and manipulate the reporting of its ground staff to shape the worldview of our readers,” Mr. Thornebrooke wrote.The Epoch Times, which publishes online and also has a weekly print newspaper that is circulated nationwide, did not respond to a request for comment on the resignation. The publication is closely linked to the Falun Gong religious movement, which was founded in China. It is known for its fierce criticism of that country’s Communist government, for spreading conspiracy theories and for its staunch support of Mr. Trump, backing his policies and criticizing his political opponents.New York Times, Booking Big Guests and Irked by Leaks: Bari Weiss’s First Days at CBS, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Oct. 19, 2025. Ms. Weiss, an unusual leader for a broadcast news division, has floated ideas for live events and asked journalists why they are seen as biased.Bari Weiss, right, the new editor in chief of CBS News, surprised senior staff at the venerable news program “60 Minutes” during a meeting on Tuesday when she asked a provocative question:Why does the country think you’re biased?The inquiry was met with stunned awkwardness, according to three people who recounted details from the private session in Midtown Manhattan. The staff of “60 Minutes,” the nation’s most-watched news program, view their coverage as firmly nonpartisan and reject criticism from President Trump and his allies who argue that it has a liberal slant.The exchange added to the uncertainty that has settled over CBS News as hundreds of producers, anchors and correspondents take stock of their institution’s unorthodox new boss in her first two weeks on the job.Ms. Weiss, 41, is unlike any broadcast news leader in recent memory: an outspoken opinion journalist who has never worked in television, and whose rise was powered in part by critiquing the practices of old-line mass media like CBS.Since her start date on Oct. 6, Ms. Weiss has met with leading anchors and executives, impressing some and confounding others. She has mused about CBS-branded live events, booked interviews for the network with high-profile newsmakers by text message and complained about a flurry of leaks concerning her early tenure, urging executives to identify the leakers in the newsroom.Still unanswered is how Ms. Weiss plans to juggle her duties at The Free Press, a website she co-founded and runs that mixes opinion and reporting, with her editorial oversight of CBS News, where reporters are discouraged from openly expressing their political views. It is not lost on some CBS journalists that The Free Press has occasionally been among the network’s harshest critics.This article is based on interviews with 10 people with knowledge of the inner workings of CBS News, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal conversations. Ms. Weiss declined to be interviewed.On a newsroom-wide conference call on Oct. 9, Ms. Weiss urged her staff to be more aggressive in booking big guests — and announced that during the course of the call, she had personally arranged for three former secretaries of state to participate in a special panel show about the Middle East peace deal.Only one of the three officials she mentioned, Hillary Rodham Clinton, ultimately appeared on the special, which aired on a weekday afternoon on CBS News’s digital streaming platform. The other two, Antony Blinken and Mike Pompeo, who has an exclusive on-air contract with Fox News, did not.Ms. Weiss, an ardent supporter of Israel, also helped book an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. She later worked with “60 Minutes” producers to land Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, for this Sunday’s episode.It is unusual for network leaders to personally book guests. But Ms. Weiss is accustomed to a hands-on leadership style; her website The Free Press, which CBS’s owner Paramount recently acquired for roughly $150 million, is a scrappy start-up with a few dozen employees.Now she is running a global news organization that for the past year has been caught in the middle of a corporate and political maelstrom.Mr. Trump sued “60 Minutes” last year, claiming its handling of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris hurt his campaign, just as CBS News’s parent company Paramount was trying to close a multibillion-dollar merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance. The deal required approval from regulators appointed by Mr. Trump.Paramount eventually paid $16 million to settle the case, even though many legal experts said it had little merit, and the Skydance deal was approved shortly afterward. When Skydance’s founder, the technology heir David Ellison, hired Ms. Weiss to run CBS News, some liberals questioned whether her appointment was intended to placate Mr. Trump and his allies. Mr. Ellison has said he wants CBS News to appeal to what he describes as the 70 percent of Americans who consider themselves center-right or center-left.For her part, Ms. Weiss has said that change is necessary at CBS News, which aside from weekend programs like “60 Minutes,” lags its rivals ABC and NBC in the Nielsen ratings. New York Times, White House and Government Agencies Join Bluesky, Then Attack Democrats, Aishvarya Kavi, Oct. 19, 2025 (print ed.). The Health and Human Services and Homeland Security Departments were among the agencies posting messages that blamed Democrats for the federal shutdown.The White House and more than half a dozen government agencies on Friday joined a social media platform popular with liberals and promptly shared posts declaring Democrats were to blame for the ongoing government shutdown.The posts on Bluesky, a social network whose format is similar to that of X, continued a pattern of partisan attacks from the executive branch after Congress failed to reach an agreement on federal funding and the government shut down on Oct. 1.The administration has repeatedly thrust normally nonpartisan agencies into the funding fight, including by posting politically loaded language on agency websites, even though the federal bureaucracy is ordinarily expected to stay out of the fray during political disagreements.In a Bluesky post on Friday, the Transportation Department blamed what it called the “Schumer-Jeffries Shutdown,” referring to the Democratic minority leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, for forcing air traffic controllers, who are required to work through the shutdown, to go without pay. The post was shared alongside a cartoon image of the men in sombreros.For its part, the Health and Human Services Department repeated a falsehood shared by Republicans: that Democrats had shut down the government because Republicans would not agree to fund free health care for unauthorized immigrants. And the Homeland Security Department’s account posted a taunting message asking people to report “criminal illegal aliens” to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and included a phone number.Most of the messages were reposted by the White House on its own account, which said in its inaugural post, “We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits.”U.S. Law, National Security, Crime, Justice MeidasTouch Legal AF All Rise News,Trump SECRET SHUTDOWN Scheme IMPLODES in COURT, Adam Klasfeld, Oct. 19, 2025. Afederal judge in California blocked Donald Trump and Russ Vought’s “politically motivated” mass firings, ditching euphemisms about what the governments calls “reductions in force.”U.S. District Judge Susan Illston refused to ignore the “human cost” of their actions, describing workers unable to learn if they’ve been fired and pregnant women unable to get insurance. Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News breaks it down.MeidasTouch Legal AF The Intersection, Trump PANICS as His DOJ Gets DESTROYED in Court, Michael Popok, Oct. 19, 2025. Trump is now attacking and threatening to blow up and tear down his own DOJ, as he cuts out leadership and hand picks unqualified prosecutors who are getting their asses handed to them in Court.Popok uses the Comey indictment and new motions filed there to explain what is happening on the Intersection Pod. New York Times,Case Against Bolton Raises Questions Over Justice Dept.’s Use of Espionage Act, Devlin Barrett, Oct. 19, 2025 (print ed.). The allegations in his case are a pointed example of when classified information tumbles into nonsecure places, either by accident or from recklessness by someone trusted to keep it safe.The indictment of John R. Bolton highlights what national security experts say is the inherent danger of using everyday messaging systems to share government secrets and raises questions about whether the Trump administration is applying the Espionage Act fairly.Mr. Bolton, who once worked as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser but has for years been an outspoken critic of the president, was charged this week with 18 counts of mishandling classified information by either illegally transmitting or retaining national defense secrets. Prosecutors say he used personal email accounts and a messaging app to share highly sensitive information with two family members who did not have security clearances.The allegations in his case are a pointed example of what counterintelligence officials call “spillage,” which is when classified information tumbles into nonsecure places, either by accident or from recklessness by someone trusted to keep it safe.It is a recurring concern that dates back decades. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was investigated for using a private email server to communicate as secretary of state. In March, it emerged that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had relayed the details of a coming military strike in Yemen over Signal, a commercial messaging app, in a group chat that mistakenly included a journalist.In Mrs. Clinton’s case, national security officials initially feared hackers might have infiltrated a similarly insecure system, though the F.B.I. investigation ultimately found no evidence of that.In Mr. Hegseth’s case, Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly dismissed the idea of investigating the breach, even though the conversation took place outside the government channels typically used for confidential discussions like war planning.“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released,” Ms. Bondi said three days after the disclosure of the breach. When Mr. Bolton was charged after having been the subject of a yearslong investigation that gained momentum under the Biden administration, Ms. Bondi declared: “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable. No one is above the law.”The inconsistency of the Justice Department’s approach toward Mr. Bolton and current administration officials was striking, national security experts said, acknowledging that every case is different.“We have no factual basis to believe a criminal investigation was ever commenced with respect to Signalgate, notwithstanding that plans, a term referenced in the Espionage Act, for a military attack were shared on a commercial messaging service,” said David Laufman, who once led the Justice Department section that investigates the mishandling of classified information. White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left. Members of the “Mara 18” and “MS-13” gangs are seen in custody at CECOT, a maximum security prison in Izalco, Sonsonate, El Salvador, on Sept. 4, 2020 (AFP Photo by Yuri Cortez via Getty Images). Emptywheel,Analysis, Stephen Miller’s Trains Don’t Run on Time, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 19, 2025. Stephen Miller is incredibly powerful and so fascistic that Trump even hesitates to describe his ambition. But he is also downright slovenly. Increasingly,I was going to write a piece anticipating the showdown at SCOTUS over Stephen Miller’s invasion of Chicago, which may well determine the future of democracy in the US.But as I was contemplating all the lies that Miller and his henchman have been caught telling in Chicago and Portland, two other stories came out that highlight how bad Miller is at execution.Both pertain to his effort, built on a edifice of lies, to rationalize a war in Venezuela based off a largely manufactured claim that Tren de Aragua is “invading the US” on behalf of Nicolás Maduro.Chronologically, WaPo provides new details about the quid pro quo behind Marco Rubio’s deal to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a concentration camp in El Salvador (shown above):The US would have to send the people who had cooperated with DOJ to expose Nayib Bukele’s ties to MS-13, a gang that Trump purported to treat as a terrorist organization.In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, right, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.[snip]The deal would give Bukele possession of individuals who threatened to expose the alleged deals his government made with MS-13 to help achieve El Salvador’s historic drop in violence, officials said. For the Salvadoran president, a return of the informants was viewed as critical to preserving his tough-on-crime reputation. It was also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13, a gang famous for displays of excessive violence in the United States and elsewhere.We’ve known from earlier reporting that Bukele’s ask was top level MS-13 members in US custody. We didn’t know they were informing against Bukele.Note that this reported conversation with Bukele on March 13 was two days before the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and three before the men — most guilty of nothing more than sporting less incriminating tattoos than the Secretary of Defense — got shipped away in a rush.One of the many things that remains unexplained about the story is the reason for the rush — the rush to get an agreement, the rush to put men on planes.Even given the rush (and the narrowly averted government shutdown), that’s when things started falling apart, when the ACLU got notice of the deportations, got an order from James Boasberg enjoining the deportations, and so set Erez Reuveni on a path that would get him fired. Not long after, one of the Salvadorans that Rubio intended to deal to Bukele, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez (who is mentioned in the WaPo story, started challenging the dismissal of his case and subsequent deportation, ultimately leading Judge Joan Azrack to order parts of the docket unsealed.Then there are the murderboats in the Caribbean — a series of wildly illegal strikes lacking any recognizable legal justification. The murderboats appear to be an attempt to draw Nicolás Maduro into a war — though the Atlantic describes the underlying motivation as something far more craven, little more than an attempt to “paint immigrants as a dangerous menace.”Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where Defense Department planners hope to reassert American primacy.Donald Trump’s top aides have all decided to murder people in cold blood as a propaganda stunt.Even before the most powerful military in the history of the world failed to fully execute its murderboat mission days ago, there were cracks in Miller’s murderboat propaganda campaign — not just the increasing demands for some kind of credible legal explanation, but also the resignation of SouthCom Commander Alvin Holsey. And even before all that, it became clear that Miller’s murderboat targets were not what he claimed they were: Venezuelans bringing fentanyl to the United States. The boats were too small. That’s not how fentanyl is trafficked to the US, most importantly, they weren’t all Venezuelans. Two were Trinis. Weeks ago, Colombian President Gustavo Petro started complaining that Colombians were being targeted.And then the most powerful military in the history of the world failed its mission, operating in uncontested waters, to completely destroy a submersible it claims was shipping drugs to the United States.The most powerful military in the history of the world failed to destroy a boat and as a result two very awkward targets — neither Venezuelan — survived.And now, because of the slovenly execution of Miller’s attempt to gin up a war with Venezuela, Petro and Trump are ratcheting up a war of words over the earlier targeting of what Petro claims was a fishing boat in distress inside Colombian waters.The slovenliness is so ingrained that the people writing Trump’s tweets can’t even spell Colombia properly.Stephen Miller is incredibly powerful and so fascistic that Trump even hesitates to describe his ambition.But he is also downright slovenly.Stephen Miller is attempting to start a war to rationalize his domestic war. And he can’t even be fucked to dot his I-s and cross his T-s.New York Times,Trump Administration: Coast Guard Buys Two Private Jets for Noem, Costing $172 Million, Catie Edmondson, Oct. 19, 2025 (print ed.). Public documents show the Department of Homeland Security has contracted to purchase a pair of top-of-the-line Gulfstream jets for the secretary and other top officials.Kristi Noem, right, the homeland security secretary, has implemented a requirement that she personally approve any department expense over $100,000. But her own spending has come under scrutiny.Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesCatie EdmondsonThe Department of Homeland Security has purchased two Gulfstream private jets for Kristi Noem, the secretary, and other top department officials at a cost of $172 million, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.The jets, which a department official said were needed for safety, are the latest expenditures on behalf of Ms. Noem to draw scrutiny from Democrats and other critics who have noted her lavish spending on living and other expenses during her time in public life.The Coast Guard put in its budget earlier this year a request to purchase a new long-range Gulfstream V jet, estimated to cost $50 million, to replace an aging one used by Ms. Noem.“The avionics are increasingly obsolete, the communications are increasingly unreliable and it’s in need of recapitalization, like much of the rest of the fleet,” Kevin Lunday, the acting commandant of the Coast Guard, told members of Congress at a hearing in May.He said a new aircraft was necessary to provide agency leaders with “secure, reliable, on-demand communications and movement to go forward, visit our operating forces, conducting the missions and then come back here to Washington and make sure we can work together to get them what they need.”Documents that were posted to a public government procurement website and reviewed by The Times show that the department has since signed a contract with Gulfstream to buy not one but two “used” G700 jets, touted by the company as having the “most spacious cabin in the industry.” The total contract value is listed as a little over $172 million.It was not immediately clear where the funding for the jets came from. Global News New York Times,U.S. Kills 3 on Boat Suspected of Smuggling Drugs for Colombian Rebels, Carol Rosenberg, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, Oct. 19, 2025. It was the seventh known strike in President Trump’s military campaign of attacking, rather than arresting, those suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean.The U.S. military has killed three men and destroyed another boat it suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean Sea, this one alleged to have been affiliated with a Colombian insurgency group, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Sunday.It was the seventh boat known to have been attacked since early September as part of the Trump administration’s use of the military to kill people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were enemy soldiers in a war rather than arresting them as criminals. The latest strike took place on Friday, and Mr. Hegseth said in a social media post on Sunday that it targeted a vessel associated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the E.L.N.So far, the Trump administration has acknowledged killing 32 people in the operation, whose legality has been widely disputed by outside legal specialists.“The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was traveling along a known narco-trafficking route, and was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics,” Mr. Hegseth wrote.He did not provide evidence for his assertions. A 27-second aerial surveillance video that showed a boat on the water and then a fiery explosion accompanied the post.New York Times, ‘Everything Is Gone’: Gazans Return Home to Find Devastation and Little Hope, Liam Stack, Abu Bakr Bashir and Bilal Shbair, Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Oct. 19, 2025. Residents who have gone back to the battered north of the territory after the cease-fire say it is a wasteland that will take years to rebuild.Sabah Abu Ghanem and her family made the long trek back to Gaza City after Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire this month, leaving a crowded tent encampment in the south of the territory with the goal of finally going home.When they arrived, they found that their neighborhood had been destroyed, like most of Gaza City. But the cement skeleton of their home was still standing, so they decided to live in one of its damaged rooms.“At least, this piece of land is ours,” said Ms. Abu Ghanem, 26. “This rubble I can call mine.”Since the cease-fire took effect, thousands of Palestinians have returned to Gaza City or other areas in the devastated north of the territory. In many cases, they went back to places that they had fled just weeks earlier, and found their homes and neighborhoods obliterated. Rebuilding their lives in Gaza City feels at best like a faraway goal and at worst, like an impossible one.For some, the destruction was too much to face. Majdi Nassar, 32, came back to look for his home in Jabaliya, near Gaza City, but returned to Deir al-Balah, in the south, within less than 24 hours. He said he would stay away until clean drinking water had been restored. That could be a long time.“I could not find any trace of the building where I had an apartment, not even the rubble,” he said. “Everything is gone.”New York Times, Israel Strikes Gaza and Temporarily Halts Aid, Saying Hamas Broke Truce, Isabel Kershner, Oct. 19, 2025. Israel launched a wave of attacks on Gaza after accusing Palestinian militants of attacking its forces across cease-fire lines. Both sides say they are still committed to the truce.The deadly flare-up of violence on Sunday and the temporary suspension of aid were the most serious tests yet of the cease-fire, which was negotiated under heavy pressure by the Trump administration and signed with great fanfare by President Trump himself.The aid was halted because of the intensity of the Israeli strikes, and was expected to resume once the bombing was over, according to an Israeli official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Israeli officials had initially said that humanitarian aid would be suspended until further notice but later appeared to step back from that decision.Israel said two of its soldiers were killed early Sunday when Palestinian militants attacked forces who were operating in an area where the Israeli military is allowed to be under the cease-fire agreement. The deaths prompted a strong response.Gaza’s health officials reported 44 Palestinian deaths across the territory on Sunday. New York Times, Louvre Closed After Thieves Steal ‘Priceless’ Jewels in Brazen Daylight Robbery, Aurelien Breeden, Catherine Porter and Alex Marshall, Oct. 19, 2025. French officials said the thieves broke into a second-floor wing of the Paris museum that houses a collection including the French crown jewels.Oct. 18 Lev Remembers,NO KINGS: Today We Rise – The Day Millions Stand United Against Trump’s Authoritarian Rule, Lev Parnas, Oct. 18, 2025. This is the moment the world will remember—when the American people stood up, rejected tyranny, and declared in one voice: We bow to no kings, not now, not ever.My dear Lev Remembers and Voice from Ukraine family,Today is not just a day on the calendar—it is a turning point in human history.SubscribedThis is the day we say together, with one voice heard across every city, every platform, every street in America and around the world: NO KINGS.No man is born above us. No leader will rule us. No dictator can buy us, silence us, or make us kneel.“Free people do not wait for permission to be free—they stand, they speak, and they act.”Donald Trump is afraid today. I know this from my sources. He is terrified—not of institutions, not of Congress, not of the media—but of you. Of the millions rising in peaceful resistance. He fears the sight of people filling the streets. He fears your voice, your power, your unity.And I speak to you now not as a commentator, not as a former insider, but as a father. As a man who wakes up every morning under threat, not just for myself—but for my family, for my wife, and for my son Aaron, who is standing on the front line of this battle for our democracy. I feel your fear. I live your fear.But today I tell you with absolute conviction: do not let fear silence you—let it awaken you.“Courage is not the absence of fear—it is the decision that something else is more important.”And today, freedom is more important.No Kings means the end of blind obedience. It means every American—Democrat, Republican, Independent—joining to say:No one is above the law.Elections are not coronations.Power belongs to the people—and today, the people speak.WHAT YOU MUST DO TODAYNot everyone can protest—but everyone can participate:🔥 If you can march, march today.🔥 If you can hold a sign, hold it high.🔥 If you can post this letter, post it everywhere.🔥 If you can call Congress, light up those phone lines.🔥 And if you can fund this movement, become a paid subscriber, contribute directly, and help us reach millions more.This is the day we show Trump that America does not kneel. We stand. We rise. Then-U.S. Congressman George Santos, a Republican representing a New York Long Island district before his conviction for defrauding large numbers of organizations and individuals, flashes the “White Power” sign in Congress (file photo). New York Times,Trump Orders Santos to Be Freed From Prison ‘Immediately,’ Michael Gold and Grace Ashford, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). George Santos, the disgraced Republican congressman, had been sentenced to prison after his web of deceit unraveled. His lawyer said Mr. Santos expected to be released Friday.President Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of former Representative George Santos of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn and whose fraud landed him a punishment of more than seven years in prison.In a social media post, Mr. Trump suggested that politics had been a major factor in his decision, commending Mr. Santos for sharing his views and contrasting him with Democrats. Calling the former congressman “somewhat of a ‘rogue,’” Mr. Trump said that he believed that Mr. Santos’s sentence was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.The president also suggested he had been moved by Mr. Santos’s accounts of being in prison, which he had published in a regular column in a local Long Island newspaper.“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”Mr. Santos, 37, reported to prison in July after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. When he is out of custody, Mr. Santos will have served fewer than three months of an 87-month sentence.He will also no longer be required to pay more than $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to his victims, according to a copy of the commutation posted online by Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney.Mr. Santos’s commutation — which cuts his sentence short but does not wipe out his conviction — is part of a blitz of grants of political clemency that Mr. Trump has doled out to his political allies or other figures who have been embraced by his right-wing supporters.For months, it looked as if Mr. Santos, who rose to political prominence as an adherent to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, would not be granted similar favor. Even as the president gave sweeping pardons to those charged in connection with the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Santos’s appeals to get his sentence reduced were unsuccessfulHis commutation is the latest startling twist in an outlandish political odyssey that saw Mr. Santos move from a little-known conservative from Long Island to an infamous example of deceit and political fraud.When he won his seat in 2022, Mr. Santos was heralded as a sign of a shift in Republican politics. Young, Brazilian American and openly gay, Mr. Santos seemed to signal an expansion of the G.O.P.’s tent. His victory, in a Democratic-leaning district in Long Island, was celebrated for helping Republicans narrowly win control of the House.But Mr. Santos’s congressional career was imperiled almost immediately, after The New York Times and other outlets exposed that his ascent was built on a spectacular web of lies.Mr. Santos claimed that he was descended from Holocaust refugees. His mother, he said, had been in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He claimed to be a college volleyball star. And Mr. Santos boasted of extensive Wall Street experience that allowed him to report loaning his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.None of that was true.As more of Mr. Santos’s claims were exposed to be false or misleading, his Republican colleagues grew increasingly uneasy. When he was indicted in 2023, prosecutors accused him of multiple criminal schemes, ranging from fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits and lying on official forms to using his political campaign to enrich himself, swindling money from donors for personal expenses and using one donor’s credit card to steal $11,000 for his personal use.Emptywheel,Analysis: Eagle Ed Martin and George Santos Just Proved Tish James’ Vindictive Prosecution Claim, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 18, 2025. At the very same time Eagle Ed was stalking Tish James up and down the Eastern Seaboard, desperately trying to find some crime to charge her with. he was also busy finding a way to free George Santos, a much bigger, confessed fraudster from prison.Donald Trump’s weaponization of government against his adversaries is a catastrophic assault on rule of law.But in those efforts, he continues to do things that may backfire. I’ve noted repeatedly how poorly he chooses the political martyrs he creates. Just the other day, for example, Tish James, left, got rock star treatment when she introduced and endorsed Zohran Mamdani.In addition, Trump is conducting his vengeance tour in such a ham-handed fashion that that one after another after another after another after another after another after another quit or resigned to much notice. Each will be available as witness to the politicization of DOJ.Aside from LaMonica McIver (whose arrest the chattering class seem to have forgotten), Trump bolloxed the timing — the sequencing of his attacks — as well.He indicted the well-lawyered Jim Comey, thus far the shoddiest case, first, and did so in EDVA’s rocket docket. That means that those who follow will benefit from the work — and possibly even precedents — Comey obtains. By the time Attorney General James is arraigned on October 24, for example, both Comey’s motion to disqualify Lindsey Halligan and his motion for selective and vindictive prosecution will be public.And yesterday, with Trump’s commutation of George Santos’ prison sentence, he botched the timing again.Trump’s clemency has already featured in motions for selective and vindictive prosecution. Both McIver and Sean Dunn (the sandwich guy) have invoked the Jan6ers that Trump pardoned as people who viciously assaulted cops but were freed. But in McIver’s case, as I laid out here, the government claimed — partly by placing an auto-pen in Trump’s hand — that prosecutors who dismissed the pending cases were left with no discretion after Trump issued his order.McIver’s claim faces a threshold, insurmountable defect: the January 6 Defendants cannot be considered similarly situated because they all were pardoned. As a consequence, their ongoing prosecutions had to be dismissed without regard to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and they could not be prosecuted for January 6th related crimes thereafter. Because a similarly situated individual is someone that “could have been prosecuted for the offenses for which [the defendant was] charged, but were not prosecuted,” and the January 6 Defendants on their face do not meet those basic criteria, McIver’s motion must fail. See Hedaithy, 392 F.3d at 607 (quoting Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 470); see also Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 469.But in Tish James’ case, the guy most responsible for her charges — the guy who has been literally stalking her in a dirty old man trench coat — also happens to be the guy who exercised discretion in the commutation of George Santos. Indeed, Eagle Ed Martin, right, who in addition to serving as Trump’s weaponization czar, also serves as Pardon Attorney, boasted of his role in the commutation.To be sure, the kinds of fraud with which Eagle Ed charged Tish James are different than the kinds to which Santos pled guilty. Eagle Ed and Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer are effectively attempting to criminalize James’ generosity, her provision of a $137,000 home to her great niece. Even if she did what is alleged (and all the evidence suggests she did not), any benefit to James herself would be less than $19,000.Meanwhile, Santos defrauded identified victims — some of them vulnerable seniors — of almost $375,000, along with $200,000 in ill-gotten gains himself. The victims include:
- The Republican Party (which matched funds Santos hadn’t earned)
- Donors whose credit cards he defrauded
- Redstone Strategies investors
- New York State’s Unemployment Insurance
- Congress
Whereas Trump claims that the fraud for which James prosecuted him had no victims, because the banks ultimately got paid back (true of the loans James obtained as well), Santos’ crimes had a number of real victims, victims who have not yet been made whole.And Donald Trump made no secret why he sprung Santos from prison: in crafting a false comparison with Richard Blumenthal, Trump declared that, “at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”Alleged Democratic fraudsters get charges whereas far more dangerous Republican fraudsters win a Get Out of Jail Free card. It couldn’t be more clear.It’s certainly possible that, if James used Santos as a comparator (along with other Republicans, like Ken Paxton, who haven’t been charged), DOJ would claim Trump may not have known about the various kinds of financial fraud Santos engaged in.But if he doesn’t know that, it’s the fault of the Pardon Attorney.The guy in the dirty old man trench coat (Martin, right), who has been stalking New York’s Attorney General all the while.DOJ might claim that they can’t share any details of Santos’ commutation.Too late!In DOJ’s response to McIver, they already exhibited a willingness to share details of the treatment of specific pardons.10 On September 2, 2025, the undersigned Assistant U.S. Attorneys spoke with the Deputy Pardon Attorney from the Office of the Pardon Attorney who confirmed that: (i) the January 6 Defendants with then-pending cases received pardons under the Pardon and were eligible to receive certificates of pardon, and (ii) that any January 6 Defendant was still considered pardoned even if a certificate of pardon was not requested. Additionally, the Deputy Pardon Attorney provided examples of certificates of pardon issued for January 6 Defendants with previously pending cases who requested a certificate.I’m sure it seemed very clever, putting Eagle Ed in charge of both hunting Trump’s enemies and freeing his friends. But in this particular case it might get tricky.At the very same time Eagle Ed was stalking Tish James up and down the Eastern Seaboard, desperately trying to find some crime to charge her with, he was also busy finding a way to free a much bigger, confessed fraudster from prison. New York Times,News Analysis: The Shutdown is Stretching On. Trump Doesn’t Seem to Mind, Luke Broadwater, Oct. 18, 2025. As the shutdown nears a fourth week, President Trump has pushed his political opponents to further dig in.President Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid. He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to Democratic jurisdictions, and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers.Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump’s actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further dig in.“We’re not going to bend,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on Friday, the 17th day of the shutdown. “We’re not going to break.” He added: “All of these efforts to try to intimidate Democratic members of the House and the Senate are not going to work.”Unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government. Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began Oct. 1, as an opportunity to further remake the federal bureaucracy and jettison programs he does not like, seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal.Administration officials appear undaunted by the criticism, even after a federal judge temporarily blocked their efforts to conduct mass firings. On Friday, some agencies indicated in court filings that they might proceed with layoffs that officials suggested were not covered by the order.Russell T. Vought, right, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of the effort to remake the government, has pledged to “stay on offense” throughout the shutdown.“He now has this cover for doing what at least Russ Vought and that coalition has wanted to do all along,” Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University, said of Mr. Trump.The standoff in Congress hinges on a fight over a short-term funding measure. Republicans want to pass one at current budget levels, while Democrats want to include additional money for health care programs and language that would limit Mr. Trump’s power to freeze funding.Asked in the Oval Office this week whether he would use his deal-making skills to bring the shutdown to an end, Mr. Trump said that he was instead working to lower health care costs without the help of Congress, by negotiating agreements directly with pharmaceutical companies for lower prescription costs.“We have to take care of our health care,” he said.White House officials say that the administration’s moves are meant to send the message that it is Mr. Trump, not congressional Democrats, who is helping Americans when government funding has lapsed.“Any negative impacts felt by the American people have purely been caused by the Democrats,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.The administration has mitigated some of the fallout by using budgetary maneuvers to keep salaries flowing to some federal workers, including border agents and law enforcement officers, as well as members of the military. Mr. Trump has also pledged to use tariff money to fund a food aid program for low-income Americans. Global NewsNew York Times,News Analysis: Ukraine Braces for New Talks Without the Leverage of New Missiles, Constant Méheut, Oct. 18, 2025. President Trump backed off selling Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, opting instead for talks with Russia. Still, Ukraine’s negotiating position has strengthened since the summer.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had meticulously laid the groundwork for his White House visit on Friday.For days, he hammered one message — that Kyiv needed U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles to strike deep inside Russia. Then, he nudged President Trump toward selling the weapons in back-to-back calls last weekend. Finally, before his arrival, he sent top aides to Washington this week to meet with the missile’s manufacturer.But when Mr. Zelensky landed in Washington, the landscape had changed. Mr. Trump had taken a phone call from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who appeared to steer him away from selling the weapons and toward reviving peace talks with an in-person meeting.As Mr. Zelensky sat in front of Mr. Trump on Friday, the American leader’s shift was apparent. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks,” Mr. Trump told him. Mr. Putin, he added, “wants to make a deal.”“It’s a déjà vu,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian Parliament, said in an interview after Friday’s meeting. “Mr. Trump fell again for Putin’s old trick.”The sequence of events was all too familiar to Ukrainians. For months, they have watched efforts to rally the mercurial American president to their side being repeatedly undercut by Russia dangling the promise of more peace talks.Ukrainians now worry they have lost the momentum they had built in recent weeks by playing on Mr. Trump’s frustration with Moscow’s refusal to settle the war. Instead of its preferred strategy — hitting Russia hard with long-range strikes to force genuine negotiations — Kyiv finds itself back to a cycle of talks it believes has already proved futile.The situation leaves Ukraine in an uneasy position, forced to wait for the Trump-Putin meeting to take place before deciding its next move. If the talks yield nothing, Kyiv is expected to try again to steer Mr. Trump toward providing more weapons.Still, Mr. Zelensky can take some satisfaction in Moscow’s proposal for new peace talks, which supports his longtime argument that Russia will only negotiate when faced with a military threat. “It shows the power of the Tomahawks,” said Harry Nedelcu, a senior director at Rasmussen Global, a research organization. “The weapons do not necessarily have to be deployed in order to be effective and to get Putin to react. So, clearly, the pressure is working.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.Mr. Putin’s agreement to a new meeting with Mr. Trump may also offer Ukraine a temporary reprieve from Russian air attacks, because Moscow will want to show Washington that it is ready to lay down arms, Mr. Nedelcu noted. Kyiv needs the pause to repair energy facilities severely damaged by weeks of strikes. Emergency blackouts have been imposed across the country in recent days, and experts warn the situation could worsen as winter sets in.In a sign that Kyiv and Moscow could still find common ground, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced on Saturday that both sides had agreed to a local cease-fire near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, which Russia controls. The cease-fire will allow repairs to damaged power lines that supply the facility and help cool its reactors. The plant had been without external power for four weeks, operating on backup diesel power.The question is whether Mr. Putin will negotiate in earnest in his meeting with Mr. Trump, tentatively scheduled in Budapest in the coming weeks.Mr. Merezhko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, said he doubted it, adding that Mr. Putin, if he actually went to Budapest, would try to “deceive Trump again.”Analysts say that if a new round of talks gets underway, Ukraine is in a relatively stronger position than in previous negotiation attempts.News RoundupsThe Parnas Perspective,No Kings Day Protests Begin as RSVPs Double in Response to Republican Backlash, Aaron Parnas, Oct.18, 2025. No Kings Day protests have begun in London, RSVPs double due to Republican backlash, Military plans live fire drills over California interstate, SNAP benefits set to expire next month, and more.No Kings Day 2.0 is officially underway, and the energy is electric. I’m gearing up to head to the massive protest here in Washington, D.C., where organizers now expect well over 100,000 people to take to the streets.Across the Atlantic, demonstrations have already kicked off in London, and momentum is surging worldwide. In just the past few days, RSVPs have more than doubled, fueled in part by Republican backlash that’s only amplifying the movement’s message: no kings in America.Throughout the day, I’ll be bringing you live coverage, on-the-ground updates, and sharp analysis of everything happening across the country and beyond. Expect a few extra posts today; there’s going to be a lot to cover, and you won’t want to miss a thing.If you’re in D.C., come say hi! I’d love to hear your stories and see how this historic day unfolds through your eyes.With that, here’s the news:Millions of Americans are expected to join “No Kings” protests across all 50 states on Saturday, with events in more than 2,700 locations denouncing President Trump’s authoritarianism and militarization of cities, as organizers and political leaders call for peaceful demonstrations defending democracy and rejecting Trump’s bid for expanded power.No Kings Day organizers tell me that the protests doubled in size following attacks on the protests from Republicans on Capitol Hill.No Kings Day has begun this morning in London, as one poster noted a crowd of about 400 people protested outside of the United States embassy in London. Protests are expected in Ireland as well.The U.S. Marines plan to fire 155mm artillery shells over Interstate 5 at Camp Pendleton on Saturday for the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary, sparking backlash from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called it a dangerous “show of force,” while federal officials, including Vice President JD Vance, defended the event as safe and routine military training. The New York Times has confirmed my exclusive reporting from earlier this week, but it did not credit my original article.President Trump commuted former Rep. George Santos’ seven-year prison sentence on Friday, ordering his immediate release after citing alleged mistreatment, drawing praise from allies like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene but sharp criticism from lawmakers and victims who called the move unjust given Santos’ fraud and theft convictions.About 42 million Americans risk losing food stamp benefits in November due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, as the USDA warns its funding will run out within two weeks; Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins blamed Democrats for the impasse, while critics urged the Trump administration to act urgently to prevent hunger among vulnerable families.Mahin Shahriar, a 28-year-old Bangladeshi asylum seeker in Canada, has been detained in a U.S. ICE facility after accidentally crossing the border, and his lawyer says Canadian authorities have failed to act on their legal obligation under the Safe Third Country Agreement to bring him back, leaving him in months-long limbo despite recognized risks if deported to Bangladesh.The U.S. Senate is set to confirm Douglas Troutman, a longtime chemical industry lobbyist, to lead the EPA’s chemical safety office—meaning all four top toxics posts would be held by former industry lobbyists—prompting fears among environmental advocates that the Trump administration will further weaken chemical safety regulations and undo recent public health protections.Trump administration officials are privately exploring the possibility of arranging a meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during Trump’s Asia trip next month, though no formal planning or communication with Pyongyang has occurred yet, and skepticism remains high given stalled diplomacy since their last 2019 encounter.The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a deepfake video of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer repeating a real quote about the government shutdown, marking the GOP’s latest use of AI-generated political content and drawing criticism for blurring ethical lines in campaign messaging.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said President Trump neither approved nor rejected Ukraine’s request for Tomahawk missiles during their White House meeting, expressing hope for future support even as Trump plans further talks with Putin amid ongoing Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure.A federal judge ruled that Pedro Hernandez, whose 2017 conviction for the 1979 kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz was overturned in July, must be retried by June 1, 2026, or released, citing flawed jury instructions in his original trial and challenges in reassembling witnesses for a potential third trial.Meta will introduce new parental controls allowing parents to block or limit their children’s chats with AI characters on Facebook, Instagram, and the Meta AI app, following reports of inappropriate chatbot conversations with minors; the safeguards will restrict under-18s to age-appropriate topics and roll out in 2026 across the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia.U.S. podcaster Johnathan Walton, who helped expose and locate serial con artist Marianne “Mair” Smyth, expressed disappointment after her four-year prison sentence in Northern Ireland for defrauding clients of over $155,000, calling it too lenient given her long history of scams spanning both sides of the Atlantic.More On U.S. Politics, GovernanceLetters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 17, 2025 [American Roots Of Anti-Monarchy], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 18, 2025. The morning of October 18, 1775, a small fleet of Royal Navy vessels opened fire on the seaport town that is now known as Portland, Maine. Under the direction of Captain Henry Mowat, the ships fired incendiary shot into the trading port’s wooden buildings, which caught fire. A landing party followed to complete the destruction of 400 buildings in the town. By the time the sun went down, almost all of the town was smouldering ruins.The burning of the town then known as Falmouth, Massachusetts—not the same town as today’s Falmouth, Maine, or Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—was retaliation for raids local mariners had made against British ships along the coast of New England. Since 1765, with the arrival of news of the Stamp Act to raise revenue to pay for the French and Indian War, residents of Falmouth had joined other colonists in protesting British policies.In spring 1775, the colonies agreed to boycott British goods in order to pressure Parliament into addressing their grievances. In March a shipload of sails, rope, and rigging arrived in Falmouth for a loyalist shipbuilder. Patriots demanded the ship carrying the supplies leave port, but they agreed to let it undergo repairs before heading back across the Atlantic Ocean. While shipbuilders worked on the vessel, the British man-of-war Canceaux arrived from Boston under the command of Captain Henry Mowat. Under the Canceaux’s protection, the loyalist unloaded the ship’s cargo.While the Canceaux lay at anchor, news arrived of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where British regulars had opened fire on the colony’s militiamen. When they heard of the battles, militia from Brunswick, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Falmouth, decided to capture the Canceaux. Led by tavern owner Samuel Thompson, they traveled to Falmouth in small boats in May and captured Mowat while he was on shore. The sailors on the Canceaux threatened to shell the town if the militia didn’t release Mowat. Eventually, the militiamen released him but refused to turn Thompson over for punishment, and locals forced the Canceaux to leave the harbor.In June, when news of the Brunswick militia’s escapade reached militiamen in Machias, near the Canadian border, they decided to capture the Margaretta, a British armed schooner that was protecting two merchant ships carrying supplies to the troops hunkered down in Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.Heartened by these successes, during the summer of 1775, American privateers raided British ships. Coming after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, their harassment helped to convince the king’s Cabinet that they must use military and naval force to put down the rebellion in the colonies.On October 6, 1775, Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, who commanded the British North Atlantic fleet, decided he would regain control of the coastal townspeople by terrorizing them. He ordered Captain Mowat to retaliate against the colonists, directing him to take four ships and “lay waste burn and destroy such Seaport Towns as are accessible to his Majesty’s Ships.” “My Design is to chastize Marblehead, Salem, Newbury Port, Cape Anne Harbour, Portsmouth, Ipswich, Saco, Falmouth in Casco Bay, and particularly Mechias where the Margueritta was taken,” Graves wrote. “You are to go to all or to as many of the above named Places as you can, and make the most vigorous Efforts to burn the Towns, and destroy the Shipping in the Harbours.”Mowat decided against attacking the towns near Boston, recognizing that they were close enough together to mount a spirited defense. Instead, he headed for Falmouth, dropping anchor there on October 16. The next day, Mowat accused the townspeople of “the most unpardonable Rebellion” and informed them that he had “orders to execute a just Punishment on the Town of Falmouth.” He warned them “to remove without delay the Human Species out of the said town” and gave them two hours to clear out.The townspeople were shocked. An eyewitness recalled that a committee of three men asked Mowat what was going on, and he answered “that his Orders were to set fire on all the Sea Port Towns between Boston and Halifax & that he expected New York was then Burnt to Ashes.” The committee negotiated to put off the attack for the night, but they would not agree to Mowat’s promise to spare the town if they would relinquish all their weapons and hand over “Four Gentlemen of the Town as Hostages.”Throughout the night, the townspeople hurried to save their possessions and move out of danger.The next morning was clear and calm, and at 9:40 the Canceaux and the other ships opened fire. “In a few minutes the whole town was involved in smoak [sic] and combustion,” an eyewitness recalled. “The crackling of the flames, the falling of the houses, the bursting of the shells, the heavy thunder of the cannon, threw the elements into frightful noise and commotion, and occasioned the very foundations of surrounding nature to quake and tremble.” When a lack of wind kept the fires contained, Mowat sent sailors ashore to spread them.Although Admiral Graves was pleased with Mowat’s assault on Falmouth, the attack backfired spectacularly.Rather than terrorizing the colonists into submission, the burning of Falmouth steeled their resolve. From his position at the head of the brand new Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts, George Washington wrote to revolutionary leader John Hancock that the burning of Falmouth was “an Outrage exceeding in Barbarity & Cruelty every hostile Act practised among civilized Nations.”Washington noted that Mowat had warned that he would make similar attacks on port towns all along the coastline, prompting the Continental Congress on November 25 to authorize American ships to capture British armed vessels, transports, and supply ships. Meanwhile, the people in the coastal towns fortified their defenses and prepared to fire back at any attacking British ships.Colonists saw the burning of Falmouth as proof that their government had turned against them, and began to suggest they must declare independence. About a month after Falmouth burned, William Whipple, a prominent resident of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, wrote to a friend that the destruction and threat to visit such ruin on other towns caused “everyone to risque his all in Support of his Liberties & privileges…the unheard of cruelties of the enemy have so effectually unified us that I believe there are not four persons now in Portsmouth who do not [oppose] the Tyranny of Great Britain.”New York Times,Higher Obamacare Prices Become Public in a Dozen States, Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). Consumers are facing greater costs for their 2026 A.C.A. health coverage as Congress continues to debate whether to extend subsidies that help people afford their premiums.Health insurance prices for next year under the Affordable Care Act are now available in about a dozen states, giving Americans their first look at the sharp increases many will pay for coverage if Congress does not extend subsidies that have made some plans more affordable.The annual enrollment period for Obamacare is expected to begin Nov. 1, but the costs for some Americans are becoming publicly available piecemeal through some state marketplaces. The federal website healthcare.gov, which includes 28 other state marketplaces, is slated to post prices before the end of October.People shopping for coverage can now preview the costs they face from potentially expiring subsidies and sharply rising premiums in many markets, including California, New York, Nevada, Maryland and Idaho. Some consumers also found out that they would have fewer choices because their insurers dropped out of some markets for 2026.Based on the newly posted information, a family of four making $130,000 in Maine would face an increase of $16,100 in annual premiums next year because they would no longer qualify for more generous subsidies, said Gideon Lukens, a health policy researcher for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which supports extending the subsidies.Older people will also see sharp increases, according to his calculations. In Kentucky, a 60-year-old couple making $85,000 per year could face an increase of $23,700 in annual premiums. In Nevada, a similar couple could pay an additional $18,100 in annual premiums, while in Minnesota, the cost might be $15,500 more and, in Maryland, an additional $13,700.The government shutdown has already amplified the potential for higher health insurance costs for millions of Americans if the subsidies are not continued. Democrats have demanded that Republicans extend the more generous subsidies in any deal to reopen the federal government, which has been closed for 17 days over a spending impasse.“I am willing to sit down with Democrats to discuss the growing unaffordability and unsustainability of Obamacare,” said Senator John Thune, the majority leader and a Republican of South Dakota, on Friday on X. But, he added, “I will not negotiate under hostage conditions, nor will I pay a ransom. Period.”Obamacare Prices That Could Rise by Thousands of DollarsThough some states have begun publishing their prices to allow customers to window-shop before the markets officially open next month, prices for the 28 state exchanges run by the federal government have not yet been made public. Healthcare.gov typically gives customers an early look at prices before enrollment formally begins, but the site has not yet published information about next year’s plans.Overall, filings from insurance companies show that prices for plans are rising by an average of 18 percent nationwide next year. But most Americans who buy their own health insurance qualify for federal tax credits that help them pay their premiums. Those subsidies were made more generous during the pandemic, but they are set to return to the earlier, lower levels at the end of this year unless Congress extends them again.U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Political Interventions Emptywheel,Analysis: Jim Comey Prepares to Prevail at SCOTUS, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 17, 2025. Jim Comey, shown above in a file photo, has added the kind of lawyers to his defense team that signals he expects to have to break new appellate ground on politicized prosecutions.On Nicole’s podcast today, I said that many of the criminal issues that will arise from Trump’s politicization of DOJ won’tbe all that controversial at SCOTUS (and SCOTUS is least awful on criminal justice issues). But I said one area would likely break new ground: selective and vindictive prosecution.Jim Comey’s prosecution — and that of everyone else Trump is pursuing — fits poorly in the existing precedents for selective and vindictive prosecution, even while they clearly are vindictive.Plus, I noted, that Trump’s penchant for yapping about legal cases even as DOJ attempts to protect him from liability in them conflicts with the language of Trump v. USA that — recklessly — puts the President in a prosecutorial function.And the Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime. Nixon, 418 U. S., at 693; see United States v. Texas, 599 U. S. 670, 678–679 (2023) (“Under Article II, the Executive Branch possesses authority to decide ‘how to prioritize and how aggressively to pursue legal actions against defendants who violate the law.’” (quoting TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U. S. 413, 429 (2021))). The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Art. II, §3. And the Attorney General, as head of the Justice Department, acts as the President’s “chief law enforcement officer” who “provides vital assistance to [him] in the performance of [his] constitutional duty to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.’” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 520 (1985) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 8).Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1. For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority. As we have explained, the President’s power to remove “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed” may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts. Myers, 272 U. S., at 106, 176; see supra, at 8. The President’s “management of the Executive Branch” requires him to have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates”—such as the Attorney General—“in their most important duties.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 750 (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted).Either Trump is properly in a prosecutorial role, in which case he needs to be at the center of these cases (and interventions like the Eric Adams bribery case), exposed to discovery. Or, his interventions are improper.The current state of affairs, where DOJ claims the President is immune from discovery, permitted to speak endlessly about criminal cases, yet order up criminal prosecutions, is fundamentally inconsistent with rule of law.Which is why I’m interested in four people Comey has added to his defense team (while also getting permission to submit a 45-page selective and vindictive prosecution brief, 15 pages extra).Comey has added:Elias Kim, a Cooley Associate with an appellate focus Ephraim McDowell, a Cooley Partner focused on appellate issues Rebekah Donaleski, a Cooley Partner who, while at SDNY, was on the Lev Parnas/Rudy Giuliani team, including the Special Master process that exploited all of Rudy’s phones Michael Dreeben, one of the best SCOTUS litigators out there, who worked on both the Mueller and Jack Smith teamsDonaleski is interesting enough, not least given the loaner AUSA bid to play games with filter teams. Plus, she would have overlapped with Maurene Comey at SDNY (and with some of Jim Comey’s old pals when she first got there, probably).But the others, especially Dreeben, signal that Comey is going into this with a plan and the expectation that he will have to argue this case before SCOTUS.This team is a signal that Comey intends to reverse some of the damage done by Trump v. USA.New York Times,Prosecutor Who Rejected Trump’s Pressure to Charge James Is Fired, Alan Feuer, Tyler Pager and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). The dismissal was the latest fallout from attempts by career Justice Department officials to impede the president’s wide-ranging campaign of retribution. The prosecutor’s deputy was also fired.A federal prosecutor who resisted President Trump’s demands to bring charges against Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, was fired along with her deputy on Friday evening, according to three people familiar with the matter.The dismissal of the prosecutor, Elizabeth Yusi, was the latest fallout from attempts by career Justice Department officials to pump the brakes on Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to seek retribution against his perceived political opponents.Ms. Yusi, who oversaw major criminal cases in the Norfolk office of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, had pushed back against Mr. Trump’s public calls for Ms. James to be indicted, telling colleagues that she had not found probable cause to file charges, the people familiar with the matter said. It was not immediately clear why her deputy, Kristin G. Bird, had also been fired.Despite the concerns career prosecutors raised about the case, Mr. Trump’s inexperienced handpicked choice to lead the prosecutors’ office, Lindsey Halligan, right, secured an indictment against Ms. James last week, accusing her of mortgage fraud. The indictment said Ms. James had falsely claimed in loan documents that she would use a home she had purchased in Norfolk, Va., as a secondary residence, but instead had used it as a rental property, allowing her to receive favorable terms that saved her close to $19,000. Financiers and Friends: Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein (File photos).New York Times,Money, Women and Taxes: Jeffrey Epstein’s Fiery Friendship with a Wall Street Titan, Matthew Goldstein, David Enrich, Steve Eder and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Oct. 18, 2025. New emails show how Mr. Epstein pressured Leon Black, his longtime friend and patron, to fork over millions for financial services.Jeffrey Epstein was furious. For years, he had relied on the billionaire Leon Black as his primary source of income, advising him on everything from taxes to his world-class art collection. But by 2016, Mr. Black seemed to be reluctant to keep paying him tens of millions of dollars a year.So Mr. Epstein threw a tantrum.One of Mr. Black’s other financial advisers had created “a really dangerous mess,” Mr. Epstein wrote in an email to Mr. Black. Another was “a waste of money and space.” He even attacked Mr. Black’s children as “retarded” for supposedly making a mess of his estate.The typo-strewn tirade was one of dozens of previously unreported emails reviewed by The New York Times in which Mr. Epstein hectored Mr. Black, at times demanding tens of millions of dollars beyond the $150 million he had already been paid.The pressure campaign appeared to work. Mr. Black, who for decades was one of the richest and highest-profile figures on Wall Street, continued to fork over tens of millions of dollars in fees and loans, albeit less than Mr. Epstein had been seeking.Of all the relationships that Mr. Epstein built with the rich and powerful, his friendship with Mr. Black was arguably the most important.After Mr. Epstein served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor, many of his contacts backed away. Not Mr. Black, who kept Mr. Epstein afloat for years.The new emails, along with court documents and interviews, provide the most complete picture yet of that relationship. They come at a time of renewed interest in Mr. Epstein, stoked by the Trump administration’s refusal to release government records related to investigations into him. The president, who was once friends with Mr. Epstein, has sought to deflect attention onto “hedge fund guys” and other prominent men who he says were much closer to the predator than he once was.Mr. Black, 74, was pushed out of the private equity firm he co-founded, Apollo Global Management, in 2021 over his ties to Mr. Epstein. He has said that his payments to the sex offender were simply for tax- and estate-planning services. Those claims have puzzled many on Wall Street, who have asked why one of the country’s richest men would pay Mr. Epstein, a college dropout, so much more than what prestigious law firms would charge for similar services.The new emails confirm that Mr. Epstein performed financial work for Mr. Black; he even claimed, in one note, that his maneuverings had saved his benefactor as much as $2 billion. And the messages suggest that Mr. Epstein, despite his financial dependency, believed he had considerable power in the relationship.The two men had been personally entwined for more than two decades. When a former girlfriend accused Mr. Black of sexual assault, he turned to Mr. Epstein for advice about paying her millions of dollars to keep it quiet, according to an email reviewed by The Times and court records. Another woman said in a lawsuit that Mr. Black had raped her at Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. She eventually dropped the lawsuit.And, for reasons that are unknown, Mr. Black wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to at least three women who were associated with Mr. Epstein, according to court documents and notes taken by congressional investigators that were shared with The Times.Representatives of Mr. Black did not respond to questions about those payments to women.Susan Estrich, a lawyer for Mr. Black, said his payments to Mr. Epstein were for tax- and estate-planning services that an outside law firm found were legitimate.“To imply that Epstein somehow had influence over Mr. Black is false and patently absurd,” she said. She added that the law firm, hired by Apollo to review the men’s relationship, found that Mr. Black “had no knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities. Mr. Black has never abused a woman in his life, and any such suggestion is false.” Mr. Black has said he regretted working with Mr. Epstein.The emails reviewed by The Times — sent in 2015 and 2016 to Mr. Black through his personal assistant, as well as to a handful of his advisers — show another dimension of Mr. Epstein’s cruelty. While he was known for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful, he could also veer into nastiness and was willing to turn the screws on his biggest client. (None of the emails reviewed by The Times were written by Mr. Black.)“I will no longer, not even for one day, work on your affairs. without the compensation that is long overdue,” Mr. Epstein wrote in November 2015. Mr. Epstein demanded “the usual 40 million per year,” with most of it paid upfront.Months later, as their fight over payments roared on, Mr. Epstein offered a concession: “Of course re any non financial issues, I am always there for you and will continue to be the best friend I can be.”Oct. 17New York Times, Prince Andrew Surrenders Duke of York Title, Mark Landler, Oct. 17, 2025. The royal’s fall from grace began nearly six years ago with a calamitous BBC television interview about his ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Prince Andrew has surrendered the use of his title, the Duke of York, completing a fall from grace that began nearly six years ago with a calamitous television interview about his ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.In a statement issued on Friday evening, Andrew said that after discussing the matter with his elder brother, King Charles III, he had decided he would “no longer use my title or the honors which have been conferred upon me. As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.”Andrew, 65, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, was removed from official duties in 2019 after a fierce public backlash against him over the interview, which took place with the BBC, as well as allegations of sexual misconduct. He has more recently been ensnared in a spying scandal involving China.The cascade of scandals have yet again thrust the British royal family into crisis. Charles, who had urged the queen to push Andrew into internal exile in 2019, appeared poised to take further punitive steps this time, according to British news media reports. After the two brothers consulted, Andrew acted preemptively.“We have concluded the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the Royal Family,” Andrew said in a two-paragraph statement. “I have decided, as I always have, to put duty to my family and country first. I stand by my decision five years ago to stand back from public life.”In the 2019 BBC interview, Andrew claimed to have severed links with Mr. Epstein, who hanged himself in his prison cell in New York earlier that year, after they were photographed together in New York in 2010. But details have since filtered out which suggest he stayed in touch with Mr. Epstein after he claimed to have cut off ties.In 2022, Andrew was stripped of his military titles after Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, accused the prince of raping her when she was a teenager, a charge he denied. He settled a lawsuit brought by Ms. Giuffre in 2022 for an undisclosed amount, with no admission of guilt. A memoir by Ms. Giuffre, who died by suicide in Australia in April, will be published this month, recounting the story of how she was introduced to Andrew through Mr. Epstein.Andrew has also been drawn into a scandal involving Chinese spying efforts in Britain, with revelations that he met on multiple occasions with Cai Qi, a senior Chinese official who is close to China’s president, Xi Jinping.Mr. Cai is believed to have received information collected by two British men who worked with members of the British Parliament who were active in Chinese affairs. Prosecutors dropped a spying case against the two men, which has mushroomed into a political crisis for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.As the son of a monarch, Andrew will remain a prince, palace officials said in a briefing on Friday. His mother had conferred the title of Duke of York on him when he got married in 1986. Historians say it is extremely rare for a member of the royal family to give up such a title. Prince Harry, who withdrew from royal duties and moved to the United States in 2020, remains the Duke of Sussex.Andrew’s daughters will retain their titles as Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. But his former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will no longer use the title of Duchess of York, which she had retained after the couple divorced.Andrew had already ceased using the honorific, His Royal Highness. And he had been stripped of more than a dozen military titles, including Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, a storied infantry regiment in the British Army.For all of Andrew’s disgrace, the queen still included him in family rituals and celebrations. After her death in 2022, however, he became more isolated. Now, Andrew will also be banished from the family Christmas celebration at Sandringham, in Norfolk, northeast of London, according to the palace officials. The annual event is a staple in the royal calendar.In a not-so-small consolation, Andrew will continue to live in the Royal Lodge, a grand royal residence on the Windsor estate, west of London. Royal watchers have long speculated that Charles would evict his brother from the residence. But palace officials said Andrew had a private tenancy agreement with the Crown Estate, which was unaffected by his decision to stop using his title.Politico,Johnson shrugs off allegations against Cory Mills, Hailey Fuchs, Oct. 15, 2025. The embattled Florida Republican has been slapped with a restraining order.Speaker Mike Johnson is shrugging off news that a judge granted the request for a restraining order against embattled Rep. Cory Mills sought by the Florida Republican’s former girlfriend.“I have not heard or looked into any of the details of that,” Johnson, right, told reporters at a Wednesday morning press conference. “I’ve been a little busy. We have a House Ethics Committee. If it warrants that, I’m sure they’ll look into that.”The restraining order centered around the former girlfriend’s accusations that Mills had threatened to circulate explicit videos of her.Asked again about allegations of simple assault against Mills, along with previous charges that he misrepresented his military career, Johnson referred further questions to Mills and called him a “faithful colleague.”Appearing frustrated to get a second question about the Mills allegations, Johnson at one point responded, “let’s just talk about some things that are really serious,” and called on another reporter.Mills, above left, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Tomorrow’s Affairs, Investigative Commentary: The transnational dimension of the Epstein case—a hybrid warfare against the West, Alexander Price, Oct. 10, 2025. Alexander Price is a PhD researcher in counter-terrorism and hybrid warfare.Recent months have seen a series of international developments related to the late American financier and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.In response to a summons from the U.S. House Oversight Committee, Epstein’s estate turned over a highly revealing gift book made by Epstein’s closest friends for the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.Lord Peter Mandelson, right, was removed from his post as British Ambassador to the United States after his letters and photos in the book and his leaked emails to Epstein demonstrated a much closer relationship to the convicted child sex trafficker than Lord Mandelson had previously acknowledged.Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives continued to campaign for their proposed Epstein Files Transparency Act, which would force the public release of all unclassified U.S. Department of Justice files on Epstein.With the U.S. government in shutdown and a significant Republican effort underway to suppress the files, it seems increasingly unlikely the bill will succeed.While many in the public have hoped that the release of the DOJ files would expose Epstein’s criminal network once and for all, this is not only unlikely, it is also unnecessary.There is already sufficient information available about the networks Epstein was part of to see what they looked like, who was involved, and a good part of what they were doing.While there has been a notable amount of reporting on aspects of the case in the US, UK, and France, it is rarer for reporting to take a transnational perspective.United KingdomThe story does not begin with Jeffrey Epstein but with his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, shown above in a file photo.Born Jan Ludvik Hoch to an Orthodox Jewish family in Czechoslovakia in 1923, Maxwell fled from the Nazis to France in 1939, where he joined the French Foreign Legion and then served as an intelligence officer with the British Army in World War Two.After the war, Maxwell worked for the British military police in Berlin, which was divided into four occupied zones.British journalist Tom Bower, in his biography Maxwell: The Outsider, reported that Maxwell frequently drank and made merry with Soviet soldiers in occupied Berlin, and on one such occasion he signed an agreement to cooperate with the KGB whenever he was needed.Maxwell soon moved to England and launched various publishing businesses. By 1950 he had come to the attention of British authorities, who suspected him of being a Soviet agent.Robert MaxwellA 1959 Foreign Office file on Robert Maxwell described him as a “thoroughly bad character” whose publishing house was “almost certainly supported by the Soviets”A 1959 Foreign Office file on Maxwell described him as a “thoroughly bad character” whose publishing house was “almost certainly supported by the Soviets.”One official noted that “Capt. Maxwell’s questionable activities have been brought to the notice of the Foreign Office on several occasions over the past 10 years” and speculated that Maxwell’s Pergamon Press could be a front for Soviet scientific espionage.Having grown increasingly wealthy, Maxwell established a residence in Oxford in 1960 while also spending time in France, where his daughter Ghislaine was born in 1961.The family made Oxford their primary residence. They became known for their lavish parties, which were attended by government officials, industry leaders, socialites, and celebrities. Robert was elected a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party in 1964 and served in that role until 1970.Prince Andrew, Duke of York, was roughly the same age as Ghislaine Maxwell. According to his own account, he first met Ghislaine in the 1980’s while she was a student at Oxford.Ghislaine Maxwell was a student at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1985. In his book Hunting Ghislaine, British journalist John Sweeney described how he was once contacted by an Oxford graduate who had been at the university at the same time as Ghislaine.This source suggested that when Ghislaine was at Oxford, “she would frequently disappear and return with beautiful posh, but dim slightly younger girls and take them to Headington Hill Hall to meet her father.” People found it odd at the time, Sweeney writes, but after the Epstein scandal broke, they began to wonder: “What if Ghislaine had become an enabler not first for Jeffrey Epstein, but for her father, long before?”Rumors have circulated suggesting that Robert Maxwell’s lavish parties in Oxford served as “honey traps” for espionage – meaning that he provided guests with compromising situations that he secretly filmed, creating opportunities for blackmail.Epstein’s criminal associate Steven Hoffenberg claimed that Robert Maxwell was assassinated in 1991 because he had come under investigation for financial fraud and was a liability to his criminal network. Maxwell’s death also coincided with the collapse of the USSR, which left the Soviets’ global espionage network out in the cold.CanadaCanadian journalist Ian Halperin spoke with a French source based in Marseilles for his book Controversy: Sex, Lies and Dirty Money by the World’s Powerful Elite.“Pepe” (not his real name) had lived in Montreal in his youth and claimed he was Epstein’s “right-hand man” – an epithet widely associated with French modeling agent and serial rapist Jean-Luc Brunel.“Pepe” told Halperin that Epstein had traveled to Montreal in 1971 when he was 18 years old and that he had a group sex experience there that changed his life.If Epstein had not previously connected with organized crime in New York, he appears to have come in contact with sex traffickers in Montreal in 1971Epstein began to hire prostitutes – some of them underage — and returned to Montreal frequently over the next few years.Montreal was known at the time for its lively cabaret and nightclub scene, from which mafia groups ran prostitution rings.If Epstein had not previously connected with organized crime in New York, he appears to have come in contact with sex traffickers in Montreal in 1971, the same year he dropped out of Cooper Union and changed career paths.EuropeWhile much of Epstein’s trip to Europe as a 22-year-old man remains unknown, his friends’ and family’s reminiscences in his 50th birthday book have provided some new insights.Epstein’s mother contributed a letter to the book in which she mentioned how she and his father had disapproved of Epstein’s decision to travel to Europe after graduation, explaining, “We pictured you coming home tired, undernourished, sickly. To our surprise, you looked great and had a great time. Your experiences in Europe helped you get the job at Dalton.”This last remark sheds light on one of the enduring mysteries in Epstein’s biography, of why former OSS officer Donald Barr hired Epstein for a teaching job at the prestigious Dalton School, for which Epstein was unqualified. His mother’s comment suggests that the contacts Epstein made during his trips to Europe helped him get this job.Leese had introduced Epstein not only to aristocratic Europeans but to all sorts of people in the arms business – Steven HoffenbergAs The Sunday Times has reported “Epstein was ‘mentored’ in the early 1980s by Douglas Leese, a British former arms dealer, and eased into establishment circles by members of Oxford’s infamous Bullingdon Club, including his eldest son, Nick.”This corroborates what Epstein’s business partner Steven Hoffenberg—who served 18 years in U.S. prison for securities fraud—told a reporter for Rolling Stone, indicating that “[Douglas] Leese had introduced [Jeffrey Epstein] not only to aristocratic Europeans (who Epstein subsequently fleeced) but to all sorts of people in the arms business—including the late Turkish-born businessman Adnan Kashoggi” as well as Robert Maxwell.France Epstein’s most significant known criminal associate in France was French modeling agent, alleged human trafficker, and serial rapist Jean-Luc Brunel, shown at right during an airplane trip with Maxwell, left, and Epstein via a photo released by the U.S. Justice Department.Brunel worked as a model scout for Paris-based Karin Management in the 1970’s and soon rose to head of the agency. His reputation for sexual assault was first brought to public attention in 1988 in a 60 Minutes news segment titled “American Girls in Paris.”Two of his former models described how Brunel had drugged and raped women at his partiesThe report featured interviews with former models who described his parties, where they were expected to have sex with clients as a condition of working for Brunel’s agency.Two of his former models described how Brunel had drugged and raped women at his parties, which was something he was widely known for.USAOne of Epstein’s closest associates and most significant clients was Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch.Epstein used his relationship with the Victoria’s Secret owner as a cover to recruit young women for sex trafficking. He would introduce himself to them as a modeling scout for Victoria’s Secret and suggest he could help them obtain work.When they arrived at the meetings, they discovered that they had been misled about Epstein’s true intentions.In October 2024, former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was arrested for running a sex trafficking and prostitution ring. Victims claimed that Jeffries invited them to sex parties with the promise of modeling jobs, and then at the parties they were drugged and raped.Trump allegedly offered girls as party favors to wealthy business associatesDonald Trump, whom Epstein once described as his “closest friend,” was the owner of Trump Model Management from 1999 to 2017.Scrutiny of the agency following Trump’s conviction for sexual assault and his 2016 election to the U.S. presidency indicated that Trump Model Management was widely understood throughout the industry to be a front for human trafficking.What’s more, according to journalist Michael Gross, in the 1990’s Trump frequently hosted parties at his Plaza Hotel where girls as young as 15 were invited with the promise that they would meet rich men who could help them in their careers.Trump allegedly offered girls as party favors to wealthy business associates. The parties were known to feature lots of drugs and lots of sex.A fashion photographer who attended the parties remarked, “It’s a small community… [The men] exchanged information, facilitated each other.” He himself had posed as a modeling agent for Trump in order to recruit girls to attend the parties.When a BBC investigative report in 1999 returned Jean-Luc Brunel to the spotlight for his ongoing sex crimes, he fled from Europe to the United States, where he joined Jeffrey Epstein’s inner circle.Flight logs indicate that Brunel was a frequent flier on Epstein’s private plane. Around 2004 Brunel founded a new modeling agency with locations in the US, Eastern Europe, and Asia, which Epstein financed. This agency was reportedly a front for human trafficking.RussiaIn autumn 2009 Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates met a Russian software designer and bridge player named Mila Antonova at a bridge tournament in Washington, DC, and they soon began having an affair.An advisor to Gates, Serbian-born Boris Nikolic, introduced Antonova to Jeffrey Epstein in 2013 (while Nikolic later denied any connection to Epstein, he was named as an executor in Epstein’s will).In 2017 Epstein sent an email to Gates attempting to blackmail him with his knowledge of the affair.Rather than capitulate to the threat, Gates went to the press, effectively ending his marriage. In doing so, he provided some of the clearest evidence available that Epstein engaged in blackmail operations, this one specifically involving Russians.American journalist Craig Unger has documented Epstein’s close connection to several Russian women in the United States with ties to the FSB, at least one of them a former model.As Unger described in his book American Kompromat, Svetlana Pozhidaeva grew up in an apartment complex in Moscow originally built for the Russian NKVD intelligence service.She graduated from the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which trains Russia’s diplomats and intelligence officials.Despite this auspicious start to a promising career, she proceeded to France to work as a model for Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 modeling agency.She then relocated to the United States, where she joined Jeffrey Epstein’s entourage. Epstein provided her with significant sums of money to launch business ventures, in one of which she partnered with Russian Victoria Drokova, who had graduated from the same intelligence-related university in Moscow as herself.Victoria’s sister Masha was a prominent member of the pro-Putin youth group Nashi and went on to relocate to the United States, where she took a job as a publicist.St Petersburg Economic ForumThe St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, as the Dossier Center report explains, is a notorious hotbed for prostitution and blackmailAccording to a report published by the London-based Dossier Center, Epstein had a close relationship with Russian FSB officer Sergei Belyakov in Moscow.Epstein advised Belyakov on the Russian economy, and Belyakov connected Epstein with influential officials in Russia. The Dossier Center was able to document at least five known meetings between Epstein and Belyakov.In July 2015, Epstein reached out to Belyakov to ask for help with a problem involving “a russian girl from moscow. Guzel Ganieva. She is attempting to blackmail a group of powerful biznessman in New York… Suggestions?”His spelling of the word businessman may have suggested that these men were involved in mafia businesses. One can only speculate what Epstein was hoping the FSB might do.Belyakov supplied Epstein with an intelligence dossier on Ganieva. In exchange for the dossier—which normally might have cost money—Epstein provided guidance to Belyakov on ways to circumvent Western sanctions, and he offered to put him in touch with prominent Western businessmen who could be invited to Belyakov’s upcoming International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg (SPIEF).The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, as the Dossier Center report explains, is a notorious hotbed for prostitution and blackmail.The forum’s organizers collaborate with modeling agencies to send beautiful women to the event. The Dossier Center noted that it is common for sex workers to film their encounters with rich businessmen and politicians secretly in order to blackmail them later.This might help explain why the FSB would want to have an agent running the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg.A Transnational NetworkThe above overview is far from comprehensive—it passes over important parts of the story, such as Epstein’s relationships with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, as well as Epstein’s global travels and networks ranging far beyond Europe and the United States, and his involvement in financial crime.The point here was to place certain pieces of the story side by side to show the presence of a pattern that is clear when one takes a broader, global perspective.The Trump administration is never going to release any evidence that could expose him to further prosecutionThe pattern is one that involved modeling agencies around the world serving as fronts for human trafficking. Russian and Eastern European models, Russian dirty money, and Russian intelligence operatives played an oversized and unmistakable role.This may very well be what Trump is trying desperately to keep quiet in the DOJ’s Epstein files.The U.S.’s Epstein Files Transparency Act will fail to produce the coup de grâce that many have been hoping for.The Trump administration is never going to release any evidence that could expose him to further prosecution.But a more important issue may be why the American government seems to have such a monopoly over the investigation of what was a transnational criminal network.Only the tip of the iceberg came out in the U.S. prosecutions of Epstein’s sex crimes. Jeffrey Epstein was involved in human, arms, and narcotics trafficking, financial crime, and hostile foreign espionage networks that spanned dozens of countries, including multiple EU members and the UK.Why has the U.S. President been allowed to exercise so much control over a transnational criminal investigation in which he is implicated and in which his personal ties to the Kremlin may well be relevant?The Epstein case is ultimately not an issue about Donald Trump and the United States but rather about all the Donald Trumps of the Western world —right-wing, nationalist, illiberal, populist political leaders with ties to Russia who are threatening the security and integrity of Western democracy.It’s about Russia’s hybrid warfare against the West. As the rule of law capsizes in the United States and a pro-Kremlin authoritarian regime entrenches itself, Europe must heed the warning.European democracy and Western values are facing their greatest existential threat since the Second World War.Just as Europe is pivoting to contribute more to its own military defense against Russian aggression, so must European states take the lead on investigating and prosecuting the transnational criminal networks connected with the Russian state.U.S. Media, Education, Technology, Religion, Cultural Wars Richard Knipel, rear, rushed to grab a man with a gun after witnesses said the man threatened to shoot himself at a Wikipedia conference in Manhattan on Friday (Photo by Bill Adair of Duke University).New York Times,Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference, Andy Newman, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). After the man walked onto the stage at the “Wiki World’s Fair” event and threatened to kill himself, witnesses said, two members of the audience jumped in to stop him.The armed man came striding up the aisle at a conference for Wikipedia editors Friday morning in Manhattan, several witnesses said.The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling.The audience of well over a hundred people panicked.“People started yelling, ‘Get down, get down!’ and people started ducking behind their chairs,” said Bill Adair, a journalism professor who was there and is writing a book on Wikipedia.A man in an orange sweatshirt rushed the stage. He was not in law enforcement, but a Wikipedia contributor on the conference’s “trust and safety team”: Richard Knipel, the City University of New York’s “Wikimedian-in-residence.” He grabbed the gunman from behind.Another Wikipedian on the trust and safety team, Andrew Lih, had been standing watch in the aisle and charged forward, too.“I saw the gun he’s holding go from pointing up at the ceiling to sweeping down toward the room, and as it swept across me I said ‘Oh, my god,’ and I ducked down, but I still kept moving” said Mr. Lih, a digital strategist who works with museums and libraries.“I grabbed his arm,” he continued. “He was still clutching his gun pretty hard. I pried his fingers away from it, removed it from his hands and put it down.” White House Chronicle, Old Journalism Is Coming in Shiny New Wrappers, Llewellyn King, Oct. 18, 2025. If you know what is going on in Gaza, it is because a journalist told you.
- If you know Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest comment about autism, it is because a journalist told you.
- If you know that there was a tsunami off the coast of Indonesia, it is because a journalist told you.
- If you know that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are planning to marry, it is because a journalist told you — in print, over the air or on the web.
Yet when “the media” is discussed, you would think that what is essential isn’t journalism, but rather the means of delivery. The death of newspapers is high on the woeful list.I am a newspaperman through and through. Although I have been involved, often simultaneously, with broadcasting, my heart and soul are in newspapers.I first set foot in a newsroom when I was 14 — and I left part of me there.I learned a lot about hot type in my youth, and I love the mechanics of newspapers. At The Washington Post, where I had a roving assignment, I often worked on “the stone,” where the type was put in the pages by artisans of extraordinary skill.But that has gone. Hot type is history. If you want to savor it, tour the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts.Sadly, I must confess that no printed newspaper is delivered to my home every day. I subscribe to the digital versions of four newspapers, four magazines and several online-only outlets, and I suffer jabs of guilt when I sit before a computer screen.Nearly all major newspapers and many smaller ones have online editions. The largest ones are grabbing much of the subscription money.That is a repeat of what happened in big cities toward the end of the golden days of words printed on paper: The winners took all.The New York Times drove out the Herald Tribune. The Washington Post drove out The Washington Star and The Washington Daily News.In the case of printed newspapers, those with just a slightly larger circulation corralled all the advertising. Today’s chances are that those with a greater offering will drive out those with a robust offering, but not as dominant as, say, The Times.Big newspapers have adopted the paywall as the model for the future, and others have had to follow. It will be a pity if that prevails.A better model would be a pay-to-read arrangement where you join a collective such as Visa or MasterCard and pay for what you want to read. That would provide a stable future for journalism and enable much of the innovation that is going on to be on a sound financial footing.There is innovation aplenty in how the precious commodity, journalism, is brought to you.The magazines have morphed into something more: They have become daily newspapers with their emailed editions. The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic and The Spectator have taken this path, among others. Even Vanity Fair has an emailed edition.Additionally, British newspapers have invaded the United States with some spritely email offerings. The Daily Mirror, The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Mail are among them.Then there are many new entries of purely internet vintage. These include but aren’t limited to the leaders, Axios and Semafor — although Axios, with revenues of over $100 million, is the clear winner to date.This suggests that journalism is alive and well and that its future is online, but its revenue stream isn’t certain. One hopes that the winner-takes-all history won’t repeat itself and that a vibrant new order of journalism, tempting to talent, grows in importance. After all, at one time big cities had many newspapers; New York had more than 20 daily newspapers.The threshold of entry for internet publishing is low. A pay-per-view rather than a paywall would establish a new golden era in which skill and talent would carry the day and where the right content would propel its authors and the publications to success.As to my world of great presses, raging like livid monsters in the middle of night, well, there will be some for a long time. But the new carriers of that critical commodity known as journalism will carry the day. New York Times, Virginia Won’t Join White House’s Compact for Colleges, Stephanie Saul, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). It was the fifth school in a matter of days to refuse an offer of preferential funding treatment from the government, even as the White House has threatened schools that do not sign up.The University of Virginia became the fifth school to rebuff a White House proposal to give universities preferential treatment if they uphold a set of White House demands.The White House offered the proposal to nine universities last week, asking them to sign on to a list of requirements laid out in a 10-page document in exchange for funds. In declining to sign on to the agreement, Paul G. Mahoney, Virginia’s interim president, said that while the university agreed with many principles outlined in the proposal, it wanted “no special treatment” in funding.“A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of the vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education,” Mr. Mahoney wrote in a note to Linda McMahon, right, the education secretary, and two other administration officials.Mr. Mahoney’s announcement, which also went out to the campus community late Friday afternoon, followed similar decisions in the past week by other schools that received the government’s offer, including M.I.T., Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.Several university leaders who said they agreed with some provisions in the document seemed to be more put off by the “carrot” in the agreement — the special funding considerations.They voiced concerns that it set up an illegal two-tiered system for doling out federal funding, allowing schools that signed on to the deal to escape merit-based consideration in federal grants.In a meeting of university leaders last Tuesday in New York, several presidents said they found that idea fundamentally inappropriate. For example, a school with special expertise in research involving a specific type of cancer could, under the provisions, be eliminated from funding for that research unless it signed the compact.Amid growing signs that many universities would not agree to the provisions in the document, called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the White House had been working earlier in the day on Friday to rally support for the idea, holding a conference call with some university presidents.Eight schools, including Arizona State, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis, had been invited to talk about the compact at the meeting on Friday, White House officials said. Those three schools were not among those that initially received invitations from the administration earlier this month, but they were invited after others rejected the White House’s offer.In exchange for the special funding considerations, schools would have to agree to provisions including tuition freezes, caps on international students, the elimination of both race and sex as factors in admissions decisions, and the promotion of conservative views on campus.Mr. Mahoney’s note to the administration, which came even as his campus is in negotiations with the federal government to resolve investigations, followed opposition from the University of Virginia community.The faculty senate had voted 60-2 against the compact. And, on Friday, a large group of students rallied against the idea on the campus grounds in Charlottesville.New York Times,Benioff Apologizes for Saying Trump Should Send Troops to San Francisco, Heather Knight, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, said he no longer believed that National Guard troops were needed in the city.Marc Benioff apologized on Friday for saying President Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco after a week of being hammered by the city’s leaders and even some of his fellow tech titans for the remarks.“I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” Mr. Benioff, the Salesforce founder and chief executive, posted on X. He added that he made the remarks out of caution as his annual Dreamforce conference ramped up in the city and brought an extra 50,000 people downtown.“I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused,” he wrote. “It’s my firm belief that our city makes the most progress when we all work together in a spirit of partnership.”Mr. Benioff initially said the National Guard should come to San Francisco in a phone interview with The New York Times last week. He said that San Francisco’s police force needed 1,000 more officers and that he hoped the National Guard could help fill those gaps.“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he had said in the interview.Those remarks drew condemnation from many San Francisco leaders.Mayor Daniel Lurie and Representative Nancy Pelosi said federal troops were not needed or wanted in a city where crime rates were dropping and more police officers were being hired. The local district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, blasted Mr. Benioff for backing “government-sponsored violence against U.S. citizens.”Oct. 17The Contrarian,Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, MIT, with several courageous universities to follow, shows it is made of sterner stuff.Elite institutions ranging from Columbia University to CBS News to the Paul, Weiss law firm have capitulated to Donald Trump’s bullying. Under the delusion that they could cut deals to save themselves from Trump’s wrath, they tossed overboard supposedly deeply held values including academic independence, freedom of the press, and the right to counsel. Instead, their cowardice whetted Trump’s appetite for more aggression and repression.Over several months, surrender by a fleet of weak-kneed institutions suggested that Trump might succeed in his dictatorial mission. However, that disturbing trend appears to have stalled. Perhaps Trump overreached, or perhaps popular protests convinced institutional leaders to show some backbone.In any event, Trump’s familiar extortion playbook seems to have lost some of its punch. Trump’s latest gambit, the so-called compact that he sent to nine prestigious universities, may have flopped. The New York Times reported on Oct. 2:The Trump administration promised a select set of universities what the government said would be a great deal.In exchange for agreeing to a list of demands, like limiting international students and protecting conservative voices, universities would get a leg up on grants, potentially beating out the competition for billions in federal funds.At least one institution, the University of Texas, said it would be eager to sign up.But then, a curious thing happened. Faculty, students, and alumni began to push back. Condemnation of the compact and talk of boycotts started “while Dartmouth College’s president has responded by saying she will always defend her university’s ‘fierce independence,’” Johns Hopkins professor Harry Farrell wrote last week. Meanwhile, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom threatened “to pull state funding from any institution that signs.”Then, the leader of one of the most prestigious universities weighed in. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth in a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, right, effectively told the Trump bullies to get lost.Kornbluth first recited her university’s principles: rewarding merit, admitting students regardless of economic need, and guarding free expression. She then drew a line in the sand in terms that old-school conservatives would have appreciated:We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission—work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.The [Trump proposed compact]… includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences.MIT’s stance, as Inside Higher Education reported, generated widespread praise from academics:“I am proud to say that MIT has rejected Trump’s poison compact,” American Association of University Professors president Todd Wolfson wrote on Bluesky shortly after the news broke.And some scholars suggested that MIT had established a precedent that others may look to. Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, questioned in a post on Bluesky whether MIT’s action changes “the calculus” for the other eight universities. . . .Lawmakers such as Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) also weighed in. “This is what courage in the face of authoritarianism looks like. No university should take Trump’s bribe & surrender their integrity—bending the knee to a bully only feeds the beast & puts ALL our rights at risk.” Even Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has taken to battling Trump on the Epstein files, praised MIT. “The surest way to screw up the world’s best technical school is to let feds tell them how to run it,” Massie wrote. “Congrats to my alma mater for turning down a bribe to let the executive branch dictate what happens on its campus.”And, lo and behold, Brown University followed suit on Thursday. “I am concerned that the Compact by its nature and by various provisions would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance, critically compromising our ability to fulfill our mission,” its president reaffirmed.Then, in quick succession, the University of Penn reportedly rejected the proposed preferential funding compact; as did the University of Southern California (USC). Meanwhile, the other institutions who originally received the proposed Faustian bargain (University of Arizona, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia) will have to decide whether to follow MIT’s principled stance or enable Trump’s totalitarian project.After the MIT humiliation, the Trump regime decided to shop the compact to all universities. We will see if any takes the deal MIT, Brown, Penn, and USC rejected.MIT, followed by three other universities, distinguished itself by remaining undaunted in defense of free expression, academic independence, and intellectual rigor, demonstrating that resistance is not futile. MIT and those that followed its lead deserve our recognition and gratitude for standing up to the bully-in-chief.We hope others beyond higher ed look to the trend MIT initiated. (Interestingly, virtually all major news outlets this week also rejected thePentagon’s outrageous and onerous restrictions on their reporting; in addition, a growing list of airports are refusing to run DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s propaganda video.)You—our Contrarian community—know that the antidotes to bullying are spine and solidarity. By turning out (and bringing family, friends, and neighbors!) at a No Kings Day event on Saturday, you can help make this the largest day of protest in American history. President Trump with President Javier Milei of Argentina at the White House on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).New York Times,Trump Offered a Helping Hand to Argentina. It Backfired,Ana Ionova and Daniel Politi, Oct. 17, 2025 (print ed.). When President Javier Milei of Argentina faced an economic meltdown, President Trump vowed to come to his aid. But that lifeline is coming at a cost.As President Javier Milei of Argentina faced a deepening economic crisis, President Trump rushed to the rescue of his political ally with a generous $20 billion bailout.Then came the fine print.To secure help from the United States, Mr. Trump made clear on Tuesday, Mr. Milei’s embattled political party would have to first pull off a victory in what are emerging as momentous and challenging legislative elections this month.“If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Mr. Trump said as he welcomed Mr. Milei, who he has called his “favorite president,” to the White House. “If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina.”In Argentina, those comments were taken by many as a clear attempt by Mr. Trump to put his thumb on a sovereign country’s electoral process.The fallout was swift. The peso tumbled as investors went on a panicked selling spree of Argentina’s currency. Mr. Milei’s political opponents railed against what they called American extortion, urging voters to reject his party at the polls. And Mr. Milei’s government rushed to try to assure Argentines that Mr. Trump wouldn’t abandon the nation based on Mr. Milei’s political fortunes.To many, Mr. Trump’s conditional economic support represented yet another attempt to influence, through economic sticks and carrots, the internal affairs of another Latin American country. The turmoil that followed also highlighted the risks Mr. Milei faces as he shackles his political fortunes, and Argentina’s economic future, to America’s deep pockets and Mr. Trump’s fickle friendship.“Trump might have sabotaged his favorite president — by both giving him too much support and too little support,” said Benjamin Gedan, a senior fellow and director of the Latin America Program at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit in Washington.Lev Remembers Analysis:Breaking: Two-Week Donnie Is Back The Deal Behind Trump’s Budapest Summit With Putin, Lev Parnas, right, Oct. 17, 2025. The Kremlin’s real plan is to plunge Ukraine into darkness — and Trump is helping them buy time.For those of you who’ve been reading, listening, and supporting Lev Remembers and Voice from Ukraine, you’re not shocked by Trump’s latest flip-flop. The media’s acting surprised — pretending this is some new development — but you already know better. You’ve heard me say it for weeks: this was coming. There’s a reason I call him Two-Week Donnie. Every time he needs to buy time, cover something up, or play both sides, it’s always two more weeks.SubscribedAnd now here we are again. Yesterday, as the world waited for Trump’s big meeting with President Zelensky — where he promised to deliver long-range Tomahawk missiles and “turn on Russia” — Trump pulled the same move he always does. Before sitting down with Zelensky, he quietly picked up the phone and called Vladimir Putin. And just like before, the timing isn’t coincidence. It’s a pattern. Remember the Alaska summit? Right before new sanctions and before the Epstein files were set to drop, they announced a “meeting for peace.” Now, right before new weapons are set to reach Ukraine, he does it again — another call, another delay, another two-week stall.So here we are. For the next two weeks — or however long he can stretch it — Russia will keep bombing Ukraine, pounding its cities, and trying to break its spirit. Trump’s betting that Putin can crush Ukraine just enough to bring them to their knees, so he can swoop in like a “white knight” and sell it as a peace deal, the same performance he staged in the Middle East. But what he doesn’t understand — and what Putin still refuses to learn — is that Ukraine isn’t going down. Not now. Not ever.And while Trump talks about peace, Putin continues his nightly terror on Ukraine.Last night, Russia launched 70 attack drones and a record 28 ballistic missiles — the largest missile barrage since the war began.Ukraine’s air defense shot down half, but the others struck energy facilities, homes, and factories.No, this wasn’t about military targets — it was about breaking Ukraine’s will before winter.Kryvyi Rih burned again. Energy stations hit. Civilians freezing in the dark.While Russia continues it’s onslaught on the Ukrainian people, Trump was on the phone with Putin — and make no mistake, this was a celebration, not a negotiation. Putin opened by congratulating Trump on his Middle East moves, then slid straight into promises of post-war trade and business deals. He’s selling a future where Russia crushes Ukrainian resistance just enough to bring Kyiv to its knees — and Trump, hungry for a headline “peace” deal and profits, is listening. This isn’t diplomacy; it’s a transaction: bombs and blackouts on the ground, boardrooms and trade deals in the wings.While children in Ukraine are dying, Trump is talking about business opportunities with the Kremlin.After the call, Putin’s negotiator Kirill Dmitriev went on X (Twitter) and proposed a “Putin–Trump Unity Tunnel” through the Bering Strait — connecting the U.S. and Russia, literally.
- He even tagged Elon Musk, promising it could be built for $65 billion, or “just $8 billion with Musk’s help.”
- He called Hungary a “voice of reason” and a “peacemaker.”
You can’t make this up. These are not negotiations — this is a delusion being sold to the world as diplomacy.Meanwhile, Hungary’s foreign minister proudly announced that Putin will be “respectfully welcomed” in Budapest — ICC warrant or not.That’s not respect. That’s complicity.President Zelensky landed in Washington full of hope — expecting long-range Tomahawks and serious commitments. Instead, he found out Trump was secretly setting up a meeting with Putin in Budapest.That’s betrayal. Plain and simple.And make no mistake: Trump’s delay on sending U.S. long-range weapons — “just two more weeks” — is not about timing. It’s about leverage. Putin promised him something, and Trump is holding Ukraine hostage for it.Trump lives in his own world — a bubble where truth doesn’t exist, only perception. Every dictator in history started believing their own lies.That’s what makes this moment so dangerous.
- He claims he’s sanctioning Russia — yet quietly opens doors for trade.
- He says India “cut off” Russian oil — and within hours, India denied it ever happened.
- He says he stands with Ukraine — then arranges a summit with its killer.
This is not chaos. This is a pattern.And I told you — follow the actions, not the words.News Round UpsNew York Times,Live Updates: Trump to Meet With Zelensky, Making New Push for Ukraine Cease-Fire, Staff Reports, Oct. 17, 2025.
- Ukraine talks: President Trump is mounting a new effort to reach a truce in the war in Ukraine and is scheduled to host President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday at the White House. Mr. Trump held a call with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, on Thursday and said he planned to meet with him in the coming weeks. Mr. Zelensky is likely to ask for more U.S. weapons, but Mr. Trump left unclear whether he might agree to provide the Tomahawk missiles he has dangled as a possibility.
- Bolton indictment: John R. Bolton, a former adviser to President Trump who became one of his most outspoken critics, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on charges of mishandling classified information. While Mr. Bolton is part of a string of perceived enemies of the president to become prosecutorial targets, the federal investigation into him gained momentum during the Biden administration.
Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 16, 2025 [Presidential Law-Breaking and Protests], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 17, 2025. Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay furloughed troops by using funds Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) for fiscal year 2026.Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “found a creative solution to keep the troops paid. And rather than congratulate the president for doing that, this unprecedented action to get our troops paid, the Democrats want to sue him for it. They’re saying that it’s illegal.”Democrats are saying it’s illegal because it is illegal. The Antideficiency Act, a law that has evolved over time since 1870, prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose.This summer, Democratic senators charged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with triggering the Antideficiency Act by overspending her department’s budget, but Trump’s claim that he can move government money around as he wishes is an even greater threat to the country than Noem’s overspending.There is more at stake here than a broken law.Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes.That principle was at the heart of the American Revolution. The 1773 Tea Act that sparked Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, to throw chests of tea into Boston Harbor did not raise the price of tea in the colonies; the law lowered those prices. To pay for the cost of what colonists knew as the French and Indian War, Parliament in 1767 had taxed glass, lead, oil, paint, paper, and tea, but boycotts and protests had forced Parliament to repeal all the taxes except the one on tea. It kept that tax to maintain the principle that it could tax the colonies despite the fact they were unrepresented in that body.Then, in 1773, Parliament gave a monopoly on colonial tea sales to the foundering British East India Tea Company. That monopoly would have the effect of lowering the price of tea. Lower prices should persuade colonists to buy the tea despite the tax, thus cementing the principle that Parliament could tax the colonies without their consent. But colonists protested the maneuver. In December 1773, the Sons of Liberty held what became known as the Boston Tea Party, ruining newly arrived chests of tea by throwing them into the harbor, thus paving the route to the American Revolution.When leaders from the former colonies wrote the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they made sure the people retained control over the nation’s finances in order to guarantee that a demagogue could not use tax money to concentrate power in his own hands. They gave the power to write the laws to the legislative branch—the House of Representatives and the Senate—alone, giving the president power only to agree to or veto those measures. Once the laws were enacted, the president’s role was to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”To make sure that the power of the purse remained in the hands of the people, the Framers wrote into the Constitution that “[a]ll Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.”Trump’s declaration that he will ignore the laws Congress passed and take it upon himself to spend money as he wishes undermines not just the Antideficiency Act but also the fundamental principle that the American people must have control over their own finances. That Leavitt suggests giving up that principle to pay the troops, which lawmakers agree is imperative but cannot write into law because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will not recall the House of Representatives, echoes the Tea Act that would have thrown away the principle of having a say in government for cheaper tea.Since Trump took office, his administration has undermined the principle that Congress controls funding. It had withheld funds Congress appropriated, a practice that violates the 1974 Impoundment Act and the Constitution. The cost of such impoundment became evident on Sunday, when catastrophic flooding hit the village of Kipnuk, Alaska, a disaster Andrew Freedman of CNN notes was exacerbated by the lack of weather data after cuts left a critical shortage in weather balloon coverage in the area.Earlier this year the administration cancelled a $20 million Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant awarded to the community to prevent flooding. Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman of the New York Times noted that when EPA administrator Lee Zeldin cut grants this year, he boasted that he was eliminating “wasteful [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and Environmental Justice grants.”Now that the government is shut down, Trump has told reporters that his administration is using the shutdown to take funds Congress appropriated away from Democratic districts. Tony Romm and Lazaro Gamio of the New York Times estimate that the administration has cancelled more than $27.24 billion in funds for Democratic districts and states while cutting $738.7 million from Republican districts and states. Speaker Johnson told reporters he thought such withholding was both lawful and constitutional but did not explain his reasoning.Today Annie Grayer and Adam Cancryn of CNN reported that not just Democratic representatives but also Republicans are out of the loop of presidential funding cuts, finding out about cuts to their districts through press releases. Even Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said “we are really not consulted.”Speaker Johnson told CNN that he hasn’t received details about the administration’s offer of $20 billion in public money and another $20 billion in private-sector financing to Argentina to prop up the government of Trump’s right-wing ally Javier Milei before upcoming elections there.Trump is also taking control of the previously nonpartisan Department of Justice (DOJ). Yesterday, in the Oval Office, Trump stood in front of three top officials from the DOJ and called for investigations into former deputy attorney general in the Biden administration Lisa Monaco; former FBI official Andrew Weissman, who led the team investigating the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives; former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated and indicted Trump for the events of January 6 and for retaining classified documents; and Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House impeachment team in Trump’s first impeachment trial.Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted the DOJ officials “smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.”Today a federal grand jury in Maryland indicted John Bolton, right, who served as national security advisor in Trump’s first term, alleging that he shared classified information in the form of a diary with two of his relatives. That material later informed his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, which covered his time in the first Trump administration and so infuriated Trump that he tried to stop its publication.The grand jury charged Bolton with eight counts of communicating secret information with those not entitled to receive it, and ten counts of having unauthorized possession of documents containing secret information. These charges are similar to those Jack Smith brought against Trump himself, although Trump’s election to a second term stopped that prosecution.The indictment references Bolton’s criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of secret information, in particular Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to plan a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen, especially after a journalist had been added to the call, and Hegseth’s additional Signal chat about the strike with family and friends.A court will determine the merits of the case against Bolton, but there is no doubt it is intended to send a signal to others in government that Trump will persecute those whom he perceives as disloyal.Today, Steady State, a group made up of more than 340 former U.S. intelligence officers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies, released a report assessing the state of American democracy. Applying the tools of their craft to the U.S., they assess that the nation is “on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, finds that American democracy is weakening as the Executive Branch is consolidating power and “actively weaponizing state institutions to punish perceived opponents and shield allies,” and that Congress is refusing to check the president, “creating openings for authoritarian exploitation.”“We judge that the primary driver of the U.S.’s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of Executive Branch overreach,” the report says, noting that “President Donald J. Trump has leveraged emergency powers, executive orders, federalized military forces, and bureaucratic politicization to consolidate control and weaken checks and balances.”But the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular. Trump loyalists are working overtime to portray those who oppose the administration as anti-American criminals and terrorists. Today White House press secretary Leavitt told the Fox News Channel that “[t]he Democrat Party’s main constituency are [sic] made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” and administration loyalists have spent the week claiming that the No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18, is a “hate America rally.”Joe Perticone of The Bulwark noted that Indivisible, the organization sponsoring the No Kings protests, “has an extensive track record that shows a longstanding emphasis on safety and nonviolence.” Perticone spoke to Ezra Levin, co–executive director of Indivisible, who said: “Go to a No Kings rally. What do you see? You see moms and grandmas and kids and dogs and funny signs and dancing and happy displays of opposition to the regime that are foundationally nonviolent. And on the other end, you’ve got a regime that’s led by a guy who cheered the January 6th insurrection.”Levin noted that authoritarian regimes fear mass organizing and peaceful protest because they reveal a regime’s unpopularity and show that it is losing its grip on power.Much as tossing chests of tea into Boston Harbor did about 250 years ago. U.S. Military, National SecurityNew York Times,Head of the U.S. Military’s Southern Command Is Stepping Down, Officials Say, Eric Schmitt and Tyler Pager, Oct. 17, 2025 (print ed.). Adm. Alvin Holsey is leaving less than a year into his tenure, and as the Pentagon escalates attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea.The military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s escalating attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs said on Thursday that he was stepping down.The officer, Adm.Alvin Holsey, right, is leaving his job as head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all operations in Central and South America, even as the Pentagon has rapidly built up some 10,000 forces in the region in what it says is a major counterdrug and counterterrorism mission.It was unclear why Admiral Holsey is suddenly departing, less than a year into what is typically a three-year job, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career. But one current and one former U.S. official, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that Admiral Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.In a statement on social media, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made no mention of any friction with his four-star commander. “On behalf of the Department of War,” said Mr. Hegseth, using the name of the department he now prefers, “we extend our deepest gratitude to Admiral Alvin Holsey for his more than 37 years of distinguished service to our nation as he plans to retire at year’s end.”Nor did Admiral Holsey publicly voice any policy objections, urging his command’s 1,200 military service members and civilians in a statement, “Keep Charging!!”But other officials at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill said the praise masked real policy tensions concerning Venezuela that the admiral and his civilian boss were seeking to paper over.“Prior to Trump, I can’t think of a combatant commander who left his or her post early, ever,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was even more pointed in his criticism.“At a moment when U.S. forces are building up across the Caribbean and tensions with Venezuela are at a boiling point, the departure of our top military commander in the region sends an alarming signal of instability within the chain of command,” Mr. Reed said in a statement.Since early September, U.S. Special Operations forces have struck at least five boats off the Venezuelan coast that the White House says were transporting drugs, killing 27 people. American officials have privately made it clear that the main goal is to drive Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, from power.But a range of specialists in the laws governing the use of force have disputed the Trump administration’s claim that it can lawfully kill people suspected of drug trafficking like enemy troops instead of arresting them for prosecution. As a matter of domestic law, Congress has not authorized any armed conflict.As a matter of international law, for a nonstate group to qualify as a belligerent in an armed conflict — meaning its members can be targeted for killing based on their status alone, not because of anything they specifically do — it must be an “organized armed group” with a centralized command structure, and engaging in hostilities.Admiral Holsey, who is Black, becomes the latest in a line of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women, who have left their jobs this year. Most have been fired by Mr. Hegseth or pushed out.Mr. Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who is Black; the first woman to command the Navy, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; and the U.S. military’s representative to the NATO military committee, Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield. He also pushed out Lt. Gen. Jeffrey A. Kruse, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.Others have not fit into the mold of what Mr. Hegseth considers a leader in his Pentagon. In August, the Air Force’s top uniformed officer, Gen. David Allvin, announced that he would retire early — two years into a four-year term.New York Times,U.S. Detains 2 Survivors of Latest Military Strike in Caribbean, Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage, Oct. 17, 2025. The capture of prisoners presents a major new set of legal and policy problems for the Trump administration in its escalating campaign.The U.S. Navy has rescued two survivors of an American military strike on a semi-submersible vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and is holding them aboard a Navy ship there, two U.S. officials said on Friday.The Navy for now is detaining the two people aboard a warship in international waters, marking the first time the military has found itself holding prisoners from President Trump’s six-week-old campaign of targeting suspected drug runners as if they were combatants in a war.The Trump administration now faces a dilemma about whether to release the two people, claim it can hold them as indefinite wartime detainees, or transfer them to civilian law enforcement officials for prosecution — a major and messy set of new legal and policy problems that could bring judicial scrutiny to the legally contested basis for its unfolding military campaign.Since early September, the U.S. military has attacked at least six vessels that the Trump administration has said, without putting forward evidence, were carrying drugs. The first five were speedboats, but the most recent strike targeted a submersible vessel, the officials said.The latest strike, on Thursday, killed two other people aboard the vessel, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But after the attack, surveillance video showed that there were survivors in the water.A Navy search-and-rescue helicopter retrieved the two survivors and flew them to one of the eight Navy warships that had been dispatched to the region. The Trump administration has been building up firepower in the Caribbean Sea amid its escalating campaign against drugs and mounting pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president.The five strikes Mr. Trump has acknowledged killed 27 people, so the death toll has now reached at least 29. The nationalities of the two survivors is unclear.The Trump administration had not announced or acknowledged the latest strike as of Friday morning. By contrast, for each of the five previous known boat attacks since early September, Mr. Trump boasted of the operations, declared how many people they had killed, and swiftly posted surveillance videos showing the vessels in the sea being blown up.The fact of the attack and the existence of survivors was earlier reported by Reuters.The press offices of the Pentagon and the White House did not comment on the matter. Speaking to reporters on Friday at the start of a White House meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Trump confirmed Thursday’s strike.“We attacked a submarine and that was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs,” he said. “Just so you understand, this was not an innocent group of people. I don’t know too many people that have submarines.”Mr. Trump did not specifically address questions about any survivors and their fate.For now, said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in the laws of armed conflict, the administration will have to wrestle with how long the prisoners can be held aboard the Navy vessel before they must be transferred somewhere. He noted that the Pentagon tends to be institutionally opposed to the headaches of detainee operations.More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Law Enforcement, RaceNew York Times, Trump Administration:John Bolton Indicted Over Handling of Classified Information, Devlin Barrett and Glenn Thrush, Oct. 16, 2025. Mr. Bolton, a Trump aide turned critic, is part of a string of presidential foes to become prosecutorial targets. But his case gained momentum in the Biden administration.John R. Bolton, right, the national security hawk and former adviser to President Trump who became one of his most outspoken critics, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on Thursday on charges of mishandling classified information.The indictment against Mr. Bolton was 18 counts and accused him of using personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of “diary” notes about his day-to-day activities as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and 2019. The notes, which were sent to two family members who did not have security clearances, included national defense information, such as details classified as top secret, according to the indictment.President Trump and his former aide parted bitterly toward the end of his first term, and the president greeted the news with grim satisfaction. “He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump said in response to a question from a reporter at the White House about Mr. Bolton. “That’s the way it goes.”While Mr. Bolton is part of a string of perceived enemies of the president to become prosecutorial targets, the federal investigation into him gained momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence agencies gathered what former officials have described as troubling evidence.The prosecution appeared to follow normal department channels, without firings or forced transfers. Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, was among the career prosecutors to sign off on the charges in conjunction with the Justice Department’s national security division.By contrast, Mr. Trump in recent weeks has removed or sidelined prosecutors in order to secure indictments against two of his longtime targets: James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.If convicted of the charges, Mr. Bolton, 76, could spend the rest of his life in prison. Each count carries a maximum potential sentence of 10 years.Mr. Bolton is expected to surrender to the authorities on Friday and make his initial court appearance in Greenbelt, Md., later that day.Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed the charges against Mr. Bolton. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.”Mr. Bolton, in a statement, declared that the indictment was part of an intimidation campaign against critics of Mr. Trump. “I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power,” he said.The two family members who received Mr. Bolton’s notes were not identified in the 26-page indictment, but prosecutors said Mr. Bolton occasionally used his AOL and Google email accounts to send notes to them.Mr. Bolton’s written descriptions of where he learned information often indicated that he recognized that he was describing carefully guarded government secrets, the indictment added. One entry by Mr. Bolton began, “The intel briefer said,” while another read, “while in the Situation Room, I learned.”Making matters worse, Mr. Bolton’s emails were later hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran, the indictment said.“A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021, but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information, that Bolton had placed in the account from his time as national security adviser,” according to the filing.One surreal section of the indictment described Mr. Bolton apparently being taunted by his hacker. A message on July 25, 2021, warned, “I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email (some of which have been attached).” The email went on to declare, “This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late.” A representative for Mr. Bolton forwarded the email to the F.B.I.The indictment laid out exchanges between Mr. Bolton and the two family members that made it clear he was meticulously assembling a record with their help, with the intent of turning it into a book. All three knew they needed to be discreet.A day after Mr. Bolton joined the White House in April 2018, the indictment said, they started using an encrypted messaging app. “Why are we using this now? The encryption?” one of Mr. Bolton’s correspondents asked. “Yup,” the other responded. Mr. Bolton then chimed in: “For Diary in the future!!!!”The charging document laid out a number of 20- to 50-page documents that Mr. Bolton sent to the two people over the app. After sending one 24-page document about his time as the national security adviser, Mr. Bolton followed up with a message that read, “None of which we talked about!!!” One of the recipients wrote back: “Shhhhh.”Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that the facts of the case “were investigated and resolved years ago.” Mr. Bolton, like many public officials, “kept diaries — that is not a crime,” Mr. Lowell added. Those diaries, Mr. Lowell said, were unclassified records that were shared “only with his immediate family, and known to the F.B.I. as far back as 2021.”In August, F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Bolton’s Maryland home and his office in Washington, carrying out boxes of papers, computer files and other materials as part of the investigation. Subsequent court filings indicated that some documents with low-level classification markings were found. Thursday’s filing said that printed versions of Mr. Bolton’s diary entries, which contained classified information, were found in the search of his home. Emptywheel,Analysis: The Bolton Indictment, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 16, 2025. The indictment against John Bolton charges him with sending, and then retaining, eight documents containing classified information. The John Bolton indictment is a substantive document. If the claims about classification levels stand up, it is as substantive as the indictment against Trump (though with less sensitive documents and none of the obstruction).For each of 8 charged documents (each was charged twice, once for transmission and once for retention) it describes Bolton (shown above in a file photo) sending the information to one of his family members via an AOL account that got hacked by Iran, then keeping it such that it was found when the FBI searched his house earlier this year.Importantly, none of these are marked classified documents, like Trump’s stolen documents were. They are his excerpts. So there will be an enormous contest over the classification determinations, especially since Kash [Patel, left] and John Ratcliffe were involved.There are ten charged retained documents (that is, the same 8, plus two more). The latter two may be marked — they may be the old Iraq documents Bolton referred to.The indictment describes someone — presumably from Iran — attempting to blackmail Bolton (at which point he told the FBI that he had been hacked).It also quotes Bolton mocking Pete Hegseth for sharing classified information on Signal. There are defenses to this case (including that Trump won’t prosecute Hegseth). But it is a solid case.Update: Bolton is quoted referring to “diaries” throughout this indictment.
Update: Because people are asking, here’s a really rough comparison of Bolton’s indictment with Trump’s. Jeanine Pirro, above, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and former Fox News commentator (Screenshot).Emptywheel,Analysis: Revenge of the “Lib Tard:” Jeanine Pirro Wins First Humiliating Acquittal, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 16, 2025. After fuck-up after fuck-up, Jeanine Pirro’s prosecutors got an embarrassing acquittal in their effort to jail Sydney Reid for filming an ICE arrest.Sydney Reid, who was arrested in July after a tussle as she was filming an ICE arrest, was just acquitted by a jury.This was a case that should never have been charged, one of at least dozens just like it. Pirro and her prosecutors have been damaged over and over in trying to bring it to trial.
- First, three grand juries no-billed the case. Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor Information anyway.
- Then, the government unsuccessfully tried to exclude evidence that damaged their case and the credibility of their primary “victim,” FBI Agent Eugenia Bates.
- That Bates called her “boo boos,” “boo boos”
- That Bates twice complained that she had to turn this thing into an assault charge:
- “I’m going to the attorneys [sic] office for a bystander that I tussled. Dinko arrested her for ‘assault’ ughhh”;
- “Do you want the arrest EC separate from the ‘assault’ or am I good to put it in together in one 302”
- That she called Reid a “lib tard”
- That she declared “I sacrificed life and limb for the mission. I think it’s worth a trump coin,” after the incident
Then Reid presented evidence that prosecutors had not provided — or even collected — a video she believed would be exculpatory, an issue that Judge Sparkle Sooknanan spent several days last week considering, only to have the government’s story keep getting worse.While I haven’t reviewed the trial transcript, in her instructions, Judge Sooknanan gave three adverse instructions against the government:
- Inconsistent testimony from Special Agent Bates
- Late disclosure of evidence
- Self defense
This is a case that DOJ should have given up when they were no-billed. But because Jeanine Pirro is a stubborn bully, she persisted, and now both the DC US Attorney’s Office (for the evidentiary fuck-ups) and Agent Bates (for the inconsistent testimony and bias) will be tainted by the process.And most of all, it was an example of Federal Public Defenders — Eugene Ohm and Tezira Abe — doing superb work ensuring Reid had a vigorous defense.We will see many more bullshit cases in months ahead. But this acquittal matters just as much as the flashier cases, because until the government stops trying to prosecute people because thuggish cops beat them up, this will keep happening.Update: CBS’ local affiliate appears to have been the only outlet that covered the trial. It describes that Bates didn’t even turn over all her text messages. Bates was the sole witness called by prosecutors and spent more than five hours on the stand across two days. Much of the questioning centered on her text messages following the incident, where she downplayed it and disparaged Reid as a “libtard.” She didn’t turn over additional text message evidence until early Wednesday morning, and in the middle of cross examination, Abe discovered one message was missing. “Conveniently, the most damning one wasn’t there,” Abe said. “… Agent Bates’ story is riddled with holes.” Update: Reid’s comment is spectacular. Reid, in a statement through her attorneys, said the verdict shows “that this administration and their peons are not able to invoke fear in all citizens.”“I feel sorry for the prosecutors really, who must be burdened by Trump’s irrational and unfounded hatred for his fellow man,” she said. “Knowing that I can stand in front of 12 of my fellow citizens and be found not guilty for standing up for basic human rights makes me feel like, despite the scary times we live in, we have hope for the future.” Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, above, supervising the Justice Department’s Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) (File photo).Emptywheel,Analysis: Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Lindsey Halligan’s Filter Follies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 16, 2025. Lindsey Halligan’s loaner prosecutors decided they’d ask for a filter protocol to access already seized material the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered they provide all discovery to Jim Comey that same day. That may work out poorly for them.The court filings submitted since Jim Comey’s arraignment have set the stage for several possible prosecutorial disasters.After loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons made a transparent bid at the arraignment to slow Eastern District of Virginia’s rocket docket with both discovery and the invocation of the CIPA (Classified Information Procedurs Act) process, Judge Michael Nachmanoff, right:• Enforced a discovery deadline of Monday over prosecutors’ attempts to stall• Adopted Comey’s preferred protective order, rejecting prosecutorial efforts to limit Comey’s own access to discovery• Approved a CIPA schedule that resolves by December (and therefore would not delay the January 5 trial date)Meanwhile, Comey noticed his intent to challenge Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as US Attorney, so Judge Nachmanoff can refer the question to Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz, who will pick a District Judge from another District to preside over the challenge. Assuming Judge Diaz responds in timely fashion, Comey will submit that motion on Monday, along with his Selective and Vindictive prosecution claim, the latter of which is likely to be rather, um, illuminating.There’s no sign, yet, that Halligan’s loaner AUSAs failed to meet Monday’s deadline, though they did file something under seal on Tuesday. If I had to guess, that might be the first bid to hide Trump’s role in the selective prosecution under claims of Executive Privilege, though I also imagine prosecutors may try to explicitly prevent the involvement of Maurene Comey (who is suing on closely related issues) or Troy Edwards (who presumably knows details of the turmoil at EDVA) on Comey’s defense team. Right wing propagandists are hinting that it might be a bid to claim Pat Fitzgerald has a conflict stemming from his past representation of Comey; but the CIPA filings, filed by prosecutors on February 13, are predicated on the assumption “that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time,” suggesting prosecutors have no complaint about Fitz’ involvement.But there’s another filing that hints at far more turmoil ahead.On Monday, after Judge Nachmanoff ordered prosecutors to turn over all discovery by 5 PM that day, prosecutors submitted a motion for a filter protocol. According to the filing, the government seized a whole bunch of computer devices — a hard drive, an iCloud account, an iPhone, and an iPad — from a lawyer in a past investigation, and they want to access it for this investigation.Evidence in the government’s custody includes PPM because the evidence was obtained from an attorney. Currently, the quarantined evidence includes an image of a computer hard drive, an iCloud download, the backup of an iPhone, and the backup of an iPad (the “quarantined evidence”). The quarantined evidence was obtained through judicial warrants in a previous government investigation. After obtaining the quarantined evidence, and prior to any review, the attorney in question reviewed the quarantined evidence, withheld purported privileged material, and provided a privilege log to the government. However, the government is not aware of any involvement by the Defendant, or other putative privilege holders, in this prior review.The devices are exceedingly likely to belong to Dan Richman, who is at least reported to be the person whom Comey is accused of authorizing to serve as an anonymous source in the indictment.Indeed, the possibility that DOJ, under Bill Barr, seized a whole bunch of content from Richman explains something about the 2021 memo closing the investigation into Richman for leaking (which Comey likely received in unredacted form on Monday). One paragraph of the memo describes that Richman told the FBI that Comey had never asked him to talk to the media, followed by a two-paragraph redaction that must describe some reason why the FBI believed that to be false.It was clear from the memo that the FBI obtained proof of what Richman said to Mike Schmidt, and while Barr tried to go after NYT directly for this investigation, they had limited success, so that evidence would have come from Richman. Plus, the closing memo is pretty clear that Richman was a confirming source for Schmidt (it says that the government has not previously charged people for being a confirming source, though I believe that’s inaccurate), which Richman admitted.So if all those assumptions are correct, let’s consider what this motion for a filter protocol confesses.First, prosecutors launched a bid to get access to this information to use at trial on the day that discovery was due, the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered that all discovery be provided by October 13. They seem really unconcerned about how badly that will piss off Nachmanoff, which seems reckless.The proposed filter itself is obnoxious in two ways. It proposes a team (which it says does not include EDVA or EDNC prosecutors, but does not address whether it includes prosecutors from WDVA or another of the far-flown parts of DOJ where Kash Patel has parked his witch hunt) will review the data for a set of narrow filter terms.2 The Filter Team is comprised of Two Assistant United States Attorneys, and their support staff, from a separate federal district from the Eastern District of Virginia and the Eastern District of North Carolina. The Filter Team has a separate reporting and supervisory chain from the Prosecution Team and are not part of the Prosecution Team.But aside from things explicitly marked privileged, they would get access to everything. Comey would only get a say over stuff triggered by those filter terms.You can tell how unusual this protocol is for the citations — none of which is from EDVA, and only one of which is from the Fourth Circuit — the loaner AUSAs give to pretend it is not.As far as I understand the posture of this, unless Judge Nachmanoff orders differently, Comey will not have to respond to the October 13 request for two weeks — October 27, with a reply a week later, after all of Comey’s initial pretrial motions are submitted (he might file a Fourth Amendment challenge for the second deadline, October 30, or just file it on October 26).He seems unimpressed by either this motion or the sealed filing.Which is to say, unless something changes, this purported filter process wouldn’t even start for another month, resulting in the provision of any relevant materials to Comey months after the discovery deadline.If this is a bid to access this material for this trial, it will likely fail. And, because this is EDVA, if that’s what prosecutors are trying, it may not work as well for investigators (including Jack Eckenrode, from John Durham’s team) as it did during the Michael Sussmann trial. The Bulwark,Conway Explains: John Bolton Chose a Book Over Saving the Country, George Conway Explains It All (To Sarah Longwell), Oct. 17, 2025. George Conway explains to Sarah Longwell how the indictment of John Bolton fits into Donald Trump’s broader pattern of targeting critics — but also why Bolton’s case may have more substance than Trump’s other so-called “revenge prosecutions.”They discuss what makes the Bolton charges different, the double standard around classified information, and how Trump’s effort to label peaceful protests as “rebellion” reveals his authoritarian instincts.Legal AF,TIDE TURNS Against Trump as Comey SCORES EARLY WIN, Shan Wu, Oct. 17, 2025. It’s an early Halloween egging for Trump’s DOJ in the James Comey case as Comey’s defense team racks up an early win. Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu breaks down the nature of the win and it’s significance for the ongoing Comey prosecution just getting started.Underage teen rapists and traffickers Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey EpsteinMiami Herald, Epstein had dinners with a top Florida prosecutor on his case, docs show, Julie K Brown and Claire Healy, Oct. 17, 2025. Jeffrey Epstein had multiple appointments, phone calls and dinners with Matthew Menchel — the Miami U.S. Attorney’s office chief criminal prosecutor who spearheaded Epstein’s sweetheart deal in 2007, newly released documents show.A tranche of over 8,500 pages of records from Epstein’s estate — released by the House Oversight Committee Friday — show that Epstein’s calendars and emails reflect that Menchel, who left the DOJ in 2007, had multiple meetings or dinners with Epstein in 2011, 2013 and 2017.Lawmakers also referred to a photograph of Menchel on a ski trip with Epstein sometime in the 2000s, but didn’t produce the photo. Contacted on Friday, Menchel initially referred the Miami Herald to a 2020 statement he had previously sent the Herald in response to questions about whether he had a business relationship with Epstein.“I had no business relationship with Mr. Epstein at any point, not before, during or after my tenure at the US Attorney’s Office.” He added that Epstein had tried to get his firm to handle some of the civil litigation associated with his case, but “we declined.”After publication, Menchel told the Herald that he never skied with Epstein. He did not deny that he had met with Epstein after he left the US Attorney’s Office.Epstein’s 2008 deal allowed the New York financier to escape federal sex trafficking charges that could have put him in prison for life. It also gave immunity to others involved in his crimes, many of whom have never been identified.A 2018 investigation by the Miami Herald, called ‘Perversion of Justice,’ detailed how federal prosecutors in South Floridaminimized Epstein’s abuse of almost 100 underage girls and worked closely with Epstein’s high-powered attorneys to keep the scope of his crimes secret.Following publication of the series, federal prosecutors in New York re-examined the case, and Epstein was arrested again in 2019 on more serious sex trafficking charges.However, he died nearly a month later in federal custody, in what was ruled a suicide by hanging. Friday’s revelation about Menchel comes as the House Oversight Committee continues its probe into the case. Lawmakers are examining whether there were other wealthy and powerful men who were involved in Epstein’s crimes and whether there was a cover-up by the FBI and Justice Department.Several banks are also under scrutiny for failing to flag financial transactions even though they knew Epstein had been accused of sex trafficking minors.E-mail message showing that Jeffrey Epstein was scheduled to meet with Matthew Menchel.President Trump, who was once a friend of Epstein’s, has denied he had any knowledge or involvement with the moneyman’s sex crimes. After initially promising to release the Justice Department files on the case, and announcing that a list of Epstein’s clients was “on her desk,” Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, abruptly announced in July that a review of the files revealed there was no Epstein client list and no credible evidence that others were involved in his crimes.That led to a public outcry, especially from Epstein’s survivors who held an emotional press conference on Capitol Hill in September to implore Trump to release the files. Trump has called recent attention to the case a hoax. Key questions have long been asked about how Epstein was able to obtain federal immunity in the first place.A judge later ruled that the plea deal, which was initially sealed by Acosta’s office, was illegal because it was kept from Epstein’s victims and their attorneys. The House Oversight Committee on Friday released the transcript of testimony by Menchel’s former boss, Alexander Acosta, who testified Sept. 19 in front of the committee.Acosta, Trump’s former labor secretary, testified that he and other federal prosecutors, including Menchel, didn’t want to take Epstein’s case to trial because they considered it a “crapshoot.” In this July 30, 2008 file photo, Jeffrey Epstein is shown in custody in West Palm Beach, Fla.In this July 30, 2008 file photo, Jeffrey Epstein is shown in custody in West Palm Beach, Fla. Uma Sanghvi Palm Beach Post-USA TODAY NETWORK In its coverage of the case, the Herald raised questions about Menchel’s role in negotiating the deal. Besides Acosta and Menchel, the case was overseen by prosecutors Jeffrey Sloman, Andrew Lourie and Ann Marie Villafaña.The Herald found that Villafaña, the lead line prosecutor, drafted an 82-page prosecution memo directed to Acosta, his deputy, Sloman, and Menchel, who was then head of the criminal division. In the memo, she proposed a 60-count indictment of Epstein on sex trafficking charges.A subsequent probe by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) later found that its child exploitation division in Washington reviewed Villafana’s materials, offered to work with her and called the memo “exhaustive” and “well done.”Acosta would later tell federal investigators he could not recall ever reading her memo, and that he relied on Menchel and others to know the details of the case. Acosta testified that he never met Epstein or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and abuse.In his comments before the committee, Acosta also reiterated that he trusted Menchel, who proposed the plea deal with Epstein’s lawyers. An OPR report issued in 2020 describes how Villafaña became angry in July 2007, when Menchel explained to her in an email that he had offered the deal to Epstein lawyer Lilly Sanchez, the only woman involved in Epstein’s defense. Villafaña felt it was an end-run around her, the report said.The report also noted that Menchel had dated Sanchez, should have informed his bosses about it and probably should have been recused from the case.Acosta, right, was asked about Menchel at least 17 times during his testimony before the House Oversight Committee. He indicated that he had not been aware that Menchel had a prior romantic relationship with one of Epstein’s lawyers and that Menchel should have told him so that they could have discussed whether there was a conflict of interest.Acosta was also questioned about a photograph that allegedly showed Menchel skiing in Aspen with Epstein sometime in the early 2000s. The committee failed to produce the photograph when asked for more information by Acosta.Menchel left the US Attorney’s office in August 2007, before Epstein’s deal was finalized, to take a job with the international law firm Kobre & Kim.His LinkedIn profile indicates he is still a lead trial attorney at the firm. Ultimately, Acosta approved Epstein’s plea deal in 2008 despite evidence that Epstein had molested dozens of high school girls whom he lured to his Palm Beach home to give him massages. The “massages” were a pretense to molest the girls, who ranged in age from 13 to 17 years of age.Epstein pleaded guilty to two state prostitution charges, one involving a minor, and would serve only 13 months in a county jail. Although he was forced to register as a sex offender, he was allowed to leave the jail each day to go to his office in West Palm Beach. Several women later filed lawsuits that claimed they were sexually abused by Epstein in his office while he was supposed to be supervised by the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. Acosta testified that Epstein’s defense team tried to get Epstein off the hook entirely, but he told lawmakers that he believed Epstein’s crimes warranted jail time and stood his ground.Still, he and the other prosecutors — including Villafaña — all agreed that taking it to trial would risk him escaping jail altogether, he said. Part of the reason for the decision, Acosta said, was the reluctance of his underage victims to testify. “Some refused to talk whatsoever,” Acosta said of the victims. “Others said he did nothing wrong and that’s the evidence you have, right?” Still, public court records show that Palm Beach police and the FBI did gather other evidence — including phone records showing Epstein had contacted underage girls, physical evidence and photographs that the girls were in his home and phone message pads showing countless messages left for him about “girls” being available for “massages.”Several victims also told the Herald that they were willing to cooperate with his prosecution. Many said they felt the prosecutors betrayed them. Acosta said he wasn’t familiar with the corroborating evidence in the case and relied on his top prosecutors’ recommendations. He explained to the committee that while the prosecutors believed a crime had been committed, he didn’t think jurors would understand that the nuances of the case — in other words, the jury would think the victims were prostitutes.“I want to be crystal-crystal-clear, lest I be taken out of context or lest I be clipped on this: No one in our office ever thought that the victims were anything less than victims. No one thought that they were — you know, the idea that they were involved as anything other than victims — did not cross the mind of a soul,” he said.Acosta admitted that Epstein’s lawyers — and their aggressive tactics — would also make the case hard to win at trial. “We put him in jail, he registered as a sex offender, and the victims had an opportunity to recover. And that was a win,” Acosta told the committee. “Looking at all of this, the ultimate judgment was, ‘Do you roll the dice?’ and if he gets away with it, you’re sending a signal to the community that he can get away with it.”Acosta was appointed by Trump as labor secretary in 2017. He resigned after Epstein’s 2019 arrest because, he said, he felt the scandal would be a distraction for the Trump administration. New York Times, Prince Andrew Surrenders Duke of York Title, Mark Landler, Oct. 17, 2025. The royal’s fall from grace began nearly six years ago with a calamitous BBC television interview about his ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Prince Andrew, above left, has surrendered the use of his title, the Duke of York, completing a fall from grace that began nearly six years ago with a calamitous television interview about his ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, above right.In a statement issued on Friday evening, Andrew said that after discussing the matter with his elder brother, King Charles III, he had decided he would “no longer use my title or the honors which have been conferred upon me. As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.”Andrew, 65, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, was removed from official duties in 2019 after a fierce public backlash against him over the interview, which took place with the BBC, as well as allegations of sexual misconduct. He has more recently been ensnared in a spying scandal involving China.The cascade of scandals have yet again thrust the British royal family into crisis. Charles, who had urged the queen to push Andrew into internal exile in 2019, appeared poised to take further punitive steps this time, according to British news media reports. After the two brothers consulted, Andrew acted preemptively.“We have concluded the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the Royal Family,” Andrew said in a two-paragraph statement. “I have decided, as I always have, to put duty to my family and country first. I stand by my decision five years ago to stand back from public life.”In the 2019 BBC interview, Andrew claimed to have severed links with Mr. Epstein, who hanged himself in his prison cell in New York earlier that year, after they were photographed together in New York in 2010. But details have since filtered out which suggest he stayed in touch with Mr. Epstein after he claimed to have cut off ties.In 2022, Andrew was stripped of his military titles after Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, accused the prince of raping her when she was a teenager, a charge he denied. He settled a lawsuit brought by Ms. Giuffre in 2022 for an undisclosed amount, with no admission of guilt. A memoir by Ms. Giuffre, who died by suicide in Australia in April, will be published this month, recounting the story of how she was introduced to Andrew through Mr. Epstein.Andrew has also been drawn into a scandal involving Chinese spying efforts in Britain, with revelations that he met on multiple occasions with Cai Qi, a senior Chinese official who is close to China’s president, Xi Jinping.Mr. Cai is believed to have received information collected by two British men who worked with members of the British Parliament who were active in Chinese affairs. Prosecutors dropped a spying case against the two men, which has mushroomed into a political crisis for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.As the son of a monarch, Andrew will remain a prince, palace officials said in a briefing on Friday. His mother had conferred the title of Duke of York on him when he got married in 1986. Historians say it is extremely rare for a member of the royal family to give up such a title. Prince Harry, who withdrew from royal duties and moved to the United States in 2020, remains the Duke of Sussex.Andrew’s daughters will retain their titles as Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. But his former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will no longer use the title of Duchess of York, which she had retained after the couple divorced.Andrew had already ceased using the honorific, His Royal Highness. And he had been stripped of more than a dozen military titles, including Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, a storied infantry regiment in the British Army.For all of Andrew’s disgrace, the queen still included him in family rituals and celebrations. After her death in 2022, however, he became more isolated. Now, Andrew will also be banished from the family Christmas celebration at Sandringham, in Norfolk, northeast of London, according to the palace officials. The annual event is a staple in the royal calendar.In a not-so-small consolation, Andrew will continue to live in the Royal Lodge, a grand royal residence on the Windsor estate, west of London. Royal watchers have long speculated that Charles would evict his brother from the residence. But palace officials said Andrew had a private tenancy agreement with the Crown Estate, which was unaffected by his decision to stop using his title.New York Times,Trump Refiles His $15 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against The New York Times, Michael M. Grynbaum, Oct. 17, 2025. A federal judge had previously dismissed the complaint as unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. The president claims that The Times sought to defame him during the 2024 election.President Trump on Thursday refiled his defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and several of its reporters, again accusing the news organization of seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation as a businessman.Last month, Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, threw out the president’s original 85-page complaint, saying it was unnecessarily discursive, laden with “florid and enervating” prose, and took too long to lodge formal allegations of defamation.“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” Judge Merryday wrote at the time. He gave the president’s lawyers 28 days to refile an amended complaint.Mr. Trump’s revised legal filing on Thursday evening was 40 pages long, less than half the length of the original. One of the defendants in the original suit, the Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, is no longer cited as a defendant. Many of the original complaint’s lengthy tributes to Mr. Trump, like a sentence that described his 2024 election victory as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history,” are no longer present.As in the original filing, the amended complaint asks for $15 billion in damages.Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against The Times is the latest in a series of actions against major news outlets. Both CBS News and ABC News agreed to pay $16 million each to settle lawsuits that Mr. Trump brought against the networks. The ABC late-night star Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air last month after Mr. Trump’s top communications regulator assailed his program and suggested that he might take regulatory action against the broadcaster.Mr. Trump’s complaint against The Times claims that a pair of articles published in The New York Times sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman and television star of the reality show “The Apprentice.” One of the articles was written by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and the other by Peter Baker.Like the original version of the complaint, the new filing also names as a defendant Penguin Random House, which published a book about Mr. Trump written by Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner.A spokeswoman for The Times said on Thursday night: “As we said when this was first filed and again after the judge’s ruling to strike it: This lawsuit has no merit. Nothing has changed today. This is merely an attempt to stifle independent reporting and generate P.R. attention, but The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics.”Judge Merryday is an appointee of President George H.W. Bush. He had said that Mr. Trump’s original lawsuit ran afoul of legal requirements that a complaint be “a short and plain statement of the claim.”Mr. Trump also sued The Times in 2021, over an article that examined his financial history; that suit was dismissed, and Mr. Trump was instructed to pay The Times’s legal expenses. Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign also sued the newspaper for libel in 2020 over an Opinion essay; that lawsuit was also dismissed. New York Times, Trump Administration: After Racist Texts, New York G.O.P. Disbands Young Republican Group, Benjamin Oreskes and Nicholas Fandos, Oct. 17, 2025 (print ed.). State party leaders eliminated the New York State Young Republicans’ charter, allowing them to reconstitute the organization with new leaders.Republican leaders in New York voted on Friday to disband the state’s young Republican group after racist texts among group members became public.The vote came days after Politico published the messages and reported on how leaders of the New York State Young Republicans and young Republicans in other states had engaged in exchanges that included racist and antisemitic comments. Some participants spoke of raping their political enemies and placing them in gas chambers.Several members of the New York State Young Republicans — including a recent chair and vice chair — were part of the chat and made offensive comments sent over Telegram.“The Young Republicans was already grossly mismanaged, and vile language of the sort made in the group chat has no place in our party or its subsidiary organizations.” Edward F. Cox, New York’s Republican Party chairman, said in a written statement.One state Republican official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the effort to disband the group, which was first reported by Newsday, would allow for a fresh start. By eliminating the group’s charter, the official said, party leaders can reconstitute it and bring in new leadership. The Bulwark Morning Shots:Trump’s Very Own Basket of Deplorables, William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift,Oct. 17, 2025. The president and his movement are dropping the fig leaf and declaring half the country the enemy. How can this go on?Tech CEOs are another breed, exhibit 42,205: Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, shocked San Franciscans last week when he said that he “fully supports” President Trump and wants National Guard troops deployed to their city. But his allegiance to Mr. Trump goes much further.Screenshots of internal documents and communications obtained by The New York Times show that Salesforce has pitched Immigration and Customs Enforcement on using the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities to help ICE staff up as Mr. Trump expands immigration raids and deportations around the country. The company, which had hoped to land a paid contract, was responding to an ICE request that firms explain how they could help the agency hire more agents. It was not clear how much money the services could raise. New York Times, Salesforce Offers Its Services to Boost Trump’s Immigration Force, Heather Knight, Oct. 17, 2025 (print ed.). The San Francisco-based firm has told ICE that it could use A.I. to help the agency nearly triple its staff. The company’s C.E.O., once a progressive tech titan, has embraced President Trump.Marc Benioff, right, the chief executive of Salesforce, shocked San Franciscans last week when he said that he “fully supports” President Trump and wants National Guard troops deployed to their city.But his allegiance to Mr. Trump goes much further.Screenshots of internal documents and communications obtained by The New York Times show that Salesforce has pitched Immigration and Customs Enforcement on using the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities to help ICE staff up as Mr. Trump expands immigration raids and deportations around the country.Mr. Benioff’s support of the National Guard ran counter to the city’s famously liberal underpinnings and to his own reputation as a benefactor of progressive causes. San Francisco leaders, already outraged by those remarks, were upset to learn on Thursday that the homegrown company was trying to help Mr. Trump with his immigration crackdown.The internal documents include a five-page memo sent on Aug. 26 that explained how Salesforce is best suited to help the agency with “talent acquisition” to achieve its goal “to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.”The company, which had hoped to land a paid contract, was responding to an ICE request that firms explain how they could help the agency hire more agents. It was not clear how much money the services could raise.Other Salesforce documents included a spreadsheet of ICE “opportunities,” the company’s term for possible contracts, as well as an internal brainstorming slide deck about how artificial intelligence agents might help ICE evaluate information sent to the agency’s tip line and improve investigations.The internal information was provided to The Times by an individual with ties to Salesforce who was granted anonymity because the person was not authorized to share it. The Times described the documents to Salesforce, and the company did not dispute their authenticity.Mr. Benioff declined to comment publicly for this article, and a Salesforce spokeswoman said the company does not discuss contracts. The company said in a statement that it has served the U.S. government under many administrations and that all of its customers are bound by company policies to use its products responsibly.Salesforce, which also contracted with ICE under the Obama and Biden administrations, is far from the only tech company helping ICE drastically expand its enforcement efforts under Mr. Trump. Palantir, the Denver-based software company co-founded by the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, is a major partner of ICE. Microsoft and IBM also have contracts with the agency.Tech leaders have increasingly catered to Mr. Trump this year, from giving him gifts in the Oval Office to joining him at state dinners, as Mr. Benioff did in England last month. Critics have suggested that the executives are well aware that Mr. Trump can help their companies thrive — or try to punish them in various ways.Salesforce relies heavily on federal contracts and is looking to expand that business line. Mr. Benioff said in an earnings call on Sept. 4 that the U.S. government is “our largest and most important customer” and that its contracts across numerous departments are worth billions to the company. He cited the U.S. Army, U.S. Coast Guard and the Veterans Affairs Administration among the agencies that use Salesforce products.“But we’re starting to expand what we do even more,” he said.Deep in the company’s most recent earnings report is an acknowledgment of the risks of relying on government contracts. Politicians could change their policies, or budgets could dry up. And some partnerships might hurt the company’s image.“Our relationships with certain government entities may result in negative publicity or reputational harm,” the earnings report states.Salesforce is in various stages of trying to sign new ICE contracts, with some already completed, according to the spreadsheet tracking business possibilities with the agency.The Aug. 26 memo, a response to a request for information issued by ICE, explained how Salesforce is an “ideal platform” to modernize ICE’s hiring process and “implement an aggressive, high-yield marketing strategy” to reach recruits. Salesforce can help ICE, it says, “identify, engage and acquire the talent profile proven to drive ICE mission success, and in turn, administration priorities.”Global NewsNew York Times, A Somali Hospital Closed After U.S. Aid Cuts. Fired Employees Reopened It Without Pay, Stephanie Nolen, Photographs by Brian Otieno, Oct. 17, 2025. After the Trump administration stopped funding a medical center for women and children, a determined group of health care workers refused to let it shutter.More On U.S. Politics, GovernanceNew York Times,7 Takeaways From the First N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Michael Gold, Updated Oct. 17, 2025. The first debate in the general election of the New York City mayor’s race was a bitter and combative affair, with the three candidates trading personal attacks, disagreeing fiercely over the Israel-Hamas war and questioning their rivals’ credentials.Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic front-runner, took an aggressive stance toward his main opponent, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, as well as toward President Trump — seeking to project strength and to make the case that he would stand up to Mr. Trump while Mr. Cuomo was beholden to the president.Mr. Cuomo, 67, who is in second place in the polls, had a more difficult job: to land a meaningful punch against Mr. Mamdani, 33, and cast himself as a common-sense, experienced alternative. Curtis Sliwa, 71, the Republican candidate, fought for speaking time, lashing out at both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo.Here are seven takeaways from the debate. The candidates will face off again on Oct. 22, ahead of the Nov. 4 election.Mamdani goes into attack mode.Even with a strong lead in the polls, Mr. Mamdani did not play it safe. He aggressively attacked Mr. Cuomo, arguing that the former governor did not understand the city’s affordability crisis and did not have integrity.Mr. Mamdani drew attention to Mr. Cuomo’s attacks over his rent-stabilized apartment in Queens. Mr. Cuomo argued that only working-class residents should qualify for those apartments.“You’ve heard it from Andrew Cuomo that the No. 1 crisis in this city, the housing crisis — the answer is to evict my wife and I,” Mr. Mamdani said. “He thinks you address this crisis by unleashing my landlord’s ability to raise my rent.”Then he made an appeal to voters.“If you think that the problem in this city is that my rent is too low, vote for him,” he said. “If you know the problem in this city is that your rent is too high, vote for me.”MSNBC Daily, Republicans’ attacks on ‘No Kings’ protests are desperate, Jill Lawrence, Oct. 17, 2025. You might find this hard to believe, but Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are making stuff up. This is a go-to move when they fear their power and corrupt authoritarian plans are at risk, and that’s happening a lot lately.Now, with millions of people signed up to attend thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations Saturday across America, the GOP’s desperation meter is at DEFCON 1.The alarm is clear from the overwrought Republican leaders spouting hallucinatory talking points in which “No Kings” protests become “‘Hate America’ rallies.” They are weaving a tale of extremists, terrorists, Marxists, agitators, “the pro-Hamas crowd” (House Speaker Mike Johnson’s phrase), and professional protesters supposedly paid by billionaire George Soros. It’s straight-up fearmongering.In truth, anti-Trump protests, like the first “No Kings” demonstrations earlier this year, have drawn people of all backgrounds, united not by payment but by their deep concern — even despair — about what’s happening to their country.Some may show up this weekend wearing inflatable costumes as frogs, chickens, bears, dinosaurs or unicorns, as they have in Portland, Oregon, and outside Chicago. In D.C., we might once again see and hear a trombonist with the stage name Michael McTrouserpants.Oct. 16President Trump on Wednesday singled out people he wanted prosecuted. Looking on during the news conference were, from left, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general; Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).New York Times,News Analysis: Trump Names More Foes He Wants Prosecuted as Bondi and Patel Look On, Glenn Thrush, Oct. 16, 2025 (print ed.). Top officials, unwilling to fight for the independence of their institutions, watched on Wednesday as President Trump continued his pursuit of controlling law enforcement.The nation’s three most powerful law enforcement officials — Attorney General Pam Bondi and her top deputy, Todd Blanche, along with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director — padded into the Oval Office on Wednesday for a public show of unity and to herald some recent successes.They left about an hour later, after President Trump tossed out, offhandedly, three names of people he wanted prosecuted: Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal indictments against him; Andrew Weissmann, a former F.B.I. official who was a lead prosecutor for the team investigating the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia in the 2016 election; and Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.“Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal,” he told the three administration officials, who have tried — with a few notable exceptions — to do what he wants.They smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.“His interviewer was Weissmann — I hope they’re going to look into Weissmann, too — Weissmann’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump added, referring to a recent event in which Mr. Smith appeared alongside Mr. Weissmann. “And he had somebody, Lisa, who was his puppet, worked in the office, really, as the top person. I think she should be looked at very strongly.”It was a common enough example of second-term Trump theater-in-the-Oval. But it was also a diorama of the administration’s lopsided power dynamic between a president bent on controlling federal law enforcement and appointees unwilling or unable to fight for the historic independence of their institutions.“Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” Mr. Smith told Mr. Weissmann in the Oct. 8 interview that captured Mr. Trump’s attention.Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.“There are rules in the department about how to bring a case — follow those rules,” Mr. Smith added. “You can’t say: ‘I want this outcome. Let me throw the rules out.’”The president, who vowed to go after the “scum” who once investigated him, often calls for investigations of people he hates, including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen.But those threats appear to be gaining legal force.At Mr. Trump’s urging, and often over the objections of career prosecutors, the Justice Department recently secured indictments against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche warned that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.Mr. Trump, who tried with limited success to bring the bureau and Justice Department under his control during his first term, has left little to chance in his second.By installing Mr. Patel and other loyalists into top federal law enforcement posts, he has not only ensured their compliance but also established a cadre of political surrogates and lock-step messengers willing to cast aside core departmental norms to serve his political agenda. New York Times,Live Updates: Former Trump Aide John Bolton Is Indicted Over Handling of Classified Information, Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush and Minho Kim, Oct. 16, 2025 Mr. Bolton, who has become a critic of his former boss, is among a string of presidential foes to become prosecutorial targets. But his case gained momentum in the Biden administration.John R. Bolton, right, the national security hawk and former adviser to President Trump who became one of his most outspoken critics, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on Thursday on charges of mishandling classified information.An 18-count indictment accused Mr. Bolton of using personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of “diary” notes about his day-to-day activities as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and 2019. The notes, which were sent to two family members who did not have security clearances, included national defense information, such as details classified as top secret, according to the indictment.President Trump and his former aide parted bitterly toward the end of his first term, and the president greeted the news with grim satisfaction. “He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump said in response to a question from a reporter at the White House about Mr. Bolton. “That’s the way it goes.”While Mr. Bolton is part of a string of perceived enemies of the president to become prosecutorial targets, the federal investigation into him gained momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence agencies gathered what former officials have described as troubling evidence.The prosecution appeared to follow normal department channels, without firings or forced transfers. Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, was among the career prosecutors to sign off on the charges in conjunction with the Justice Department’s national security division.By contrast, Mr. Trump in recent weeks has removed or sidelined prosecutors in order to secure indictments against two of his longtime targets: James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.Mr. Bolton is expected to surrender to the authorities on Friday and make his initial court appearance in Greenbelt, Md., later that day.Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed the charges against Mr. Bolton. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.”Mr. Bolton, in a statement, declared that the indictment was part of an intimidation campaign against critics of Mr. Trump. “I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power,” he said.The two family members who received Mr. Bolton’s notes were not identified in the 26-page indictment, but prosecutors said Mr. Bolton occasionally used his AOL and Google email accounts to send notes to them.Mr. Bolton’s written descriptions of where he learned information often indicated that he recognized that he was describing carefully guarded government secrets, the indictment added. One entry by Mr. Bolton began, “The intel briefer said,” while another read, “while in the Situation Room, I learned.”Making matters worse, Mr. Bolton’s emails were later hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran, the indictment said.“A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021, but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information, that Bolton had placed in the account from his time as national security adviser,” according to the filing.One surreal section of the indictment described Mr. Bolton apparently being taunted by his hacker. A message on July 25, 2021, warned, “I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email (some of which have been attached).” The email went on to declare, “This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late.” A representative for Mr. Bolton forwarded the email to the F.B.I.The indictment laid out exchanges between Mr. Bolton and the two family members that made it clear he was meticulously assembling a record with their help, with the intent of turning it into a book. All three knew they needed to be discreet.A day after Mr. Bolton joined the White House in April 2018, the indictment said, they started using an encrypted messaging app. “Why are we using this now? The encryption?” one of Mr. Bolton’s correspondents asked. “Yup,” the other responded. Mr. Bolton then chimed in: “For Diary in the future!!!!”The charging document laid out a number of 20- to 50-page documents that Mr. Bolton sent to the two people over the app. After sending one 24-page document about his time as the national security adviser, Mr. Bolton followed up with a message that read, “None of which we talked about!!!” One of the recipients wrote back: “Shhhhh.”Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that the facts of the case “were investigated and resolved years ago.” Mr. Bolton, like many public officials, “kept diaries — that is not a crime,” Mr. Lowell added. Those diaries, Mr. Lowell said, were unclassified records that were shared “only with his immediate family, and known to the F.B.I. as far back as 2021.”In August, F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Bolton’s Maryland home and his office in Washington, carrying out boxes of papers, computer files and other materials as part of the investigation. Subsequent court filings indicated that some documents with low-level classification markings were found. Thursday’s filing said that printed versions of Mr. Bolton’s diary entries, which contained classified information, were found in the search of his home.The New York Times has previously reported that the United States gathered data from an adversary’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case.Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would use in his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which offered a highly critical behind-the-scenes look at the Trump administration.None of the classified information described in the indictment was mentioned in the book, according to the filing, which said that Mr. Bolton shared intelligence about a foreign adversary’s plan for a future missile launch, a covert action in a foreign country and sensitive sources and methods used to collect intelligence.Mr. Bolton has been a prolific television pundit for more than a decade, and Thursday’s indictment used some of his own statements against him, including his declaration that if he had done what Hillary Clinton did in using a private email server as secretary of state, “I’d be in jail right now.”Prosecutors also cited his criticism of the Trump administration earlier this year when it was disclosed that officials had used Signal, a commercial messaging app, to discuss an upcoming military strike in Yemen.“I couldn’t find a way to express how stunned I was that anybody would do this,” he said in April. “You simply don’t use commercial means of communication, whether it’s supposedly an encrypted app or not, for these kinds of discussions.”While the Bolton case has taken a number of unexpected turns over the years, it stretches back to the waning days of the first Trump administration, when White House officials were furious that Mr. Bolton had written the book.Shortly before Mr. Bolton’s memoir was published, the administration went to court seeking to delay its release. The Justice Department around that time also opened a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Bolton had mishandled classified information by disclosing certain details in the book. A judge later concluded that he might have published classified information, but the criminal investigation appeared to languish until the intelligence about his emails was gathered years later.A 2021 settlement of the litigation over the book included the condition that Mr. Bolton return to the government any material in his possession “that may contain classified information,” the indictment said.Earlier this year, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, briefed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, on the information collected about Mr. Bolton’s emails. The officials believed that the material Mr. Bolton had transcribed into the unclassified and unsecured email contained classified information.Each intelligence agency makes its own determinations about what information is classified, so it is often up to the “originating” agency to decide whether pieces of information are classified, and how sensitive they are.Mr. Bolton was investigated under the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that has in recent years taken on an outsize role in American politics as investigators have pursued similar cases against high-profile officials or candidates.During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton was investigated for her use of a private email server to handle her work as secretary of state.In 2022, F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and found more than 100 classified documents, in addition to others retrieved earlier. Mr. Trump was indicted in that case, but the charges were dismissed by a trial judge during the 2024 presidential campaign.And in early 2023, the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to investigate how classified documents had ended up in President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s office and home after he left the vice presidency.John Bolton said in a statement that he was being prosecuted for criticizing Mr. Trump and cast himself as “the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department.” The government, he said, was using “charges that were declined before or distort the facts” to punish Trump’s enemies. He called the case an “abuse of power ” by the second Trump administration, which he compared to Stalinist Russia.“These charges are not just about his focus on me or my diaries, but his intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct,” he said. “Dissent and disagreement are foundational to America’s constitutional system, and vitally important to our freedom.”New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Plans Meeting With Putin to Discuss an End to War on Ukraine, Tyler Pager, Oct. 16, 2025.
- Russia-Ukraine: President Trump said high-level U.S. and Russian envoys would meet next week in anticipation of a sit-down with President Vladimir V. Putin in Budapest to discuss a cease-fire in Moscow’s war against Ukraine. Mr. Trump, who is set to host President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the White House on Friday, said on social media that a call with Mr. Putin had yielded “great progress.” Read more ›
- Israel-Gaza: Mr. Trump suggested that Hamas, whose fighters have executed members of rival groups in Gaza since the cease-fire with Israel, could face military strikes if the violence continues. “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them,” he wrote on social media, without offering details of who would conduct the strikes or whether it could involve U.S. forces.
- Chicago crackdown: A federal appeals panel kept in place an order temporarily blocking the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops to the Chicago area, saying that “the facts do not justify the president’s actions.” Earlier, a federal judge said she would order agents conducting deportation operations in Chicago to wear body cameras.
As Trump wrapped up his remarks in the Oval Office about his administration’s efforts to try to make I.V.F. more accessible, he made a rare acknowledgment of being tired.“Yesterday I did this, and I stood for about an hour and a half as people spoke,” he said about his event Wednesday in the Oval Office with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and Pam Bondi, the attorney general. “And I said, ‘This time I’m sitting right there, and I’m going to watch you.’”The president then took a seat in his chair behind the Resolute Desk and turned the microphone over to other guests, all of whom remained standing behind him.Regarding Chicago: The 18-page preliminary ruling by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit concurred with the reasoning of Judge April M. Perry of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, who put a temporary block on deployments in her state on Oct. 8.“The facts do not justify the president’s actions in Illinois,” under the statute the Trump administration invoked in its attempt to deploy the National Guard, the appeals panel wrote, though it left open the possibility that could change in the future.The decision means that National Guard troops from Texas and Illinois cannot be stationed on the streets outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview, Ill., where protesters have gathered as the Trump administration has carried out an immigration crackdown in the Chicago area.The unsigned order was issued by a panel of three judges: Ilana Rovner, David Hamilton and Amy St. Eve. The three judges were nominated to the appellate bench by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, respectively.Illinois and Chicago officials have vehemently opposed any use of military troops in the streets, and they say the prospect could intensify a growing wave of objections to Mr. Trump’s immigration policies in the Chicago area.Some 500 members of the Illinois and Texas National Guards have already been activated in the Chicago area, according to a statement by the military’s Northern Command. Last week, it said the troops “are conducting planning and training” but not “operational activities.”The ruling on Thursday is unlikely to be the final word in the dispute. Neither Judge Perry nor the Seventh Circuit have made a final ruling on the merits of the case. The Trump administration could at some point appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Mr. Trump could also invoke the Insurrection Act, which would provide a fresh legal basis for sending in troops and would almost certainly be the subject of another round of lawsuits. New York Times,The Future of New York: New York Is Going to Flood. Here’s What the City Can Do to Survive, John Surico and Nick Underwood, Oct. 15-16, 2025. The waters surrounding New York allowed it to grow into an economic powerhouse. But what has been a blessing is increasingly a threat, as flooding becomes one of the city’s greatest challenges.Projections that model future flooding in the city show that it will only get worse. By 2080, many areas will face an increased risk of tidal flooding because of rising sea levels.At the same time, more neighborhoods will become vulnerable to extreme rainfall. The Bulwark Morning Shots,Jack Smith Speaks, Will Saletan, Oct. 16, 2025. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who secured indictments of Donald Trump in 2023 and 2024, is reemerging with a call to action. It’s not a call to action against Trump. It’s a call to unite across the political spectrum in defense of the rule of law.Smith, shown at right in an official photo, faces a cohort of demagogues who have captured Congress and the White House, taken over the executive branch, ruthlessly abused power, and conned millions of voters into believing that any criticism of this administration’s corruption is partisan.The demagogues’ strategy was on display last week, when Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Josh Hawley called Smith a “hit man” who had led a “witch hunt” against Trump. Senator Eric Schmitt said Smith had been appointed to “get Trump.” Bondi accused Smith of trying to “weaponize the Justice Department against Donald Trump.”These lies are designed to inflame conservative voters and make them ignore Smith and other critics of the administration.Smith is trying to puncture that propaganda. And he’s taking his efforts public. In a September 16 speech at George Mason University and an October 8 interview at University College London—the latter was posted to YouTube on Tuesday, the former was recorded in videos obtained on Wednesday by The Bulwark—Smith emphasized the political neutrality of career prosecutors. He noted his own service in administrations of both parties, including Trump’s first term.Responding to the myth of a partisan double standard in the Justice Department—a myth promoted by Bondi among others—he explained why, for example, Trump had been indicted for his handling of classified documents while Joe Biden hadn’t. The difference, Smith observed, lay in the facts of the two cases, starting with Trump’s obstruction of the government’s efforts to recover its files.Again and again, Smith emphasized that the current administration has diverged from all previous administrations. “Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” he told the audience in London. This divergence, he added, takes two forms: personal loyalty to the president over loyalty to institutions, and a commitment to outcomes instead of rules.Smith outlined numerous examples:
- The pardons and commutations given to everyone convicted of violent crimes on January 6, 2021. Smith put it starkly: “They were pardoned by the president because they committed their crimes in his name and in his interest.”
- The terminations of FBI agents and “the January 6 prosecutors and their staffs . . . for doing their jobs.”
- The appointment, as a senior adviser to the attorney general, of a man (Jared Wise) who “was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, telling other rioters to kill police officers.”
- The unwarranted “prosecution of the former director of the FBI,” James Comey. Smith pointed out that “the career prosecutors . . . who analyzed this said there wasn’t a case. And so they [apparently alluding to DOJ leaders and the White House] brought somebody in who had never been a criminal prosecutor, on days’ notice, to secure an indictment a day before the statute of limitations ended.”
- “Dismissing a criminal case against the current New York City mayor [Eric Adams] in exchange for his cooperation with the president’s political agenda—and then forcing the resignation of prosecutors who wouldn’t go along with that deal.” Smith told the George Mason audience: “I’ve been doing this 30 years. I never heard of such a thing.”
- “Refusing to even open a criminal investigation when senior members of this administration broadcast what was clearly classified information over a commercial messaging app, including to a member of the media.” He was alluding here to the infamous chat involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Folks,” Smith went on, “there is no Justice Department under any previous administration, Republican or Democrat, that on these facts would not have opened a criminal investigation, where the lives of our service members were put at risk.”
- “Deporting people from the United States despite a clear [judicial] order stating that a person can’t be deported.” To this, Smith added: “Leaders at the DOJ [apparently a reference to Emil Bove] allegedly telling prosecutors that they would disregard court orders if they [the court orders] come into conflict with the president’s agenda.”
- “In the first week of this administration, 17 inspector generals from across the government were fired,” Smith reminded the George Mason audience. “If you wanted to deter whistleblowers from coming forward and allow active corruption to happen, one of the first things you’d do is to get rid of those inspector generals.”
“Next thing you’d want to do if you wanted to erode the rule of law is to get rid of nonpartisan, apolitical career prosecutors,” said Smith. “Firing these people is completely unprecedented. No administration has ever tried it.” But this one has.Trump routinely calls Smith “deranged.” But in his remarks, Smith illustrated what it looks like to follow rules instead of trampling them as Trump and Bondi have. Last year, in a blow to Smith, the Supreme Court granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution. Then, when Trump won the presidential election, the Office of Legal Counsel—operating under Biden—told Smith he couldn’t prosecute Trump as a sitting president. Each time, Smith accepted the judgment and moved on. And while Trump spewed lies about him throughout the investigations, Smith never spoke out against Trump. To do so, Smith observed in London, would “make it hard for the defendant to get a fair trial.”As Americans of all backgrounds prepare to rally on Saturday against authoritarian government, Smith is now speaking out. He is doing so in a way to underscore all that’s at stake. “No man is above the law, and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it,” he told the students at George Mason, quoting Theodore Roosevelt. And then, in his own voice, Smith added: “When we say we have no kings in this country, that’s what we’re talking about.” What could happen without Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act if the radical activiist MAGA majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturns a law unanimously reaffiied by the U.S. House of Representatives two decades ago? (New York Times comparison graphic of current vs. plausible House splits for upcoming elections.).New York Times,Updates: Supreme Court Appears Poised to Upend Key Provision of Voting Rights Act, Abbie VanSickle, Oct. 16, 2025 (print ed.). In a dispute over a Louisiana voting map, the conservative majority signaled it might prohibit using race as a factor in creating election districts. Resulting redistricting could let states cement Republican control of Congress.The Supreme Court appeared poised on Wednesday to upend a key provision of a landmark civil rights law by prohibiting lawmakers from using race as a factor in drawing voting maps, which could spark widespread redistricting efforts.If the justices determine that lawmakers may not consider race in drawing districts, the repercussions for the country’s political balance could be sweeping, allowing Republican state legislatures to eliminate at least a dozen Democratic-held House districts across the South.It’s not clear how fast any redistricting could happen. The court typically issues major rulings by late June or early July, and the next major vote is the 2026 midterm elections in November.The case examines whether Louisiana lawmakers violated the Constitution when they adopted a new electoral map in 2024, creating the state’s second majority-Black district. It challenges a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.During the oral argument, several of the court’s conservative justices appeared focused on whether there should be a time limit for allowing race to be used as a factor in congressional maps, a requirement that stemmed from civil rights era protections aimed at undoing generations of efforts to suppress the power of Black voters.“This court’s cases, in a variety of contexts, have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time — sometimes for a long period of time, decades, in some cases — but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who is expected to be a key vote on the issue.“What exactly do you think the end point should be?” Justice Kavanaugh then asked a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued to uphold the Voting Rights Act.That question — whether there should be a time limit on using race-based remedies — appeared to be at the heart of the oral argument.The legal battle can be traced back to the 2020 census, which showed an increase in Louisiana’s population of Black adults. While Black Louisianans made up about a third of the state’s population, there was only one majority-Black congressional district out of six districts.After the census, state lawmakers revisited the map and passed a version that still had only one majority-Black district. Two groups of Black voters sued in 2022, asserting that state legislators had violated the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into one district and diluting their voting power.The Voting Rights Act, one of the central legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, banned discriminatory practices like literacy tests that had been used to disenfranchise people.A federal judge agreed, finding that the map likely did violate the statute. State lawmakers then proposed another map in January 2024, which included a second majority-Black district — a long, narrow one that wound from the southeast part of the state to the northwest.State lawmakers claimed that they had crafted the map with politics, not race, in mind, protecting valuable Republican incumbents, including Speaker Mike Johnson.But shortly after lawmakers approved that map, a dozen white voters sued, arguing that the new map was an illegal racial gerrymander that had caused them to suffer “unlawful, intentional discrimination based on race.”In April 2024, a divided panel of three federal judges agreed, striking down the new map. Louisiana then appealed to the Supreme Court. The justices paused the lower court’s order, allowing Louisiana’s new map to be used in the 2024 election. Democrats picked up a seat, as voters in the newly created district elected Cleo Fields, a longtime party figure from Baton Rouge. Mr. Fields is Black.The justices heard the case, Louisiana v. Callais, in the spring. But instead of issuing a decision in late June or early July, the justices, in a rare move, ordered new arguments for their next term, which began this month. Rearguments can be a signal that the justices are poised to take a broader action in a case. In 2009, the court called for reargument in Citizens United, a campaign finance case that turned from a minor case into a blockbuster, clearing the way for unlimited campaign spending by corporations.The court offered no explanation for punting on the case, but several weeks later, the justices announced that they would hear arguments on a more expansive question: whether Louisiana’s “intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”That question suggested that the justices appeared to be considering holding the provision of the Voting Rights Act that has been used to challenge redistricting plans unconstitutional.The court’s conservative justices have long pointed to what they have viewed as a tension between the Voting Rights Act’s goal of protecting minority voting rights and a colorblind conception in the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which requires that the law treat everyone equally.Two years ago, however, the justices rejected an Alabama voting map, finding that it had diluted the power of Black voters. In that case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has been a skeptic of the Voting Rights Act for decades, wrote the majority opinion agreeing that lawmakers could take race and other factors into account when redistricting.The new question in the Louisiana case has shaken up the alliances from the first argument.In the months since the justices announced that they would hear arguments again, the Louisiana officials who had defended the map have essentially switched sides, aligning with the white voter plaintiffs. They were joined by lawyers for the Trump administration.In a brief to the court, Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s attorney general, described the structure of the provision of the Voting Rights Act that allows race to be used as a factor in redistricting — Section 2 — as “unworkable and unconstitutional.”The constitutionality of Louisiana’s second majority-minority district was defended on Wednesday by a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Along with voting rights organizations, the NAACP has argued that the case is about whether minority communities continue to have meaningful representation in politics. They have also raised concerns that gains from the civil rights era were at risk. New York Times,How FEMA Is Forcing Disaster-Struck Towns to Fend for Themselves, Scott Dance, Oct. 16, 2025. President Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of disaster relief and recovery onto states. It’s already happening.Life is inching back to normal in the town of Cave City seven months after a tornado slammed into its corner of northeastern Arkansas. The only grocery store is about to reopen. Crews are starting to dig the foundation for a rebuilt funeral home.But the town — like so many others facing daunting recoveries from recent disaster — has had to go it alone, Mayor Jonas Anderson said.The Trump administration denied Cave City’s requests for Federal Emergency Management Agency money to help it recover. Mr. Anderson was forced to forge ahead anyway, racking up a bill of about $300,000 he said could end up eating 15 percent of the small town’s annual budget.Some of the nearly 2,000 residents have gotten federal help. FEMA agreed to cover repairs to the more than 50 homes damaged or destroyed when 165 mile per hour winds struck in March. The state pledged relief money, too. But Mr. Anderson said Cave City is carrying more of the burden of recovery than expected.“We’re making a really good recovery not because of some big FEMA reimbursement we got, but in spite of not getting it,” Mr. Anderson said. “People here are super resilient.”ImageA blue pickup truck is parked in front of a white trailer with a missing roof.Cave City, Ark., in May, two months after it was hit by a tornado. The Trump administration has denied the city’s requests for FEMA funds.Credit…Houston Cofield for The New York TimesThis could be the future for more communities across the country, based on Mr. Trump’s vision for emergency management in the United States: one that would transfer responsibility for disaster recovery from the federal government to the states in all but the largest catastrophes. For many places, it is already the reality.FEMA has been delaying disaster declarations and aid payments to communities, adding new hurdles to access some grant funds and cutting off the flow of money intended to boost resilience and prevent future disasters from causing so much damage.Emergency managers and elected officials across the country are adjusting to a system in which they can no longer count on the sort of disaster aid they typically expect from FEMA, which was established in 1979 to coordinate and professionalize disaster response. They are figuring out how to prepare for future disasters without key FEMA grants, raising private funds to replace federal aid and turning to state governments to beef up their preparations. In some places, volunteer disaster recovery squads have sprung up.More On ‘No Kings’ March Commentaries Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: The unhinged attacks on No Kings, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 16, 2025.The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” On Sunday, October 18, millions of Americans plan to do just that at thousands of “No Kings” protests held across the country. The message of the protests is simple: “America has No Kings.”In advance of the event, prominent Republicans have attacked the protest as un-American. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-IN) have all called it a “hate America rally.”Johnson described the No Kings protests as an “outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes“ and said those who attend the event “don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”Of course, one of the “foundational truths” of the United States is that it has no kings.“The original No Kings protest was 250 years ago,” actor Robert De Niro said in a video shared by Indivisible, one of the protest organizers. “Americans decided they didn’t want to live under the rule of King George III.” Organizers describe Sunday’s protest as a “peaceful national day of action and mass mobilization in response to the increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption of the Trump administration.”Johnson, however, claimed those attending would be “pro-Hamas“ and “antifa people.” Emmer said the protest involved “the terrorist wing“ of the Democratic Party. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the event was “part of antifa.”There are hundreds of groups involved in organizing the event. They include the ACLU, College Democrats of America, the Human Rights Campaign, the League of Conservation Voters, and the National Organization for Women. None of the organizing partners support Hamas or are affiliated with antifa.Other Republicans claimed that the attendees would be paid. Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) claimed that the event would have “professional protesters“ who were paid for by George Soros. Duffy also said the event would be filled with “paid protesters,” which “begs the question who’s funding it.”There appears to be no need to pay people to protest President Trump. YouGov poll released this week found that 55% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, including 46% who “strongly disapprove.” On average, recent polls show about 52% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance.About 4-6 million people attended the first No Kings protests in June. There is no evidence that any of them were paid.George Soros has funded some of the groups involved in organizing the protests. But those donations, many of them made years ago, were for general support. There is nothing to suggest that Soros’ Open Society Foundation has provided any funding specifically for organizing the protests, much less for paying individual protesters.“We do not pay people to protest or directly train or coordinate protestors,” the Open Society Foundation said in an August statement. “All Open Society grantees are required to comply with the law, and we expect our grantees to uphold our shared commitment to human rights, dignity, and nonviolence.” The invocation of Soros plays into the trope of wealthy Jewish men orchestrating major events.Marshall also suggested the No Kings protests were a recipe for violence. “We’ll have to get the National Guard out,” Marshall said. “Hopefully, it will be peaceful. I doubt it.” The June protests were overwhelmingly peaceful. Among the millions of participants, there were a handful of violent incidents. One person was fatally shot by accident, and other incidents involved people violently attacking protesters.Depicting peaceful protesters as violent terrorists is part of a broader campaign spearheaded by White House Advisor Stephen Miller. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed in September by Trump, redefines commonly held views — including identifying as “anti-Christian,” “extremism on migration,” or having “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality” — as “indicia” of violence. The memorandum instructs the federal government to “investigate and disrupt” any groups with people who hold these beliefs.Organizers expect turnout to greatly exceed that of the last No Kings protest in June. Trump, meanwhile, predicted that it would be a flop. “I hear very few people are gonna be there,” Trump said on Wednesday.The Contrarian,Opinion: Mike Johnson Calls No Kings Protestors ‘Terrorists,’ Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 16, 2025. GOP panic rises as millions prepare to turn out on Saturday.This Saturday, all those who oppose dictatorship will have a chance to engage peacefully in the second No Kings Day, which may wind up as the largest mass demonstration yet against an unhinged, lawless authoritarian regime that is tightening the noose on our democracy. Donald Trump has upped the ante in deploying the military against Americans, indicting political enemies, and effectively disbanding the House (Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to keep members out of town is certainly not his own). Despite all the MAGA mouthpieces’ bravado, notable cracks in the GOP façade have appeared. MAGA politicians’ increasingly hysterical outbursts suggest a mass peaceful demonstration attended by a wide cross-section of Americans is the last thing they want.Johnson’s obnoxious McCarthy-like attack on peaceful demonstrators was not isolated. “They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall,” he said. “It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the, you know, the Antifa people, they’re all coming out.” Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) also got in on the nonsense, declaring, “This is about one thing and one thing alone—to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold a hate America rally in DC next week.”Their choice of language is not accidental. In misrepresenting their opponents as “terrorists” for peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights, Republicans are attempting to squeeze them into Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional, all-purpose executive decree purporting to outlaw “ANTIFA” as a domestic terrorist organization. (Remember, ANTIFA is not a defined group or even a coherent ideology; moreover, Trump has no power to designate any domestic terrorist organization.) Predictably, anyone the regime dislikes has been receiving the ANTIFA or terrorist label—and coming under the threat of retribution. Whether the Trump regime intends to actually (further) weaponize the Department of Justice to try to stop protests and/or enact retribution remains to be seen, but such action would be grossly unconstitutional and trigger swift court challenges and public outcry.Aside from their baseless legal maneuvering, the MAGA cult’s freakout evidences how difficult they are finding it to maintain the big lies of 2025: blue cities are awash in violence, the government is benignly attempting to keep order, and their white Christian nationalist base is under siege. Right-wing media propagandists have so little material that they have to recycle old video to keep Trump’s pretext alive.Images will appear of millions of ordinary Americans waving American flags, peacefully reminding Trump that we are not a monarchy and demanding that the regime abide by the Constitution. When they surface, the MAGA propaganda machine sputters. Like the inflatable menagerie of characters now appearing in Portland, the appearance of No Kings protestors (e.g., a 70 yr. old holding a flag, or parents with kids carrying clever signs) undermines the MAGA lie. The true nature of the opposition (i.e. patriotic, diverse Americans) becomes harder to conceal. The level of MAGA hysteria has risen as the reasons to protest have increased, including the big, ugly bill’s jaw-dropping maneuver to cut health care coverage for ordinary Americans to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires; the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein scandal (i.e. protection of powerful, rich men who enabled child rape); attacks on the press and free speech more generally; efforts to destroy public employee unions; and RFK, Jr.’s endangering public health by destroying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) while peddling crackpot non-science with his fringe movement.If all that is not enough to get Americans into the streets, consider the large-scale corruption and self-dealing to enrich Trump and his family; politicization of the military; demolition of the Justice Department (transforming it into a political weapon to persecute opponents based on flimsy charges); illegal and unconstitutional use of military to blow up boats and murder suspected drug smugglers without due process; giving $20B $40B of taxpayer money to Argentinian President Javier Milei, a MAGA mini-me; and of course the ongoing, abusive, violent, and a lawless actions by ICE that victimize entire communities.Need more reasons to protest? Recall the unilaterally-imposed and unconstitutional trade war that effectively taxes every American consumer and business while fueling inflation; the attack on the Federal Reserve’s independence; evisceration of the National Institutes of Health including hundreds of millions in critical funding for cutting-edge medical research; dismantling USAID, which has killed hundreds of thousands of adults and kids and marred America’s international image; and mass layoffs of veterans together with unconscionable cuts to veterans’ care.Let’s not forget the transformation of the Supreme Court into a band of partisan MAGA operatives who have so egregiously abused their power and strayed from their constitutional mission as to incur the fury of lower courts; the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act; the criminalization of abortion and life-threatening forced birth laws that ensued; the mean-spirited bullying and persecution of trans Americans; and the attempt to rewrite the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship.Frankly, it is hard to think of any American not affected by one or more of these outrageous developments. If nothing else, turning out to protest the do-nothing GOP House and Senate majorities that have abandoned their jobs, ceded the power of the purse to Trump, and resorted to demeaning and vilifying the majority of Americans who oppose Trump and virtually all his policies should be more than enough justification to link arms with fellow Americans in defense of democracy, the rule of law, and decency.We will look forward to seeing you all out in joyful, peaceful protest. Please also join us for coverage of the day at 7:30 pm ET with reports from events around the country plus an all-star lineup of guests.News UpdatesLetters from an American, Historical Commentary: October 15, 2025 [Voting Rights, House Control, One-Party South Again?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 16, 2025. Today the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, which together challenge a federal court decision outlawing a racial gerrymander in the state of Louisiana.At stake is Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which declares: “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”About a third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, and when Republicans in the Louisiana state legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts after the 2020 census, they gerrymandered through “packing” and “cracking.” They packed as many Black voters as they could into one district and then cracked the rest across five others. This meant that out of the state’s six districts, only one is majority Black. Because voting patterns map onto racial patterns in Louisiana, this means that Black voters cannot elect representatives of their choice. As Madiba K. Dennie of Talking Points Memo notes, Louisiana has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction.So Black voters sued over the new map, and federal courts agreed that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. They told the legislature to draw new maps that created a second majority-Black district. To stop that change, a group of people who described themselves as “non–African American voters” sued, saying that drawing a map to create a majority-Black district is itself an illegal racial gerrymander.In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld the principle that if a state has used race to determine districts, it must show that it has a compelling reason to do so. In 2017 it said: “This Court has long assumed that one compelling interest is compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” In the past, the court saw that interest as served by guaranteeing the creation of majority-minority districts to guarantee that Black, Brown, and Asian-American voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer.In today’s hearings, the right-wing majority indicated it opposes the use of race in redistricting, suggesting the previous understanding of this issue is unconstitutional. Overturning the decision of the lower court would finish the gutting of the Voting Rights Act the Roberts Court began with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.This shift shows the willingness of the right-wing majority on the court to gather the power of the U.S. government into its own hands.The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.” Congress passed it after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, which reads:Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.When it passed the Voting Rights Act, Congress did what the Fifteenth Amendment required it to do to protect the right of racial minorities to vote. As political scientist Jonathan Ladd notes, now, though, the Supreme Court is on the cusp of saying that it, rather than Congress, can determine how to enforce the right of citizens to vote.That the Supreme Court appears to be taking aim at a constitutional amendment added to the Constitution during Reconstruction is a little too on-the-nose. When the federal government stopped enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, former Confederates took control of their states and instituted a one-party region that lasted until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.Today, Nate Cohn of the New York Times explained that striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act could eliminate more than a dozen districts in the South currently held by Democrats. Republicans could win virtually uncontested control of the South and so could control the House of Representatives even if they lost the popular vote by a significant margin. Cohn writes that Democrats would need to win the popular vote by between five to six points in order to win the House if the court strikes down Section 2.But, since gerrymandering depresses turnout of the losing party’s voters, Republicans would appear to hold the country even more firmly, making the United States as a whole reflect the American South from about 1874 to 1965.Such a one-party state would give the leader of that party whatever power party officials permitted. We are already seeing what that could look like.Julian E. Barnes and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that the Trump administration is stepping up its effort to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power. This effort has been spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliffe. Last month the administration told Congress that it considered Venezuelan drug cartels “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack on the United States,” meaning that the U.S. is at war. This declaration covered for the strikes on Venezuelan boats, which the administration claims were importing drugs to the U.S., although it has offered no proof of that assertion.Sources in the administration told the journalists that a presidential finding authorizes the CIA to conduct operations in the Caribbean and to take covert action against Maduro and his government. A presidential finding, also called a memorandum of notification, is a classified directive issued by the president to authorize the CIA to conduct a covert operation the president claims is necessary for national security. Findings are supposed to be transmitted to key congressional committees to keep Congress informed of the actions of the U.S. government, but lawmakers cannot make the information in them public.That “multiple U.S. officials” were willing to discuss the presidential finding with the New York Times journalists suggests the administration wanted to leak this information—perhaps, as legal analyst Asha Rangappa suggests, to make it sound like there is legal cover for what they are already doing or, as legal analyst Allison Gill suggests, to do an end run around Congress.Trump promised during the 2024 campaign that he was “not going to start a war,” and promised “to stop the wars.” He has campaigned heavily to win a Nobel Peace Prize, nonsensically claiming to have stopped at least seven or eight wars. But the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have gotten hotter during his administration, and Barnes and Pager note that the U.S. military is also building up its resources in the region near Venezuela. The Pentagon has deployed 10,000 troops to the area, stationing most of them on bases in Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Navy has sent eight warships and a submarine.This buildup comes as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has demanded that media outlets report only information authorized by department officials or lose their press credentials. All but a single far-right opinion network refused, leaving the department’s actions unscrutinized by the excellent journalists who had been covering the Pentagon. The Pentagon Press Association today said its members were “still committed to reporting on the U.S. military. But make no mistake,” it said, “today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening U.S. commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all.”Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that at least one of the U.S. strikes in the Caribbean—the one on September 19—targeted a boat that had left Colombia and was manned by Colombian nationals. The journalists note that “[t]he deliberate targeting of Colombians…suggests that the U.S. military’s campaign against suspected narcotics trafficking groups in the Caribbean is wider than previously believed.”Last week, the deputy director of the CIA, Michael Ellis, made himself the CIA’s general counsel.Yesterday Trump compared the strikes on “drug boats” with public executions Hamas supporters have carried out in Gaza in the wake of the ceasefire deal there. “They killed a number of gang members,” Trump said. “And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s ok, it’s a couple of very bad gangs. You know it’s no different than other countries—like Venezuela sent their gangs into us and we took care of those gangs.”Today Trump announced that he has the power to pay furloughed troops by taking any unused funds Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2026 and using that money to pay the troops.As budget and tax specialist Bobby Kogan notes, this is wildly illegal: only Congress can appropriate money and determine how it is spent, a constitutional requirement reinforced by the Antideficiency Act clarifying that it is illegal for the government to spend money that was not appropriated for that purpose. The military is funded on an annual basis, so when funding ran out on September 30, so did money to pay the troops.Kogan explains that Trump is turning to the account for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE), which was funded for two years and still has money. But, as Kogan points out, that shift creates another problem: as soon as the money is taken to pay the troops, it becomes unusable because that money ceased to be available on September 30.Kogan notes Trump’s order should also be unnecessary: Congress would pass a measure to pay the troops easily if only House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would call the House into session. Democrats have been begging Johnson to bring such a measure to the floor.Trump says that because he is commander in chief, he has the right to this power.More On U.S. Law, Crime, Courts The Bulwark Morning Shots,A Conversation with Tim Snyder, William Kristol, right, Oct. 16, 2025. My guest yesterday in the series of discussions that I’ve done for a decade was Timothy Snyder. Tim is a leading historian of central and eastern Europe and the author of several major works, including the magisterial Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. More recently, he’s been a major participant in contemporary debates through his popular and influential works, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), and On Freedom (2024).I found the conversation both stimulating and very helpful for understanding the current moment. Here are some excerpts, very lightly edited for clarity. You can watch or listen to the whole thing here.On some features of the Trumpist authoritarian project:I’ve been thinking about the mechanization of lying. So if you think about Pam Bondi giving testimony or Kash Patel, they don’t prepare for the actual substance of the conversation at all anymore. And also the way that they completely disrespect human ideas of social contract or even ideas about speaking truth because maybe you’re under oath or you have some obligation to do so.And related to or consistent with that are the giant fantasies, like the Stephen Miller terror memo about how there’s this giant Antifa conspiracy and therefore we have to have effectively a state of emergency. And the whole government has to be turned against the liberals and the Democrats and everybody who tries to organize themselves in the United States. I mean, you can see the resonances of this with Stalinism if you want, or with fascism if you want. But certainly it is a kind of totalitarian politics where you imagine this enemy that has no face and is invisible, and therefore you are allowed to go after them with whatever means necessary.On the Trumpist takeover of the institutions:On the institutions, it strikes me that they’re going really quickly. And the thing that they’re trying to establish is something like a party state. So it’s not that the state is going away, it’s that the state is becoming secondary to some other project, which is what of course the fascists and the communists had in common.They didn’t do away with the state, but the state was secondary to a movement as they called it, or to a party. So the state functioned, but the party was on top of it. The party was beside it. The party ran through it. The worrying thing for me is that today is a little bit different from the prior cases, because those actually went more slowly.On how Trumpism makes us weaker:I take an old-fashioned view of this, which is that there really are threats in the world. The Trumpist version of strength isn’t very functional against the actual threats in the world. And so I worry a lot that an FBI with a completely incompetent director, where 50 percent of the agents are directed towards border control, is not an FBI that stops a terrorist attack.And so I think that will be a real test. When something cracks, does anyone blame them then for that? Of course they will say, ‘Oh, no, that was the left. That was Antifa.’ But subjectively, how does the American population experience it?On “anticipatory obedience”:I guess it’s the naivete that bothers me. The people who run law firms or universities or big companies, people who think of themselves as being tough in the world, how naive they can be. I mean, hypocrisy I don’t like, but I can at least understand it. And then, of course, there’s the stuff which is more like collaboration, where people just believe that this is the right way to go. And so why not direct a whole television network that way? There’s that too, which is troubling in a different way.On protest and ‘No Kings’:On Saturday, there’s the second big ‘No Kings’ protest. And it’s going to be very big. It’s going to be millions and millions of people in several thousand different places, and I’ll be at one of them. But still, when I’m moving in elite-ish environments, I talk to people who are like, ‘Yeah, this is all terrible, but oh, I didn’t realize there was a protest on Saturday.’ There are other things we can do, but if we’re not protesting, then we’re not doing Politics 101. You do that, and then maybe you do other things too, but you’ve got to do that . . .I’ve got baseball on my mind at the moment because of the time of year we’re in. And it’s like a lot of people in our—forgive me—class, broadly understood, the way they think about politics is that it’s like a baseball game and there’s an umpire. So there are two teams, and they each have their tactics and their uniforms and their personalities, but at the end of the day, there’s an umpire. There are rules and there’s an umpire.And the thing is, that’s not actually the way politics works. In moments like this, you’re the umpire. You can’t just sit in the stands and say, ‘Oh, the umpire is not calling balls and strikes. This is weird.’ You’re the umpire. You actually have to get out on the field and be the umpire. And I think we’re stuck at that moment where we’re eating the popcorn and we’re like, ‘Oh, where’s the umpire? I want to watch the game. Where’s the umpire?’ And there isn’t going to be a game unless we get out there and say, ‘Okay, we believe in the rules.’AROUND THE BULWARK
- An Attack on Our System of Government… Republicans in Congress know that what they’re doing is deeply unpopular—on healthcare, supporting troops in the streets, and on redistricting. That’s why they’re basically in hiding, plotting new ways to try to shift the narrative. HEATHER COX RICHARDSON joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod.
- Propaganda With Our Tax Dollars, Sickos in the Chat, and Why the GOP is Scared of #NoKings… On The Next Level, SARAH, TIM, and JVL discuss the GOP’s accelerating moral collapse.
- Exclusive: Graham Platner Makes the Case for Doing ‘Something Different’… Maine’s upstart Senate candidate tells LAUREN EGAN why he is a different breed of Democrat than Gov. Janet Mills—but not a progressive.
- The Long Road to Peace and Trump’s Short Attention Span… The Israel–Hamas ceasefire is a welcome achievement, writes MONA CHAREN, but the next steps are vague and the president lacks the temperament to get more.
THIS AUTHORITARIANISMBill wrote yesterday that the Trump authoritarian project is “getting worse.” What he didn’t necessarily predict was how fast it would accelerate in the subsequent 24 hours. Yesterday brought an avalanche of headlines, any one of which would have been a major news event in “normal” times. But this is Trump land, where the shit comes in quick succession.
- The Pentagon has officially purged itself of almost all of its reporters, leaving our largest government agency with no in-house coverage.
- Trump, it was reported, is considering an overhaul of the refugee system that would, in the words of the New York Times’s headline (yes, the headline) “Favor White People.”
- It was reported that the CIA authorized covert activity in Venezuela, with the option to carry out lethal operations in the country. If it wasn’t surreal enough to see a regime-change operation spooled out in the press, Trump confirmed it in a press conference.
- And then, for the coup-de-grace, the Wall Street Journal reported last night that “the Trump administration is preparing sweeping changes at the Internal Revenue Service that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily.”
- This is an avalanche of Watergate-level stuff, all packed into a single day—only the president and his team are shouting it from the rooftops, not covering it up.
The Pentagon Headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. National Press Club, National Press Club Warns Pentagon Move to Strip Reporter Access Strikes at the Heart of Press Freedom, Staff Report, Oct. 15, 2025. National Press Club President Mike Balsamo today issued a statement on new restrictions that forced dozens of Pentagon journalists to surrender their credentials:“The National Press Club condemns the Pentagon’s unprecedented move to strip dozens of journalists of access, a sweeping action that strikes at the heart of press freedom and public accountability.For generations, reporters have walked the halls of the Pentagon not as guests, but as representatives of the American people — asking hard questions on behalf of those who serve in uniform. To shut them out is to shut out the public itself. This is not a matter of policy or protocol. It is an assault on transparency and an erosion of democratic norms.The Pentagon may close its doors to reporters, but it cannot close the public’s right to know.Independent coverage of the U.S. military is essential to public trust and oversight. A Pentagon that limits scrutiny limits understanding and weakens the very institution it seeks to protect. The First Amendment does not stop at the Pentagon’s gates.The National Press Club calls on the Department of Defense to immediately restore full access for independent journalists and recommit to the principles that have long distinguished this country from governments that fear their own press.When history looks back on this day, it should see a press that refused to yield and a public that demanded answers. The people’s right to know endures — with or without the Pentagon’s permission.”Emptywheel,Analysis: Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Lindsey Halligan’s Filter Follies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 16, 2025. Lindsey Halligan’s loaner prosecutors decided they’d ask for a filter protocol to access already seized material the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered they provide all discovery to Jim Comey that same day. That may work out poorly for them.The court filings submitted since Jim Comey’s arraignment have set the stage for several possible prosecutorial disasters.After loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons made a transparent bid at the arraignment to slow Eastern District of Virginia’s rocket docket with both discovery and the invocation of the CIPA (Classified Information Procedurs Act) process, Judge Michael Nachmanoff, right:• Enforced a discovery deadline of Monday over prosecutors’ attempts to stall• Adopted Comey’s preferred protective order, rejecting prosecutorial efforts to limit Comey’s own access to discovery• Approved a CIPA schedule that resolves by December (and therefore would not delay the January 5 trial date)Meanwhile, Comey noticed his intent to challenge Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as US Attorney, so Judge Nachmanoff can refer the question to Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz, who will pick a District Judge from another District to preside over the challenge. Assuming Judge Diaz responds in timely fashion, Comey will submit that motion on Monday, along with his Selective and Vindictive prosecution claim, the latter of which is likely to be rather, um, illuminating.There’s no sign, yet, that Halligan’s loaner AUSAs failed to meet Monday’s deadline, though they did file something under seal on Tuesday.If I had to guess, that might be the first bid to hide Trump’s role in the selective prosecution under claims of Executive Privilege, though I also imagine prosecutors may try to explicitly prevent the involvement of Maurene Comey (who is suing on closely related issues) or Troy Edwards (who presumably knows details of the turmoil at EDVA) on Comey’s defense team.Right wing propagandists are hinting that it might be a bid to claim Pat Fitzgerald has a conflict stemming from his past representation of Comey; but the CIPA filings, filed by prosecutors on February 13, are predicated on the assumption “that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time,” suggesting prosecutors have no complaint about Fitz’ involvement.But there’s another filing that hints at far more turmoil ahead.On Monday, after Judge Nachmanoff ordered prosecutors to turn over all discovery by 5 PM that day, prosecutors submitted a motion for a filter protocol. According to the filing, the government seized a whole bunch of computer devices — a hard drive, an iCloud account, an iPhone, and an iPad — from a lawyer in a past investigation, and they want to access it for this investigation.The devices are exceedingly likely to belong to Dan Richman, right, who is at least reported to be the person whom Comey is accused of authorizing to serve as an anonymous source in the indictment.So if all those assumptions are correct, let’s consider what this motion for a filter protocol confesses.First, prosecutors launched a bid to get access to this information to use at trial on the day that discovery was due, the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered that all discovery be provided by October 13. They seem really unconcerned about how badly that will piss off Nachmanoff, which seems reckless.The proposed filter itself is obnoxious in two ways. It proposes a team (which it says does not include EDVA or EDNC prosecutors, but does not address whether it includes prosecutors from WDVA or another of the far-flown parts of DOJ where Kash Patel has parked his witch hunt) will review the data for a set of narrow filter terms.But aside from things explicitly marked privileged, they would get access to everything. Comey would only get a say over stuff triggered by those filter terms.But understand what else is going on. The loaner prosecutors say they need to use an inapt filter process that treats both Comey and Richman like fraudsters because allowing them to participate in the process — or even pausing for a Fourth Amendment challenge — “risks delay.”But this is EDVA, home of the rocket docket, and in EDVA, you don’t wait until after you’ve indicted to obtain material you think might be helpful to your case.Meidas Touch Network, Legal AF Torches Trump’s “Shadow DOJ” and Looming Voting-Rights Gut Punch, Michael Popok, right, and Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Oct. 16, 2025. The hosts unpack Trump’s banana-republic lawfare, the MAGA civil war inside DOJ, and a Supreme Court term that could erase Black representation. In the latest Legal AF midweek episode, the hosts chart the metastasis of Trump’s “I’m the nation’s chief law officer” fantasy into a full-blown institutional implosion.They describe a MAGA knife fight inside the Department of Justice, with Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche on one side, Kash Patel and would-be “shadow attorney general” Ed Martin on the other, while amateurs are reportedly handed the keys to politically motivated prosecutions.The show spotlights the framing of former FBI Director Jim Comey on rickety perjury charges spearheaded by newly minted EDVA prosecutor Lindsey Halligan.Comey’s team striking back strong, with a motion to disqualify Halligan as unlawfully appointed and a bid to move that question to a different court, and with a separate motion to dismiss for vindictive/selective prosecution.Translation: the “cases” look like cosplay—loud press releases, flimsy law.Speaking of cosplay, Popok skewers Trump’s militarized stunts: federalizing or importing National Guard units to blue states for made-for-TV intimidation.In Oregon, Judge Immergut again blocked deployment, and related fights in Illinois and California continue.Price tag for these photo-ops? Popok estimates hundreds of millions burned so the tough-guy act can strut.The hosts also dig into the Tom Homan cash-in-a-bag bribery sting, a meticulously planned FBI operation involving $50,000 in marked bills, contrasted with Bondi’s hand-waving defenses. With stonewalling the norm, Democracy Forward has moved from FOIA to federal court to pry loose the video and audio.On rights and representation, the show turns to a bleak Supreme Court preview: the MAGA-six appear eager to kneecap Voting Rights Act §2 using Louisiana’s map as the vehicle. The conservative justices, ever allergic to acknowledging race when it protects minority voters, seemed perfectly fine with “partisan” gerrymandering that just happens to sideline Black communities. Popok calls it what it is: an existential threat that could vaporize dozens of seats largely held by Black and brown members.There’s a rare bright spot. Jack Smith reemerges in a long, sober interview with Andrew Weissmann, defending apolitical prosecution and process over outcomes, a quiet rebuke to Trump’s retribution-machine. It takes courage to speak now, Popok notes, when Trump’s goons are busy indicting enemies and pepper-balling dissent.Finally, the episode tracks Arizona AG Kris Mayes pressing a mandamus threat to force Speaker Mike Johnson to swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, whose vote could trigger a House floor move on the Epstein files—yet another scandal Trumpworld seems desperate to bury.Meidas Touch Network,Judge Orders Federal Agents in Chicago to Wear Body Cameras After Violent Clashes, Aaron Parnas, Oct. 16, 2025. This will apply to all agents that currently have body cameras. Federal immigration officers in the Chicago area will now be required to wear body cameras following recent confrontations with protesters. The decision came Thursday from U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, who said she was “a little startled” after viewing television footage showing agents using tear gas and other aggressive tactics.Judge Ellis, who lives in Chicago, expressed frustration about the ongoing clashes. “I live in Chicago if folks haven’t noticed,” she said in court. “And I’m not blind, right?” Her comments reflected deep concern about the images she’s seen of federal agents’ behavior during enforcement actions linked to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.Just last week, Ellis issued an order requiring agents to clearly display their badges and prohibiting them from using certain crowd-control measures—such as tear gas and rubber bullets—against peaceful demonstrators and members of the press.Despite that ruling, Ellis said she’s been troubled by new reports and footage suggesting her directives might not have been followed. “I’m getting images and seeing images on the news, in the paper, reading reports where I’m having concerns about my order being followed,” she said during Thursday’s hearing.Government attorney Sean Skedzielewski pushed back, blaming what he called “one-sided and selectively edited media reports” for shaping a misleading narrative about agents’ conduct.The judge’s new order marks another step toward transparency and accountability for federal law enforcement. Body cameras, she said, will help ensure compliance with court orders and provide a clearer record of agents’ interactions with the public.The decision comes amid heightened tensions surrounding immigration enforcement in Chicago and other major cities, where residents and advocacy groups have raised concerns about the treatment of protesters and undocumented immigrants.New York Times, Venture Capitalist Resigns From Salesforce Foundation Over Benioff Comments, Heather Knight, Oct. 16, 2025. Ron Conway stepped down from the board of Salesforce’s philanthropic arm after the company’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said he supported President Trump and wanted the National Guard to come to San Francisco.A prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist resigned on Thursday from the board of Salesforce’s philanthropic arm after the company’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said last week that he fully supported President Trump and wanted the National Guard to come to San Francisco.The venture capitalist, Ron Conway, had been a member of the Salesforce Foundation board for a decade. He told Mr. Benioff on Thursday in a fiery email, seen by The New York Times, that their values were no longer aligned and that he was resigning as a director. Mr. Conway has been a close friend of Mr. Benioff for more than 25 years.Mr. Conway said in the email that he resigned because Mr. Benioff told The New York Times last week that he backed President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed in San Francisco, where Salesforce is based, to help prevent crime. The comments by Mr. Benioff, a billionaire who had been considered Silicon Valley’s rare progressive tech titan, enraged leaders in the liberal city.“It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Mr. Conway, a top Democratic donor, wrote to Mr. Benioff in the email.Mr. Conway, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article. Mr. Benioff did not respond to a request for comment about the resignation.In the interview with The Times last week, Mr. Benioff said that he had not followed news of ICE raids, the government shutdown or the president’s attacks on the media. He said that he would support a deployment of Guard troops to San Francisco because the city does not have enough police officers.Though President Trump has touted his use of the military to fight crime, troops are generally forbidden by law from engaging in domestic law enforcement.Leaders in San Francisco have condemned Mr. Benioff for his remarks and for suggesting that the president should send troops to the city. Mayor Daniel Lurie released new statistics this week that showed homicides in San Francisco were at a 70-year low and that drug overdose deaths have also dropped.Still, President Trump said on Wednesday that San Francisco could be the next place he sends National Guard troops, and that he appreciated the “great support” for such a deployment, a possible reference to Mr. Benioff and to Elon Musk, who also backed the idea.Mr. Conway was so disturbed by Mr. Benioff’s comments that he contacted his longtime friend about them and they discussed the matter over the past few days, according to the email. But Mr. Conway did not come away satisfied that Mr. Benioff had reflected on the dangers posed by the Trump administration or the impact of his remarks.Media, Culture Wars The Bulwark,False Flag: Racist Young Republican Chat Leaves GOP Stumbling to Respond, Will Sommer, above, Oct. 16, 2025. Split over whether to discipline the offenders or just ignore the whole affair.IS THERE A PLACE in the Republican operative class for people who “love Hitler”? How about those who like making jokes about black people eating watermelon?That’s the debate consuming the MAGA movement this week, after Politico published selections from a group chat featuring a faction of the Young Republicans organization using what we will charitably call vile language.The fallout has morphed into a sort of philosophical debate within the movement: If someone on your own side is caught frolicking in a racist group chat, is it fair to criticize them? Or should you just keep your mouth shut because you agree with them about Trump?We’ve experienced a version of this debate many times before, often with Republicans choosing to downplay scandals for Trump and his allies. (We still don’t know where “border czar” Tom Homan’s $50,000 ended up, in large part because MAGA personalities have said they don’t give a fuck.)But this Young Republicans flap is different, precisely because of the low stakes for anyone who wasn’t in the chat. There are no electoral outcomes or Supreme Court appointments hinging on defending the participants here. These mostly wannabe apparatchiks could easily be thrown overboard and replaced in a day. It’s a more or less pain-free way to reclaim some moral high ground—or, at least, to avoid getting covered in the muck.And at first, that’s what GOP officials and entities tried to do. The Young Republicans national organization called for the chat’s participants to resign and the Kansas GOP suspended its Young Republicans wing, which had members in the chat. Even Roger Stone condemned the content.But in a sign of the times we’re in, there was an immediate backlash to the backlash. Both the Young Republicans’ and the Kansas GOP’s tweets were quickly inundated with replies calling them gay.Support this newsletter’s coverage of the right, the far-right, and the far-out right—sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today:SubscribedThen Vice President JD Vance logged on to announce that he would give no ground in admitting the chat messages were wrong, and said that anyone who cared about the texts was engaged in “pearl clutching.”“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said on Wednesday, referencing group chat members who were in their late twenties and early thirties. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”THE RESPONSES PROVIDE yet another distillation of the fault lines that have come to define the modern GOP. In one corner is the aggressive “New Right”—a faction that explicitly doesn’t care about hypocrisy and is eager to use whatever power they have to crush their foes. They are typified by Vance, who just a few weeks ago was calling for people who posted social media tweets criticizing Charlie Kirk to be fired. In the other corner are the shreds of pre-Trump standards that remain in the party along with those who believe it makes moral and political sense to abide by them.That latter, lonely group has been represented a lot lately by James Lindsay, a conservative pundit whose anti-woke crusade during the Biden administration has morphed into a new war against what he calls the “Woke Right.” His target is essentially the new wave of antisemitism and “groyperism” led by figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.“This isn’t about a group chat,” Lindsay wrote on X. “A ton of younger MAGA is actually like that.”Pop this newsletter into a friend’s inbox or post it to social media:ShareLindsay is not lacking for material to work with. On Wednesday the Capitol Police launched an investigation into why a staffer for a Republican member of Congress had an American flag with a swastika displayed in his workspace. And though Lindsay may be waging a lonely fight, he’s not waging it entirely alone. Jewish conservatives, in particular, have grown less than thrilled to find their gentile compatriots so comfortable with gas chamber jokes and even ironic Hitler praise.“Remember when we watched the left get taken over by its worst voices and wondered how they let it happen?” right-wing personality Arynne Wexler tweeted. “Well.”Among the arguments that Lindsay’s compatriots have made is that the rule that conservatives should not attack one another only seems to go one way—with figures like Owens and Fuentes seeming to relish tearing into their more traditional, moderate rivals.Still, I think Vance’s “New Right” will carry the argument here. The motivation is obvious: As long as you never criticize anyone on the right for even smaller-stake scandals, you don’t have to do the same when the consequences are much greater and involve someone like Trump himself.Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh typified this approach when he posted that conservatives needed to stick together no matter what, rather than “throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.”“The Right doesn’t stick together,” Walsh posted on X. “That’s our biggest problem by far. Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies.”SubscribedhTHE FRATERNAL DEFENSE of the chatters grew so pronounced on Wednesday that some even argued such forums were needed to ease the male loneliness crisis—that disbanding them would deprive participants of the self-love safe spaces they need.“The group chat is sacred,” wrote popular right-wing meme account Autism Capital. “It’s the only safe space men have left to call each other retards and homos. You don’t take that from a man. That’s evil.”Like Autism Capital, many on the online right seemed far more interested in identifying and punishing the chat leaker than in dealing with the chat participants themselves. Much of that intrigue has focused on State New York Young Republican Club chairman Gavin Wax, who is an avowed enemy of at least one of the Young Republican officials exposed in the chat leak.In an affidavit first reported by Politico, one group chat member—a staffer in the Small Business Administration—claimed Wax “threatened” his “professional standing” and issued other forms of retaliation if he didn’t give up the chat logs. In the affidavit, the chat member added that he folded under the pressure and handed the logs over to a Wax “associate,” though he wasn’t sure how they made their way to Politico.“Seriously fuck Gavin Wax,” Fuentes tweeted. “[He] should be immediately blacklisted from any political circle. Zero tolerance for friendly fire.”Unlike many of the previously unknown Young Republicans implicated, Wax is a real man-about-town in the young MAGA movement. His New York conservative club has offered a glitzier, naughtier, generally less predictable take on life as a Republican than more staid Young Republican events. At the group’s gala last year, for example, Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz inexplicably collapsed onstage.Perhaps most intriguingly, Wax has been serving in the Trump administration. After an abortive and controversial stint at the FCC, he has been the chief of staff to the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the State Department, meaning he potentially did have more power to threaten the group chat member’s career in the Trump administration. But as a sign of how deep the racism goes, Wax’s boss at State, Under Secretary Darren Beattie, was himself fired from the first Trump administration for speaking at a racist conference.More Global NewsNew York Times,China’s Rare Earth Restrictions Aim to Beat U.S. at Its Own Game, Ana Swanson and Meaghan Tobin, Oct. 16, 2025. Beijing’s latest effort to weaponize global supply chains is modeled on the American technology controls that it has long criticized.Over the past three years, Washington has claimed broad power to impose global rules that bar companies anywhere in the world from sending cutting-edge computer chips or the tools needed to make them to China. American officials have argued that approach is necessary to make sure China does not gain the upper hand in the race for advanced artificial intelligence.But a sweeping set of restrictions announced by Beijing last week showed that two can play that game.The Chinese government flexed its own influence over worldwide supply chains when it announced new rules clamping down on the flow of critical minerals that are used in everything from computer chips to cars to missiles. The rules, which are set to take effect later this year, shocked foreign governments and businesses, which may now need to acquire licenses from Beijing to trade their products even outside China.With its dominance over the production of these rare earth minerals and its control of other strategic industries, China may have an even greater ability than the United States to weaponize supply chains, analysts say.“The U.S. now has to face up to the fact it has an adversary which can threaten substantial parts of the U.S. economy,” said Henry Farrell, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The United States and China are now very clearly “in a much more delicate stage of mutual interdependence,” he added.New York Times,China Fans Patriotic Sentiment as Trade War With U.S. Heats Up, Lily Kuo, Oct. 16, 2025. Chinese state media is rallying the public and posting old propaganda footage, but officials are also careful to leave room for talks with President Trump.Over the last few days, Chinese state media have been posting an old video of Mao Zedong issuing one of his most famous battle cries. “For as long as they want to fight,” he shouts from behind a row of microphones, “we will fight!”Speaking in 1953, China’s former leader was referring to the United States, which it fought during the Korean War. Today, Beijing portrays itself as fighting a different but no less existential battle with its old rival, as the two countries engage in a deepening trade war that threatens to engulf the global economy.The latest round includes U.S. threats of 100 percent tariffs — a response to Beijing’s announcement last week of new export controls over rare earth minerals — as well as port fees levied by both countries, Chinese sanctions on U.S. shipping subsidiaries and a possible U.S. ban on Chinese cooking oil imports.Faced with the breakdown of what was a fragile truce between the two countries after months of tit-for-tat retaliation, China’s propaganda machine went to work this week, rallying citizens with messages of resilience and patriotism. At the same time, state media and officials have held back from more strident language — a sign that the Chinese leadership is still leaving room for reconciliation with the United States.Oct. 15 New York Times,Trump Targets Democratic Districts By Halting Billions During Shutdown, Tony Romm and Lazaro Gamio, Oct. 15, 2025 (print ed.). Two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts and states, according to an analysis by The New York Times.Total amount of affected funding Congressional district of grant recipient
- Democratic districts 87 districts $27.24 bil. Republican districts 14 districts $738.7 mil.
Each of these infrastructure projects had received federal aid, sometimes after officials spent years pleading in Washington — only to see that money halted as President Trump has looked to punish Democrats over the course of the fiscal stalemate.The Times conducted its analysis by examining federal funding records, which include details about the city and state where each grant recipient is based. The projects include new investments in clean energy, upgrades to the electric grid and fixes to the nation’s transportation infrastructure, primarily in Democratic strongholds, such as New York and California..In some cases, recipients had started to receive portions of the federal aid, only to become casualties in a funding battle that has no end in sight.Mr. Trump’s aides have offered a series of explanations for the administration’s decision to pause or terminate grants, claiming in some cases that the spending would have been wasteful or in conflict with the president’s priorities. Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has been particularly aggressive in cutting federal investments to combat climate change.But the budgetary moves coincide with the president’s public pledges to use the shutdown to slash spending favored by Democrats. He has described the federal stoppage as an “unprecedented opportunity” to make some cuts permanent.Many Democrats said that the announcements fit a broader pattern at the White House, where Mr. Trump has claimed vast authority to reprogram the nation’s budget, even though the Constitution gives that power to Congress.In doing so, Democratic lawmakers said the result could harm their cities and states, upending work that would have helped residents regardless of their political party.So far, the administration has targeted essentially two broad tranches of federal aid. First, the White House has held up billions of dollars in previously approved transportation funding for New York and Chicago.In New York, the administration stopped the delivery of about $18 billion in pledged investments for two major projects: the Second Avenue subway, which traverses the east side of Manhattan, and the Hudson River tunnel, which serves as the primary rail route through New York City and along the northeast corridor. Funding for the tunnel, in particular, came only after years of wrangling, as New York officials and their counterparts in New Jersey looked to repair a roughly 115-year-old passage from damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy while improving rail capacity.In Chicago, the Trump administration said it paused about $2.1 billion in money pledged for the city’s own transit upgrades, including an extension of its rail system into the South Side. Groundbreaking was expected to begin in 2026 after years of work to shore up federal funding for the expansion.In both cases, the White House said it was pausing the delivery of federal dollars so that it could review the cities’ contracting policies. The administration sought to determine if leaders had made construction-related decisions on the basis of race, diversity or inclusion. The Bulwark Morning Shots,Political Opinion, It’s Getting Worse, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 15, 2025. The Trump administration’s assault on the rest of us is intensifying.It’s a big day for election law at the Supreme Court, where justices will hear a case today that Republicans hope will provide an occasion for eliminating the last major provision of the Voting Rights Act, which in turn would make it possible for the GOP to pick up even more seats through even more radical gerrymandering across the South. Democracy Docket,Pro-Democracy Advocacy, This SCOTUS case is why I founded Democracy Docket, Marc Elias, right, At 10:00 a.m. this morning, the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court took the bench. Shortly thereafter, the clerk called case 24-109 — State of Louisiana v. Callais.This case isn’t just about one map in one state, it may well have historic implications. At stake is the future of the Voting Rights Act — whether the law, which has afforded minority voters essential legal protections since it was passed in 1965, will stand, and whether we will have free and fair midterm elections in 2026.I founded Democracy Docket in 2020, for moments exactly like this. Before we had a single subscriber, I envisioned a pro-democracy news outlet that would be the most authoritative voice on the most important cases facing democracy. I wanted it to cover the cases and the angles that legacy media so often overlook or apply a lens of both-sides journalism. Democracy Docket will cover the argument live today on social media, on its website and through its newsletters and long-form analysis. But to be honest with you, this is the easy part.What I’m most proud of is the hard work that Democracy Docket has been doing when few others were paying attention. It covered every step of this case since it began years ago — tracking every filing, analyzing every development, connecting each to the real-life impact.It’s this deep, committed coverage that sets Democracy Docket apart. I’ve argued four redistricting cases before the Supreme Court and won all four. In each case, I stood before the court on behalf of Black voters facing unconstitutional district lines. It has always been this way. Groups bringing redistricting claims have always been minority communities who have historically faced discrimination and disenfranchisement.What makes the Louisiana lawsuit especially cynical and outrageous is who brought the lawsuit: 12 self-identified “non-African American” voters are arguing that Louisiana’s new congressional map — which, after my law firm sued the state, added a second majority-Black district for the first time in almost 30 years — discriminates against them.This case should never have gotten to this point. The Supreme Court considered this case term Spring and could have quickly rejected these claims. Instead, this summer, the Supreme Court expanded the underlying question to be a potential direct attack on the Voting Rights Act: “Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”If the justices ultimately rule the creation of this second congressional district was unconstitutional, the impact will extend well beyond the Bayou State. Nineteen congressional seats in which Black voters elect their candidates of choice will — overnight — be at risk of being redrawn by Republicans into seats they can control.If you thought Texas’ five seat gerrymander was bad, this would be far worse. It would open the possibility of Republicans drawing more gerrymandered maps for the midterms. The result could well swing the control of Congress in 2026 and beyond, the result could be to lock in Republican control of the House for decades.One of the commitments I made on day one was that Democracy Docket’s website, and its news coverage would always be free to everyone. But this is only possible because of support from its premium members. To be blunt, as Democracy Docket grows to meet the increased demands of these times, the importance of our premium member support is growing as well. Days like today are exactly why I founded Democracy Docket. If you believe in the importance of pro-democracy news, information and analysis committed to exposing what’s happening to voting rights, elections and democracy in court, I hope you’ll consider powering Democracy Docket’s mission today. New York Times,White House Guts Education Department With More Layoffs, Sarah Mervosh, Michael C. Bender and Dana Goldstein, Oct. 15, 2025 (print ed.). About a fifth of the agency’s remaining staff was affected, including employees working on special education, funding for low-income students and civil rights enforcement.A pair of decades-old promises from Congress — ensuring disabled students receive a free and appropriate education and protecting all pupils from discrimination in schools — have been thrown into doubt after a round of sweeping layoffs at the Education Department.The department’s Office of Special Education Programs was decimated by the cuts, which the Trump administration issued on Friday in its latest reduction of the federal work force. The special education office has been the principal government arm overseeing billions of dollars that support about 10 percent of the nation’s school-aged children, but will have fewer than a half-dozen employees, a reduction of about 95 percent since the start of the year.The Office for Civil Rights in the department was also slashed. After starting the year with 12 regional sites, the civil rights office was cut in half in March and may go down to a site or two when the layoffs take effect in 60 days, according to data compiled by the union representing education workers. Over 22,600 discrimination complaints in schools were filed with the department last year, more than double the number from five years earlier.And the layoffs gutted the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees a wide range of funding for states and school districts. The firings included a team of employees who oversee federal funding for low-income students, known as Title I, which is the largest source of federal funding to school districts, according to three Education Department employees with knowledge of the cuts.About 466 workers at the Education Department have been fired since Friday, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the breadth and depth of those cuts appeared to touch nearly all aspects of an agency that President Trump has vowed to eliminate, part of his bid to end the federal role in supporting roughly 54 million students in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools.Education Department officials have not disclosed precise numbers on where those cuts were targeted as of Tuesday; the Trump administration declined to discuss the changes, and a spokeswoman declined to comment. The administration has described the more than 4,000 layoffs across federal agencies as punishment to Democrats for the government shutdown.The lack of communication left unions scrambling to piece together the fallout. But the individual notices sent to Education Department staff were sent to their official emails, which workers had been repeatedly warned would be illegal to check during a shutdown. The administration sent word in recent days that government workers could check their messages to see if they had been fired, but several employees said on Tuesday that they were refusing to open their email because they did not trust the Trump administration.Unions representing federal workers have sued over the firings and described the cuts as an attempt from the administration to use the government work force as a bargaining chip in a political feud.“If you are a kid in America, regardless of where you live or what your capabilities are, or what year you are in school, you are going to be affected by these cuts,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, which represents Education Department employees. Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: UPDATE: Trump admits Argentina bailout will not benefit the U.S., Judd Legum, right, Oct. 15, 2025. A remarkable statement about the $20 billion plan that will greatly benefit a well-connected hedge fund manager.President Trump hosted Argentinian President Javier Milei, above, at the White House on Tuesday. The meeting came on the heels of the Trump administration’s $20 billion rescue package for Argentina.During a question-and-answer session with the press following the meeting, Trump admitted the bailout for Argentina would be of little benefit to America. “It’s not going to make a big difference for our country,” Trump said.On September 29, Popular Information reported that the bailout would immensely benefit billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, a personal friend and former colleague of Scott Bessent, above. A subsequent Popular Information report revealed that Citrone, belowright was in contact with Bessett about the bailout before it was announced.Popular Information’s reporting was confirmed on October 9 by the New York Times:Mr. Citrone, the founder of Discovery Capital Management, has made Latin America his biggest bet in the world, and Argentina is the fund’s biggest investment in the region. Mr. Citrone has said that when he worked with Mr. Bessent under Mr. Soros in 2013, he convinced them to make their now famous bet against the Japanese yen and that he was responsible for most of the bonus that Mr. Bessent earned.…[T]wo people familiar with the deal said Mr. Citrone was in close contact with Mr. Bessent in the lead-up to the Treasury announcement last month, arguing that if Argentina’s currency crashed, so too would the political fortunes of Mr. Milei.This reporting has changed the narrative about the motivations behind the U.S. bailout of Argentina. Previously, media outlets attributed it solely to the ideological alignment of Trump and Milei. Now, CNN is noting how Citrone would benefit in its FAQ about the issue: Elizabeth Warren blasted the bailout as cronyism. “Trump promised ‘America First,’ but he’s putting himself and his billionaire buddies first and sticking Americans with the bill,” Warren said in a statement. She introduced legislation with seven other Senators to block the bailout.During the press availability, Trump dismissed the concerns of American soybean farmers about Argentina. China has boycotted American soybeans as part of the ongoing trade dispute. Argentina has taken advantage by eliminating its export tax and then selling 1.5 million tons of soybeans to China within days. This has had a devastating impact on American farmers.“It’s not gonna mean anything in the end,” Trump said of the controversy.While farmers struggle to survive and the federal government is shut down, Milei is riding high thanks to the cash infusion from the Trump administration. “There will be an avalanche of dollars,” Milei said in a radio interview shortly before traveling to the White House. “We’ll have dollars pouring out of our ears.” New York Times,Trump Administration Authorizes Covert C.I.A. Action in Venezuela, Julian E. Barnes and Tyler Pager, Oct. 15, 2025. The development comes as the U.S. military is drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including possible strikes inside the country.The Trump administration has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials, stepping up a campaign against Nicolás Maduro, right, the country’s authoritarian leader.The authorization is the latest step in the Trump administration’s intensifying pressure campaign against Venezuela. For weeks, the U.S. military has been targeting boats off the Venezuelan coast it says are transporting drugs, killing 27 people. American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.The new authority would allow the C.I.A. to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela and conduct a range of operations in the Caribbean.The agency would be able to take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation. It is not known whether the C.I.A. is planning any operations in Venezuela or if the authoritiesare meant as a contingency.But the development comes as the U.S. military is planning its own possible escalation, drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including strikes inside Venezuela.The scale of the military buildup in the region is substantial: There are currently 10,000 U.S. troops there, most of them at bases in Puerto Rico, but also a contingent of Marines on amphibious assault ships. In all, the Navy has eight surface warships and a submarine in the Caribbean.The new authorities, known in intelligence jargon as a presidential finding, were described by multiple U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the highly classified document.Mr. Trump ordered an end to diplomatic talks with the Maduro government this month as he grew frustrated with the Venezuelan leader’s failure to accede to U.S. demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by officials that they had no part in drug trafficking.The C.I.A. has long had authority to work with governments in Latin America on security matters and intelligence sharing. That has allowed the agency to work with Mexican officials to target drug cartels. But those authorizations do not allow the agency to carry out direct lethal operations.Editors’ PicksThis Classic Sushi Roll Is a Delight to Make at Home36 Hours in Madison, Wis.When Baryshnikov Wanted a Challenge, Twyla Tharp DeliveredThe Trump administration’s strategy on Venezuela, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, aims to oust Mr. Maduro from power.Mr. Ratcliffe has said little about what his agency is doing in Venezuela. But he has promised that the C.I.A. under his leadership would become more aggressive. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Ratcliffe said he would make the C.I.A. less averse to risk and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president, “going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.” President Donald Trump talks with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on Oct. 13, 2025, in Jerusalem (Evelyn Hockstein Pool photo via AP)New York Times,Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire News Analysis: Now Comes the Hard Part for the Gaza Cease-Fire Plan, David M. Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 15, 2025 (print ed.). Hamas released hostages and agreed to abide by a cease-fire, but persuading it to lay down its arms is another matter.Getting Israel’s hostages released from Gaza and stopping the war may have taken two years and the direct efforts of the American president and the leaders of several Arab and Muslim nations.But that was almost certainly the easy part.Getting Hamas to give up its weapons, and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip — key preconditions for Israel to pull out of Gaza fully, as both President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Monday — could prove a lot harder.Then there are the other issues in Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan, which outlined a comprehensive solution for Gaza. In full, it also called for the establishment of an international force to help maintain security in the territory, an ambitious effort to rebuild Gaza’s economy and infrastructure, and the creation of a temporary Palestinian governing committee, whose work would be overseen by an international board.During the talks leading up to the cease-fire in Gaza, provisions for who would run the enclave on “the day after” the war was over were among the most complicated and vexing — so much so that they were eventually severed from the cease-fire talks and put off until a second phase of negotiations.That phase had at least an air of auspiciousness on Monday evening in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt gathered dozens of leaders to try to build on the momentum created by the truce and the exchange of 20 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of others for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.“Phase 2 has started,” Mr. Trump said. He predicted “tremendous progress.”“It’s peace in the Middle East,” he said. “Everyone said it’s not possible to do. And it’s going to happen.” Emptywheel,Analysis: The Fascist Dragnet To Avenge Charlie Kirk’s Honor, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 15, 2025. It’s bad enough that the State Department using free speech about Charlie Kirk to exclude purported visa holders. It’s still worse that two of six claimed accounts don’t do what State accuses. But the dragnet they must have used to get this far is pure fascism.Congratulations to the memory of Charlie Kirk. Trump has, in his death, affirmed that Kirk is the same kind of person as his idol, inflammatory bigot Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump also awarded the Medal of Freedom.To pay tribute to the event, the State Department yesterday announced another assault on free speech, identifying six purported visa holders who — it claims, but the underlying logic is worthy of conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie, currently the State Department head of Public Diplomacy — “celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.”At least two of the six did not celebrate Kirk’s death (these are in reverse order).One, described as Paraguayan, merely said Kirk was a son of a bitch and he died by his own rules.This is likely a reference to Kirk’s comment that it was worth having some gun deaths every year, like his own, so “we” can have a Second Amendment.I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.The other post that, in my opinion, did not “celebrate” Kirk’s killing is this one, which per Google translate reads, “When fascists die, democrats don’t complain” (or perhaps don’t wail).Stating that you’re not wailing is different than celebrating.But the tweet is notable for something else: It doesn’t even mention Charlie Kirk. It’s a subtweet.So how did Trump find it to attack it? One explanation may be this Facebook post, also in German, which does mention Kirk. It translates this way:“When fascists die, democrats don’t complain.”This disgusting quote from ZDF screenwriter and publicist Mario Sixtus, published just hours after the assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk, marks a moral low point.Anyone who speaks like this exposes themselves: not as a democrat, but as a cynic who tramples on the foundations of our free order. Those who celebrate the death of a political opponent aren’t demonstrating their stance, but rather confirming that they, in truth, have no respect for democracy—because democracy thrives on words, on debate, on the clash of arguments, not on hatred of human life.Yes, Charlie Kirk held radical positions; yes, he was contentious and uncomfortable. But he sought debate. And as long as debate, speech, and discourse are possible, there is a civilized, legitimate framework. Violence, malice over death, and dehumanization are not part of it.Therefore, I say clearly: Anyone who rejoices over the death of a person disqualifies themselves as a democrat. Anyone who claims to fight against inhumanity while acting inhumanely themselves is a hypocrite.This case demonstrates once again how deep the cracks in our society are – and how great the danger is that the self-proclaimed “moral elite” has in fact lost all moral sense.That is, it’s not that the original poster, IDed here as a German screenwriter, celebrated Kirk’s death. It’s that someone else accused him of doing so (all while ignoring the way Kirk himself dehumanizes people).Still, how did they find it?!?Consider what it means that the State Department is proudly IDing claimed visa holders whose speech about Charlie Kirk it condemns. We know how State conducted its prior assault on free speech, that of supporters of Palestinians, in at least some cases a doxing hate group called Canary. Judge William Young described it this way:AD Hatch was told by DHS leadership (Hatch could not recall who) to review the names of student protestors on the Canary Mission website, which contains a database of over 5,000 individuals. Id., 109-111. Canary Mission’s website purports to “document[] individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.” See “Our Mission”, Canary Mission, Ex. 229.14 Prior to March 2025, AD Hatch was unaware of the Canary Mission website. Id. 112:18-22.Within about a week of the early March meeting, a so-called “Tiger Team” was assembled to expedite the preparation of ROAs. Id. 98:8-25–99:3. Hatch confirmed that the Tiger Team’s process was that: (1) the Office of Intelligence would fact find; (2) the National Security Division of Homeland Security Investigations would compile the information and provide it to the State Department; and (3) the State Department would decide on what action to take, if any. Id. 98:20-99:3. The use of the term “Tiger Team” is not pejorative. It is a common internal practice referring to the speed and intensity of the work to be completed. The phrase was not intended to intimidate or, indeed, to be publicly known. Trial Tr. vol. II, 95:17–97:8, Jul. 10, 2025.But it’s one thing to find Palestinian supporters targeted by a hate group. It’s another thing to find people with an opinion about Charlie Kirk, because one’s opinion about Charlie Kirk has no conceivable tie to national security or even foreign policy.And to get to this list of four people who celebrated Kirk’s death and two who did not, State would have had to run their own databases against a list that included a whole bunch of Americans who also don’t care for Charlie Kirk either. The original list almost certainly consisted primarily of Americans who would have been affected by Kirk’s hatred and doxing.That State is doing this in any case is obnoxious and illegal. That they’re doing it with such shoddy vetting that they’re batting 66% accuracy with a selection of just six statements is both offensive and pathetic.But to have accomplished this hunt would have taken the kind of database scan that fascists dream of, one cataloging the free speech of Americans.More On U.S. Law, Crime, Courts
The Bulwark Morning Shots, Political Opinion, Antifa Signs, Freshly Painted, William Kristol, right, Oct. 15, 2025. It’s getting worse.I mean this neither as an expression of hyperbole nor a cry of alarm. I mean this simply as a factual statement about where we are, less than a quarter of the way through the second Trump administration.The fact is that Trump’s authoritarian apparatchiks are tightening their control over the key power ministries of the federal government. And they are getting more aggressive in asserting their power over the private sector and civil society.So in the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi, below right, and FBI Director Kash Patel have abandoned all pretense that they are interested in something so old-fashioned as the rule of law.They are directing that individuals against whom the president has a grievance be criminally prosecuted. And when told by subordinates—whether career lawyers or political appointees—that sound grounds for legal action don’t exist, they fire those honest attorneys and go ahead with the prosecution.It’s not just the prosecutions of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the firings of attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia who refused to bring those cases. It turns out that the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, a longtime Republican state legislator in Virginia until he was appointed by Trump in July, was forced to resign within a month of his appointment.Why? Because he refused to overrule a career prosecutor who found no justification for criminal charges against those in the FBI who had looked into Russia’s attempt to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election.But the administration is also moving well beyond targeting individuals against whom Trump has a grievance and those who won’t help the president act on those grievances. Any and all critics of the administration are now at risk of legal assault.Following up on their earlier executive order and national security memorandum, the administration and its allies routinely claim that peaceful protests are controlled by “antifa”—which they in turn claim is a criminal and terrorist conspiracy. And they assert that such speech is a cover for and an incitement to violence. The administration is thus laying the groundwork for subjecting speech critical of it to suppression and prosecution.There are indications that new crackdowns on dissent, on dissenters, and on the institutions that employ them and their funders, are imminent.It’s of course comical when President Trump says, as he did yesterday, thatYou see people holding this gorgeous sign with beautiful wood, beautiful cardboard, wood, everything, everything’s perfect, paint job, and they’re all the same. There are thousands of them, you know, that they weren’t made in the basement out of love. They were made by anarchists. Beware of the well-organized anarchists at work!But what’s not comical, what is in fact sinister, is the assumption here that there would be something wrong if protest signs weren’t being made in basements but in print shops; and that it would be wrong to attempt to organize others who agree with their message. This is all protected speech.But the president and his administration barely conceal any longer that they want to suppress both free speech and free political activity.Meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to kill unidentified people on the high seas while providing neither evidence nor legal justification for doing so. And beginning today, media access to the Pentagon will be radically limited.So the Trump administration is becoming both increasingly aggressive and increasingly unaccountable.Which brings me to the “No Kings” protests planned for Saturday. Several old friends have been amused that I seem to have become a defender and advocate of popular mobilization against the government. And several new friends have commented on the irony that I was a supporter of policies they protested in earlier times.Fair enough. But we’re beyond irony and amusement. The administration’s campaign against a free society is intensifying. Congress, controlled by the Republican party, is acquiescent. The Supreme Court so far hasn’t been much of a barrier. And elites outside government are increasingly finding reasons to go along and get along.The Founders tried to construct a government that featured all kinds of guardrails to protect liberty: separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances. They didn’t want to count too much on uncommon courage or wisdom from the people. As Federalist #51 puts it,A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs…These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.But the “auxiliary precautions” that were to supply “the defect of better motives” haven’t proved, in this crisis, up to the task.We do ultimately depend on the common sense and common courage of the people. “No Kings” is an expression of protest. But it is also an affirmation of responsibility. We the people ordained and established our free government. It’s up to us to keep it.New York Times, ICE Is Cracking Down on Chicago. Some Chicagoans Are Fighting Back, Julie Bosman, Visuals by Jamie Kelter Davis, Oct. 15, 2025 (print ed.). Residents have begun forming volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods for federal immigration agents. Others honk their horns or blow whistles when they see agents nearby.Federal agents deployed tear gas on Chicago residents and more than a dozen police officers on Tuesday, the latest clash in the nation’s third-largest city as the Trump administration has carried out its immigration crackdown.The clash began on Tuesday morning when federal agents were seen chasing a car through a working-class, heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s far South Side, witnesses said. An S.U.V. driven by the federal agents collided with the car they were pursuing, the Chicago Police Department said, sending that car into another vehicle that was parked nearby.After the crash, dozens of additional immigration agents in masks arrived and residents emerged from their houses, gathering on streets and sidewalks, throwing objects at agents and shouting, “ICE go home!”As the agents left, they released tear gas, apparently without warning, sending people coughing and running for cover. Among those affected by the gas were 13 Chicago Police Department officers, the police department said, and at least one officer was seen rinsing his eyes out with water from a neighbor’s garden hose.A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said that the federal agents were conducting an immigration enforcement operation when two people tried to flee and hit the agents’ vehicle.“This incident is not isolated and reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,” the D.H.S. said in a statement. The statement said that federal agents used “crowd control measures” after a group of people gathered and turned hostile.It was one of many turbulent episodes to erupt in Chicago in recent days. Federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol have roamed the city and suburbs making arrests, often pulling up to people walking along sidewalks, stopping them and questioning them. New York Times, Frustrated Gen Z Threatens to Topple African Governments, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Oct. 15, 2025. Protesters say their anger reflects a lack of economic opportunity on a continent with the world’s youngest population.First Kenya, then Madagascar and now Morocco (above and right). A wave of protests under the banner of Gen Z has swept through parts of Africa.Demonstrators have stormed Parliament buildings. Security forces have killed and injured hundreds, and in Madagascar the president fell from power on Tuesday.Each protest has had specific causes, but under the surface each reflects the failure of elected governments to provide economic opportunities for young people across a continent with the youngest population in the world, according to protesters and analysts.The frustration among young people poses a challenge to governments beyond where Gen Z protests have taken place, not least because of the continent’s young demographic. Africa’s median age is 19, which means that young people are entering the workplace and becoming politically active in large numbers.Young voters in Botswana last year helped defeat the party that had ruled since independence, while in South Africa discontent among young people with the economic performance of the African National Congress helped cause its vote share to fall below 50 percent for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994.Young people want some form of prosperity, they want some form of hope and they are not seeing that,” said Ndongo Sylla, a Senegalese economist and author. The attempts by security forces to repress the protests suggest that governments lacked clear answers, he added.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Kenya, Madagascar and Morocco? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.In one measure of the limited economic opportunities in Africa, the vast majority of new jobs on the continent are in the informal sector, according to the African Development Bank.Young people often lead demands for change and analysts argue that, while social media makes these protests distinct, it does not constitute a fundamental difference.But social media has made it easier for Gen Z, the demographic cohort born roughly between 1997 and 2012, to outfox the authorities by orchestrating demonstrations on the fly without high-profile leadership. Foreign Policy Magazine, Analysis: Russia’s Next Opposition Will Not Be Liberal, Alexey Kovalev, Oct. 15, 2025. Army corruption and mass death are breeding new dissent—deep inside Vladimir Putin’s loyal core.Among Russians who follow their country’s war in Ukraine, it’s difficult to overstate the lasting, demoralizing impact of the story of Ernest and Goodwin, the call signs of two experienced Russian drone pilots in Ukraine.In September 2024, after they exposed their commander’s corruption, they were sent to the front on a so-called nullification mission—the Russian army’s euphemism for a guaranteed suicide attack.Their deaths in Ukraine ignited public outrage on pro-war Telegram channels, forcing even the Kremlin to publicly address the issue.Col. Igor Puzik, the corrupt commander who sent the drone pilots to their deaths, is still in charge of his regiment and is regularly praised on state TV. Among contract soldiers, puzikovschina has become a grim neologism for a Russian command structure riddled with impunity, incompetence, and lethal betrayal; a warning that merit and loyalty no longer protect you from being used, abused, and even killed for a superior’s corruption and other ambitions.Puzikovschina now signifies a systemic collapse of trust between the military’s leaders and its rank and file. The problem is no longer limited to isolated cases; it is endemic. Whole regiments function as private fiefdoms, with officers siphoning off supplies, selling fuel meant for troops, and responding to complaints by sending the complainers on nullification missions at the frontNews UpdatesLetters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 14, 2025 [U.S. Shutdown Continues], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 15, 2025. The government shutdown, which started on October 1, is entering its third week.As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained this morning, the Senate is in session, and it keeps voting on two bills to reopen the government. Majority leader John Thune (R-SD) keeps having the Senate vote on the measure passed by Republicans in the House. That measure funds the government until November 21. It has failed repeatedly to get past the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. The Democrats have offered an alternative measure, which extends the healthcare premium tax credit—without which health insurance costs on the Affordable Care Act market will skyrocket—and restores nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. That measure, too, has repeatedly failed to pass.Murphy notes that normally the two sides would negotiate. But, he says, President Donald J. Trump is telling Republican senators to “BOYCOTT NEGOTIATING,” and they are “following orders.”The House of Representatives is even more dysfunctional. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pushed the continuing resolution through the chamber on September 19, the Friday before leaving town for a week.Then Johnson canceled the House sessions on Monday and Tuesday, September 29 and 30, both to jam the Senate into having to accept the House measure and to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), left, who was elected on September 23. Grijalva will provide the 218th signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the files collected during the federal investigation into the crimes of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his officials promised to release those files, but have tried to avoid doing so since news broke that Trump, who was a close friend of Epstein, is named in them.Emily Brooks of The Hill notes that jamming the Senate as Johnson tried to do was a tactic employed by the far-right Freedom Caucus, and they are cheering him on. But Democratic senators refused to vote in favor of the House measure, standing firm on extending the premium tax credits before their loss decimates the healthcare markets. Now, although Democrats are in Washington, D.C., ready to negotiate, Johnson says he will not call House members back to work until the Senate passes the House measure.Brooks notes that not all Republicans are keen on the optics of staying out of session during a shutdown. Mike Lillis of The Hill reported on Sunday that the cancellation of all House votes since late September has some Republicans warning that the tactic will backfire. In addition to the question of healthcare premiums, there is the issue of military pay stalled by the shutdown, and the fact that, by law, Congress was supposed to deliver its 2026 budget by September 30.Over the weekend, the administration tried to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic senators to cave when it announced it would fire about 4,200 federal employees. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes that the threat seemed at least in part to be designed to follow through on a threat Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had made to pressure Democrats before the shutdown. When those layoffs didn’t happen, the administration then suggested it would not pay furloughed workers after the shutdown ends. After backlash, they walked that threat back. The new announcement seemed in part an attempt to prove they would do something.On Friday night, hundreds of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received notices they were being fired, only to receive a follow-up letter less than a day later saying they were not fired after all. As Tom Bartlett of The Atlantic put it: “No explanation, no apology.”Marshall points out that other cuts seem to have come from agencies Trump especially dislikes, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which Trump has hated since its then-director Chris Krebs said the 2020 presidential election was not hacked. The administration also gutted the office responsible for special education in the U.S. Department of Education serving about 7.4 million students with special needs.Today, Trump tried to pressure Democrats by telling reporters the slashing of government programs will hurt only Democrats. “We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work,” he said. “So the Democrats are getting killed, but they’re not telling the people about that…. So we are closing up Democrat programs that we think that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open again.”The administration continues to try to demonstrate its power. Today it announced its fifth known attack on a boat “just off the coast of Venezuela” in international waters. Once again, Trump asserted that the boat was trafficking narcotics. The U.S. has now killed 27 people in this and similar attacks, making the argument that drug smugglers are enemy combatants. This is problematic not just because the administration has never produced any evidence that those killed have been smuggling drugs but also because lawyers say these killings are illegal. Charlie Savage of the New York Times points out that the administration has not produced any legal analysis that defends its position.Conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “That’s twenty-seven flat-out murders. That’s twenty-seven lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law.”The administration’s attempt to portray itself as powerful is running not just into the law but into popular perception. The administration insists it needs extraordinary powers to fight back against South American gang members illegally in the U.S. The attack on the boats serves the idea that drug cartels are invading the U.S. to kill Americans, a theme the administration hits when it insists that those it is rounding up in the U.S. are “the worst of the worst.”But as Jacob Soboroff and Kay Guerrero of MSNBC reported today, the Department of Homeland Security announced on October 3 that more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants had been arrested in and around Chicago since September, when their operation began. It said those arrested included “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” But it has produced little evidence for that claim, and federal data shows that more than 70% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees as of last month had no criminal convictions.So the administration is upping its claims. Today the Fox News Channel reported on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegation that “narcoterrorists in Mexico are reportedly working in coordination with domestic extremist groups to place bounties worth thousands of dollars on the heads of federal immigration officers in Chicago.” DHS called it “an organized campaign of terror against agents just trying to do their jobs.”The administration is attempting to paint immigrants as violent criminals and those opposed to their raids as terrorists. They are producing slick videos to make that point. But protesters have deprived them of photo opportunities by dressing in animal costumes. ICE agents staring down a giant frog and Mr. Potato Head don’t look very dominant.Cracks are showing elsewhere in the administration’s picture of strength. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that media outlets agree they would not publish any material about the Defense Department—even if it were unclassified—unless it was explicitly authorized by department officials. He set a deadline of 5:00 tonight for them to sign an agreement or hand over their press badges.Every major press outlet, including the Fox News Channel, refused, saying such a demand is an assault on the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.Airports around the country are refusing to air the video Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recorded to be shown at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints, which blames Democrats for the shutdown. Some have noted it violates the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government assets for partisan purposes.As the administration faces resistance, Republican lawmakers seem worried about the upcoming No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark notes that Republican lawmakers are scrambling to get in front of a potentially large protest event with a prebuttal. House majority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) has alleged that those protesting are “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, “playing to the most radical, small, and violent base in the country…. They just do not love this country.”While Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) retorted that the No Kings event is about loving America, not hating it. “It’s a rally of millions of people all over this country who believe in our Constitution, who believe in American freedom and are not going to let you and Donald Trump turn this country into an authoritarian society.”Today, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hardline pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.One of them wrote to the others, “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked [for real for real].”More On U.S. Politics, Governance The Bulwark Morning Shots,Political Opinion: The Kids Aren’t All Right, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 15, 2025. The Young Republicans are in a bit of trouble: Their group chat just went public.Yesterday, Politico reported on months of private messages in a single Telegram chat among a number of state leaders in the prominent national youth organization. What they found may have shocked a lot of people.But the truth is, it’s what you’re likely to find among any group of baby MAGAheads talking amongst themselves in private about politics today: pure nihilism, obscene racism, a constant barrage of slurs, a nonstop battery of shock-jockery whose only goal is to OFFEND, OFFEND, OFFEND.Just a tiny sample: one member, then–New York State Young Republicans Chair Peter Giunta, was whipping votes as he ran for chair of the national Young Republicans. “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber,” he wrote in the chat.Told that another state’s delegation would vote for “the most right wing person” running, Giunta replied: “Great. I love Hitler.” Pretty awful.But that’s not all. Here was a smattering of the language he used for members of his organization who supported another faction for chair: “Minnesota – f—-ts. Arkansas – inbred cow f-ckers. . . . Maryland – fat stinky Jew . . . Rhode Island – traitorous c—ts who I will eradicate from the face of the planet.”I’ll leave it at that, although depending on your tolerance for pure grotesquery you may want to read the whole thing. Again, this is just one person in the chat, and just a few of his choice comments. Not great!The Young Republicans are, of course, in full damage control mode, trying to write off the chat’s participants as a few bad apples. “The Young Republican National Federation condemns all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate,” YRNF chair Hayden Padgett—who ultimately triumphed over Giunta—said in a statement.Such behavior, he said, “has no place within our organization or the broader conservative movement.”But reading over the chats, what I was struck by is just how self-evidently wrong Padgett’s claim was. The views expressed were particularly vile. But they weren’t out of step with the broad strokes of public MAGA discourse. Instead, they seemed to exist where a lot of young Republicans are today: at the nexus of the coarse and cruel public discourse modeled by Donald Trump and his movement and the maximum-shock style common among the young and Extremely Online.This behavior is abominable, but it’s also unsurprising. Today’s young (and not so young) Republican politics prizes two things that are in conflict: absolute conformity to Donald Trump and his project, and an absolute rejection of the idea that you are conforming to other people’s political standards at all. (You’re supposed to be a based free thinker!)How do you reconcile the two? By backing Trump’s project to the hilt while posturing rhetorically that if you do have a disagreement it’s that he doesn’t go far enough. You prove it by the theatrical rhetorical embrace of slavery, Hitler, racial slurs, and so on.This is what you get after a decade of Trumpism’s ascendance: a young-activist base that has self-selected for the most amoral and psychotic political strivers, and has held them up as a professional ideal for the young people coming up behind them to copy and emulate. This is what they know as the ticket to power.It’s MAGA gone metastatic. Trump could have a radical conversion tomorrow, resign the presidency to enter cloistered religious life, and never speak in public or tweet again: The whole system that has oriented itself around him would remain—the system that is the future of Republican politics.That these chats surfaced at all is notable. The leak seems to have been an attempt by someone to punish a rival in an internecine GOP conflict. The participants are certainly embarrassed, offering mealy-mouthed half-apologies after the story broke. But because everyone involved is still MAGA in good standing, it seems far from clear that anybody’s career is really over here.Already, the main reaction from the top ranks of the party is a determination to avoid the whole thing. Vice President JD Vance scoffed off the story, saying that “I refuse to join the pearl clutching”—after all, Democrats like Virginia’s Attorney General nominee Jay Jones are worse.He was far from alone.All over the country, young Republicans are likely doing the very sort of thing Politico unearthed—yukking it up in the vilest ways with their fellow-travelers. And they’re doing so with reasonable confidence (too much confidence, in some cases!) that those fellow-travelers won’t leak their worst behavior out of a sense of mutually assured destruction. Even if they do come out, the party’s reaction will likely be a collective shrug.But that impunity holds only as long as people stay onside.Do we think JD Vance would show the same grace to a person trying to leave MAGA altogether? The Triad via The Bulwark,All the Pretty Little Nazis, .Jonathan V. Last, Oct. 15, 2025. The shape of things to come. What is required is that a plurality of Republican voters needs to stop choosing authoritarianism.In order for us to get out of this death spiral, we need coordinated action between Republican elites and tens of millions of Republican voters.Democrats cannot—and will not—win every election. The only possible path for survival is lowering the stakes of our elections by having both parties support liberal democracy.This is why I resist infantilizing voters and treating elected Republicans as though they lack agency. Because if the only answer is—Democrats have to be perfect. They must only put forward flawless candidates. They can hold no unpopular ideas. They shall communicate effectively. They may never preside over a war or a recession.—well, then we’re fucked. Because the Democratic party isn’t a divine creation of Providence. It’s just a normal political party of the sort you see in functional democracies. It has some good ideas and some bad ideas. It has its share of crazies and cynics. Not every Democratic politician is true blue. Some of them are jerks, or crooks, or strivers.And what about on the other side? How is the next generation of Republicans shaping up?Let’s talk about this story and what it suggests about the shape of our future.2. Game of TelegramIt’s always the ones you most expect. Here are some tidbits from the Politico story:Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway. . . .Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.” . . .“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, wrote back. . . .When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?” . . .In another exchange, Dwyer, the Kansas’ chair, informs Giunta that one of Michigan’s Young Republicans promised him the group “will vote for the most right wing person” to lead the national organization.“Great. I love Hitler,” Giunta responded.Dwyer reacted with a smiley face.There is a great deal more.¹I don’t want to overinterpret. If you follow the link to the Politico story and look at the pictures of the men involved, they, uh—how do I say this charitably? They are not Übermenschen. We’re talking about a group of doughy, incel weirdos. Guys who lump at the far end of John Ganz’s Jock/Creep Theory of fascism.²But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that we are a decade into Trumpism. These Young Republicans have never known any other type of Republicanism. I assume Trumpism will persist as the dominant feature of Republican politics at least to 2028 and almost certainly to 2032. By that point we’re talking about a full generation of Republicans who only understand politics in the context of an authoritarian project.“Normalized” isn’t even the word. For them, Trumpism won’t be some exotic political mode that was made acceptable. It won’t be a “fever” that breaks. It will have been their mother’s milk.Now maybe these guys aren’t able to capture meaningful power within the Republican party. And maybe a plurality of Republican voters decides that they don’t really care about authoritarianism because they’ve moved on to some other project.But that’s not really a plan, is it? It’s just us sitting around and trying to win the next election while hoping that some enormous, amorphous segment of our political culture transforms of its own accord.People want what they want and I don’t see how we can make Republican voters not want fascism. Sarah would say that sustained electoral defeats might cure Republican voters. Or bad real-world outcomes. But I’m not so sure.Look at Republican politics in states that are overwhelmingly Democratic: Republican candidates there have experienced sustained electoral defeats, and yet those states’ Republican parties tend to nominate more extreme candidates than you generally see in swing states. Sustained electoral defeats seem to liberate those permanent-minority Republicans to be their most based selves.And then look at Republican politics in states that are overwhelming Republican. Real-world outcomes are not good in West Virginia, Louisiana, and most other deep-red states. And yet these real-world outcomes have not driven voters to seek different kinds of Republican leadership.I’d like your thoughts on all of this. The Contrarian,Opinion: A Nobel Prize for Trolling?Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 15, 2025. The distinguished awards further illustrated that Trump is wrong on just about everything.The Nobel Prize Committee announced its annual awards over the last week or so. Aside from the number of winners based at U.S. universities (which have been until now the crown jewel of our education and scientific communities), something else caught my attention: Are the Nobel Prize judges…trolling Donald Trump?I have no doubt the awards—the culmination of a long and rigorous process—are apolitical and entirely well deserved. However, what the committee said about the prizes and how the winners’ work were described certainly highlight Trump’s ignorance and malevolence. If you are going to shine a light on brilliance and excellence, Trump is going to be left in the dark—and others will notice.Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes was explicitly asked about Trump’s clamoring for the Peace Prize. “In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention,” Frydnes said. In other words, they are used to getting nagged. He continued: “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So, we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.” Hmm. Sounds like Trump fared poorly in comparison to all those men and women esteemed for courage and integrity. a coin with a horse on it The explanation of the award itself seemed even more pointed. “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado,” the committee explained. “She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” [Emphasis added here and below.] Democracy surely was front and center (with a notable reminder that it exists in conflict with dictatorship). In fact, democracy was mentioned in more detail and with greater fervor than peace itself.The statement about Machado read: “As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela….” She was credited with leading the opposition demanding “free elections and representative government.” The committee explained:This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree. At a time when democracy is under threat, it is more important than ever to defend this common ground.The regime she opposed is described in language you would (or will, on Saturday) hear at a No King’s Day rally: “a brutal, authoritarian state,” where the few at the top enrich themselves, where “violent machinery of the state is directed against the country’s own citizens,” battling an opposition “systematically suppressed by means of election rigging, legal prosecution and imprisonment.”And in case anyone had missed the point:Democracy is a precondition for lasting peace. However, we live in a world where democracy is in retreat, where more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norms and resorting to violence. The Venezuelan regime’s rigid hold on power and its repression of the population are not unique in the world. We see the same trends globally: rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarization. In 2024, more elections were held than ever before, but fewer and fewer are free and fair.Maybe this was not intended to poke Trump in the eye—and the statement is accurate without any consideration of him—but condemnation of his tactics and outlook are the inevitable result of an award that elevates democracy, the rule of law, fair elections, and a free media. Since Trump antagonizes all those things, the award winners’ opponents sound an awful lot like Trump.Trump prosecutes his perceived enemies, sets the American military against Americans, blows ships out of the water and murders those on board without due process, bullies the media, and seeks to rig elections. In other words, he embodies all the things Maria Corina Machado and other deserving winners fight against. So long as he continues doing all those things (i.e. so long as he remains Trump), he will continue bearing a disturbing resemblance to the other authoritarians around the globe—and will therefor never receive the award he has so openly whined about deserving. (Buckle up, however. Speaker of the House and go-to sycophant Mike Johnson, instead of working to find a compromise and assist in re-opening our government, is reportedly devoting his time and efforts to getting Trump his prize in 2026. Good luck with that.)Trump, his lackeys, and his cultish cheering section seem not to understand that “peace” is not simply the absence of war. Conquest also achieves the end of some wars. But that is not what we are after. Peace, rather, requires renunciation of violence in favor of democratic and humanistic values. Only then do you have a lasting peace during which human beings can flourish.SubscribedThe Peace Prize was not the only award that sounded like an anti-Trump recitation. Consider one of the three Nobel Prize winners for economics: Phillipe Aghion, a French economist and ½ of the winning team with Peter Howitt of Brown University. The Guardian reported:[He] warned that “dark clouds” were gathering amid increasing barriers to trade and openness fueled by Donald Trump’s trade wars. He also said innovation in green industries, and blocking the rise of giant tech monopolies would be vital to stronger growth in future.“I’m not welcoming the protectionist wave in the US, and that’s not good for world growth and innovation,” he said.To be clear, I don’t think he and the other winners received their awards because they sound like a rebuttal to Trump. Rather, Trump is so invariably, deeply, and consistently wrong on economics that anyone recognized for merit invariably will contradict his irrational, ignorant views.In all likelihood, Nobel folks did not set out to troll Trump. But if you are going to celebrate peace—real peace, and the democracy it depends upon—alongside the keys to economic growth (free trade, scientific discovery, dynamic and free societies), then you are going to find yourself sounding like the retort to MAGA authoritarian, know-nothingism.This year’s Nobel prize committee wound up illustrating the degree to which Trump is inimical to peace, progress, and prosperity. The committee should earn a prize for that.Politico,Johnson shrugs off allegations against Cory Mills, Hailey Fuchs, Oct. 15, 2025. The embattled Florida Republican has been slapped with a restraining order.Speaker Mike Johnson is shrugging off news that a judge granted the request for a restraining order against embattled Rep. Cory Mills sought by the Florida Republican’s former girlfriend.“I have not heard or looked into any of the details of that,” Johnson, right, told reporters at a Wednesday morning press conference. “I’ve been a little busy. We have a House Ethics Committee. If it warrants that, I’m sure they’ll look into that.”The restraining order centered around the former girlfriend’s accusations that Mills had threatened to circulate explicit videos of her.Asked again about allegations of simple assault against Mills, along with previous charges that he misrepresented his military career, Johnson referred further questions to Mills and called him a “faithful colleague.”Appearing frustrated to get a second question about the Mills allegations, Johnson at one point responded, “let’s just talk about some things that are really serious,” and called on another reporter.Mills, above left, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Politico, Seth Moulton to seek Massachusetts Senate seat held by Ed Markey in generational fight, Kelly Garrity, Oct. 15, 2025. Markey is one of the oldest members of Congress. Rep. Seth Moulton has a history of challenging those in power.Rep. Seth Moulton, right, will challenge Sen. Ed Markey for his Senate seat in 2026, setting up one of the biggest tests of Democratic voters’ appetite for generational change following the 2024 presidential election.Moulton, who turns 47 this month, is putting age at the center of his announcement, saying in a campaign video to be released Wednesday that Markey is “a good man” but he should nevertheless move on after decades in Congress.“We’re in crisis, and with everything we learned last election, I just don’t believe Senator Markey should be running for another six-year term at 80 years old,” he said in the video announcement. “Even more, I don’t think someone who’s been in Congress for a half century is the right person to meet this moment and win the future.”Moulton has a history of challenging those in power. He was first elected to Congress in 2014 after defeating incumbent Rep. John Tierney, and tried to block Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) from becoming speaker in 2018.Markey has been in Congress since 1976 and would be 86 at the end of another term. At 79, he’s one of the oldest members of Congress seeking reelection next year.Markey has faced the generational change argument before and won. In 2020, he defeated then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III by double digits, bolstered by a horde of young, digital-savvy supporters.Markey has been rolling out endorsements from prominent lawmakers and labor unions for weeks amid rumors of a potential primary challenge. Alex Rikleen, a former teacher and fantasy sports writer, is also running as a Democrat.Moulton’s announcement sets off what’s likely to be a fierce and expensive primary in the safe blue state. Democrats need to pick up four seats to win control of the Senate.A recent poll from the University of New Hampshire found that 42 percent of Bay Staters believed Markey deserves to be reelected, while 39 percent of those surveyed said he doesn’t deserve another term.Another recent survey released by the conservative Fiscal Alliance Foundation found that in a head-to-head matchup, 43 percent of likely general election voters surveyed favored Moulton, while 21 percent favored Markey. But among Democrats surveyed, that gap was narrower: Moulton led Markey 38 percent to 30 percent.On the Republican side, John Deaton, a cryptocurrency advocate and attorney who ran for Senate in 2024, is also considering a run for the Senate seat.MSNBC Daily,Political Opinion: How Democrats can defeat Susan Collins, Paul Waldman, right, Oct. 15, 2025. Democrats want to play it safe in Maine’s white-hot Senate race. That’s a mistake.Maine Gov. Janet Mills has entered the race to unseat Sen. Susan Collins in next year’s election, rounding out the field in what could be the most competitive Senate race in the country — or at least the one where Democrats have the best chance of flipping a seat. The party in Washington would love it if the other candidates would step aside so Mills could focus on the general election against Collins. And some on the left didn’t want Mills entering at all, so a more progressive candidate could have a clearer path to the nomination.They’re all wrong. An absurd amount of energy is spent trying to avoid primaries, when in fact, Democrats should want more of them.Collins is target number one for Democrats in the midterms, as the only Senate Republican up for reelection from a state Donald Trump lost in 2024. And this primary has is brimming with interesting contenders. There’s Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and military veteran who combines blue-collar bona fides with passion and charisma. He has become something of an online sensation since entering the race two months ago, raising millions of dollars and drawing large crowds. Then there’s Dan Kleban, owner of the Maine Beer Company, who turns his small business success into a story about taking on the powerful. There’s Jordan Wood, another progressive with a familiar origin story (clean-cut local boy goes to Washington, works for advocacy group, comes home to run for office). And a few others to boot.Then there’s Gov. Mills, who was recruited to run by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Mills is exactly what the party in Washington always wants: a familiar and fairly popular elected official who can raise money and has plenty of campaign experience. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has already formed a joint fundraising committee with her, making the party’s endorsement all but official.U.S. Media, Education, Religion, Culture WarsHollywood Reporter,Layoffs Hit NBC News: 150 Jobs Cut Ahead of Versant Split,Alex Weprin, Oct. 15, 2025. The cuts come ahead of Comcast’s Versant spinoff, which will see MSNBC and CNBC cleaved off from the rest of the NBC News Group. Layoffs hit NBC News on Wednesday, with the network news division facing cuts ahead of Comcast’s spinoff of Versant. About 150 jobs were eliminated, representing about 2 percent of the workforce of the NBC News Group.The cuts were across the News Group, without specific teams being targeted.The Versant spin will see MSNBC and CNBC separated from NBC News. NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC are currently all part of the NBC News Group, led by Cesar Conde.Per a source, the cuts were driven by the fact that NBC News will no longer be providing newsgathering capabilities for CNBC and MSNBC, as well as broader concerns around the overall economic environment for the media sector.That said, NBC News is shifting resources to other areas, including the forthcoming subscription offering, and new areas of coverage like sports. The division currently has about 140 open job postings, and impacted staff are being encouraged to apply for those roles.“Coming off the successful creation of our new daily podcast Here’s the Scoop, we are preparing to launch our NBC News subscription service later this year that will feature the best of our coverage and include new premium offerings,” Conde wrote in a note to staff last week. “NBC News is expanding its new Sports Hub, in partnership with NBC Sports, with the NBA returning to NBC, as well as the Milan Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the World Cup on Telemundo. And to support the leading position of NBC News, we will be launching a marketing campaign soon that will reinforce our reputation for rigorous fact-based reporting that is indispensable and accessible across all platforms for all, the first such campaign in modern memory.”NBC News employees impacted by the cuts are being given 60 days’ notice, as well as a severance package and outplacement services.The Bulwark Quick Hits,Political Opinion, WHAT THE ZUCK, Sam Stein, right, Oct. 15, 2025.To hear Mark Zuckerberg tell it, one of the great offenses that Joe Biden committed was the use of the government to suppress speech.The Meta CEO had a specific bone to pick: that the Biden administration had pressured his company to take down posts about vaccine safety and efficacy during the height of the COVID pandemic. But he cast this moment as an almost spiritual awakening. Donald Trump, he argued, would get the government out of the content moderation business. He, himself, would never allow Meta to be jawboned again.“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction,” Zuckerberg declared. “And we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”Few people thought this was sincere. Zuckerberg, right, after all, needed to find a way to ally himself with Trump that didn’t seem totally craven. So he projected the 47th president as a free speech absolutist who wouldn’t do to him what Biden had done. And then Trump did. And Zuckerberg went along.On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted that her office had reached out to Facebook and gotten the platform to remove a “large group page that was being used to dox and target” ICE. Bondi was well within her right to do this—as was the Biden aide who pushed Facebook to drop the COVID vaccine entry. Government offices reach out to publications ALL THE TIME to make these requests.But the outrage that Republicans had over the Biden revelations (there were, quite literally, congressional hearings) were absent Tuesday. And the only comment Facebook would offer was: “This Group was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm.”Reasonable enough. So too is the case, made by a DOJ official, that their request to Facebook was more grounded than the one from the Biden aide. But, in the end, this proves that there are occasions when content moderation lines can be drawn and that there are instances when “pressure” from an administration can be tolerated. Zuckerberg isn’t a principled actor, he’s a calculating one. Glad we’ve cleared it up. Meidas Touch Network,Opinion: Fox Declared War on Us, Ben Meiselas, right, Oct. 15, 2025. This doesn’t come as a surprise. Fox has always hated the MeidasTouch Network. Rupert Murdoch (shown in a 2009 file photo above) despises me and my brothers. He thought he was going to hand off the biggest news network to his son Lachlan. The Murdochs poured billions of dollars into it. Private equity poured billions of dollars into Fox.Yet, here we are—with the MeidasTouch Network, built on this Substack and our subscribers, beating Rupert Murdoch,.As you know, other than the MeidasTouch Network, my favorite news entity is The Guardian, which is based in the United Kingdom. After expanding out from Australia, Rupert started building his media empire in the United Kingdom. The Murdochs are very much aware of the major stories coming out of their competition like The Guardian.Apparently, from all of my Fox sources, the profile that The Guardian did on me and the MeidasTouch Network sent Rupert and Lachlan into a spiral. They’ve told several executives privately, words to the effect of, “We are going to war with Meidas and taking down the Meiselas brothers.”I hear they have an entire digital team at Fox monitoring the work we do each day.In the past, Fox has essentially reported our hosts to the DOJ for accurately reporting on ICE. As you know from my prior reporting, Fox has also gone after several of our hosts on air.Although the Murdochs may want to make this fight about Murdoch versus Meiselas, I don’t see it that way. I see it as Murdoch versus the Meidas Mighty. I don’t have an ego in this. The MeidasTouch Network has shocked the world and is pummeling Fox in views and engagement because of this Meidas Mighty community.Whereas Fox deceives and exploits its audience, in my opinion, MeidasTouch uplifts and channels the strength of our community to get out critical messages and the truth during these uncertain times. That is why we will continue to beat Fox and the Murdochs. Rupert and Lachlan will just have to learn that their time controlling the narrative with lies is over.As The Guardian article pointed out, it’s now time for the MeidasTouch Network to lead the way. Let’s keep building this wonderful network and community together.Hollywood Reporter,Jeff Bezos’ Ownership Stake in Amazon Dropped Below 10 Percent as Tech Mogul Continued Stock Sell-Off, Alex Weprin, Oct. 14, 2025. The Amazon founder has been selling off his shares at a regular cadence since stepping aside as CEO four years ago.For what is likely the first time in Amazon‘s history, founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos‘ stake is now less than 10 percent of the company.In a securities filing Tuesday, Bezos disclosed that he now owns 9 percent of the company’s shares, after selling off more than 100 million shares over the course of the past year. A year ago, Bezos owned 10.1 percent of Amazon, and a proxy filing earlier this year showed that his stake had dropped to 9.6 percent.When the company went public in 1997, the tech mogul owned more than 43 percent of the company. When he stepped aside as CEO in 2021 and handed day-to-day control over to Andy Jassy, he owned 14.1 percent of the company, per SEC filings. More Global News New York Times,London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why, Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, Oct. 15, 2025. About 80,000 phones were stolen in the British capital last year. The police are finally discovering where many of them went.The scale of the crime has gone beyond the pick-pocketing familiar to London since before Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist made it famous. Increasingly brazen thieves, often masked and on e-bikes, have become adept at snatching phones from residents and tourists. A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year, according to the police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.Last month’s raids were aimed at identifying a group of middlemen who, the police say, use secondhand phone shops as part of a multilayered global criminal network. By the end of the two-week operation, detectives had found about 2,000 stolen phones and 200,000 pounds ($266,000) in cash.After years in which phone theft was a low priority for an overstretched police force, the new operations are revealing the curious blend of factors behind the epidemic, including steep cuts to British police budgets in the 2010s and a lucrative black market for European cellphones in China.A Mile of Aluminum FoilFor years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woman who had used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes bound for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones.“It quickly became apparent this wasn’t just normal low-level street crime,” said Mark Gavin, a senior detective leading the investigation for the Metropolitan Police. “This was on an industrial scale.”The breakthrough coincided with a broader push by the police to increase public confidence by tackling the city’s most common crimes. Phone theft has been the subject of particular anger among victims, who for years reported their cellphones stolen and handed the police the locations being transmitted, only to be given a crime reference number and hear nothing more.The police are now using that information to map where stolen phones are transported by street thieves. After the Heathrow seizure, a team of specialist investigators who normally deal with firearms and drug smuggling was assigned to the case. They identified further shipments and used forensics to identify two men in their 30s who are suspected of being ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.ImageA picture made available by the Metropolitan Police of seized phones wrapped in foil to prevent them from transmitting tracking signals.Credit…Metropolitan PoliceImageBoxes of stolen phones bound for Hong Kong found in a warehouse near Heathrow Airport, in a photograph made available by the police.Credit…Metropolitan PoliceWhen the men were arrested on Sept. 23, the car they were traveling in contained several phones, some wrapped in aluminum foil in an attempt to prevent them from transmitting tracking signals. At one point, the police said at a news conference, they observed the men buying almost 1.5 miles’ worth of foil in Costco.Some phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many are shipped to China and Algeria as part of a “local-to-global criminal business model,” the police said, adding that in China, the newest phones could be sold for up to $5,000, generating huge profits for the criminals involved.Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in cybersecurity, said that it is easier to use stolen British phones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers do not subscribe to an international blacklist that bars devices that have been reported stolen.“That means that a stolen iPhone that has been blocked in the U.K. can be used without any problems in China,” Mr. Wright said.E-Bikes and BalaclavasThe exporters are at the top of a three-tier criminal network, the police say. In the middle are the shopkeepers and entrepreneurs who buy stolen phones from thieves and sell them to unsuspecting members of the public or pass them on for transport abroad. On the lowest tier are the thieves. Their numbers have risen in line with the juicy profits on offer, and a growing sense of impunity.Overall crime in London has fallen in recent years, but phone theft is disproportionately high, representing about 70 percent of thefts last year. And it has risen sharply: The 80,000 phone thefts last year were a stark increase from the 64,000 in 2023, the police told a parliamentary committee in June.New York Times,Belarus Is as Repressive as Ever. Why Is the U.S. Warming Up to It?Valerie Hopkins, Oct. 15, 2025. Analysts say they are unsure what the Trump administration hopes to get out of its gifts and concessions to Belarus’s autocratic leader, Alexander Lukashenko, left, a close ally of Russia.Ties between the United States and Belarus have been in a deep freeze for years because of Belarus’s political repression and its assistance in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.There is no public indication that the administration is pushing Belarus to change course on either of these issues, and analysts say it is unclear what the United States hopes to get out of the thaw.New York Times,What Are Tomahawk Missiles, and Why Might Trump Give Them to Ukraine?John Ismay, Oct. 15, 2025. Largely used by naval forces for more than 40 years, Ukraine could receive a newly developed land-based launcher to strike Moscow and beyond.President Trump has hinted that he may send Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, which would give President Volodymyr Zelensky the ability to attack Moscow with precise munitions capable of great destruction.Mr. Trump, who will meet with Mr. Zelensky at the White House later this week, said on Tuesday that he knew the Ukrainian leader wanted the weapons.“We have a lot of Tomahawks,” Mr. Trump added.Because of their long range, accuracy and low cost compared to piloted warplanes, Tomahawks have long been seen as a go-to weapon in the Pentagon’s arsenal.The United States has launched more than 2,300 Tomahawks in combat over more than four decades. The most recent versions cost roughly $2.5 million each.Oct. 14The Bulwark,Morning Shots Political Opinion: Is He Lying Or Crazy? Does It Matter?Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 14, 2025. One stage in ending the conflict in Gaza is over; another begins.And as the New York Times notes this morning, the hardest questions may be the ones that remain outstanding: whether Hamas will give up its weapons, whether the Palestinians will agree to demilitarize, what the ultimate governance structure of the strip will look like.For Trump, this is all stuff to hash out later. “I’m talking about rebuilding Gaza,” he told reporters last night. “I’m not talking about single-state, or double-state, or two-state . . . A lot of people like the one-state solution. Some people like the two-state solution. We’ll have to see.” Happy Tuesday.New York Times,Global Growth Remains Sluggish as Tariff Threats Loom, Alan Rappeport, Oct. 14, 2025. The International Monetary Fund said the impact of trade tensions had been limited so far, but it expects growth to slow.News RoundupsSecretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer and Fox News host who prefers to call himself “Secretary of War” instead of the legally mandated term “Secretary of Defense,” addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025. His book advocating a new Christian-oriented “crusade” is shown below left.The Parnas Perspective,Conservative and Liberal Media Unite to Rebuke Pete Hegseth’s Crackdown on the Press, Aaron Parnas, Oct. 14, 2025. Trump rages about Time Magazine’s photo choice of him, report shows the right to protest is under attack in America, and moreWe are witnessing something truly historic: for the first time in years, conservative, centrist, and liberal media outlets are united, standing shoulder to shoulder in defense of the First Amendment and rejecting the Pentagon’s new “reporter pledge,” a dangerous mandate that could criminalize journalism covering Defense Department activities.Every major outlet, from The New York Times to Newsmax, has refused to sign. Only one network, OAN, has agreed. That alone tells you how serious this moment is.This is a watershed test of press freedom in America. The media is finally drawing a line in the sand, saying: No more government overreach. No more threats to the free press.Many of you have asked whether I would ever sign that pledge. Let me be clear: absolutely not. It would make the kind of reporting I do illegal, and with members of this administration already trying to silence me, I refuse to bend, to censor myself, or to surrender to intimidation.With that, here’s what you missed:Major U.S. news outlets including The New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, Newsmax, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic are refusing to sign the Pentagon’s new press rules—introduced under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Trump administration—arguing they threaten First Amendment protections by requiring journalists to acknowledge vague restrictions on information access, which could result in their eviction from the Pentagon.As of 5 PM today, the only news outlet that will be allowed to enter the Pentagon to cover the Department of Defense will be OAN, a far-right, Trump-allied news organization that often spreads conspiracy theories and falsehoods.A new report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) warns that the right to protest is under sustained attack in Western nations—including the UK, US, France, and Germany—where governments have “weaponized” counter-terror and antisemitism laws to suppress pro-Palestinian demonstrations, censor dissent, and restrict civil liberties amid rising hate crimes and expanding police powers.No Kings Day 2.0 is on the verge of breaking historic record this weekend despite attacks from Trump-aligned cabinet members who allege, without any proof, that the protestors attending this weekend’s events are associated with “Antifa” or are being “paid.”Donald Trump woke up extremely upset at Time Magazine for using an unflattering image of him on the cover this morning:Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was caught on a hot mic at the Gaza peace summit in Egypt asking Donald Trump if he could meet his son Eric, raising questions about potential business links as the Trump Organization expands new projects in Indonesia; the exchange adds to scrutiny over Trump’s ongoing conflicts of interest between his presidency and global business ventures.New York Attorney General Letitia James, facing federal fraud charges, defiantly vowed not to back down during her first public appearance since the indictment, warning against “powerful voices” that seek to “silence truth” and “weaponize justice,” and urging supporters to defend democracy and the rule of law.After a deadly weekend that left 12 dead and at least 40 injured across South Carolina and Mississippi high school events, the U.S. total for 2025 mass shootings has climbed to 337, according to the Gun Violence Archive; officials condemned the violence as “senseless,” while experts warn that mass shootings have become a pervasive “American phenomenon,” with 1 in 15 adults having witnessed one firsthand and researchers calling for stronger support systems to address the nation’s enduring gun crisis.Multiple U.S. airports—including those in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, Charlotte, Portland, and Buffalo—refused to display Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s video blaming Democrats for the government shutdown, citing laws against political messaging on public property; airport officials said airing the video would violate the Hatch Act and local regulations prohibiting partisan content, as travel disruptions mount amid unpaid TSA and air traffic staff.Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Coast Guard members will still receive pay during the ongoing government shutdown, citing an unspecified “innovative solution” within DHS, after Trump directed the Defense Department to pay military personnel despite most federal workers missing paychecks amid continued congressional gridlock over funding.China vowed to “fight to the end” after the U.S. accused it of trying to harm the global economy, escalating tensions in the renewed trade war sparked by Trump’s new 100% tariffs on Chinese exports and fresh U.S. duties on goods like furniture and timber; both nations have exchanged port fees and rare earth restrictions, casting doubt on a planned Trump–Xi meeting despite ongoing lower-level talks.Senators Lindsey Graham and Mark Kelly remain at an impasse over the nearly two-week government shutdown, with Graham refusing to reinstate Obama-era healthcare subsidies demanded by Democrats.Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei praised Donald Trump ahead of their first White House meeting, calling him a “dear friend” and “an example of leadership” for defenders of freedom.Trump pledged to leverage his presidency to push Israel toward recognizing it has achieved its military goals and to usher in a new era of Middle East cooperation, potentially including peace with Iran.Trump plans to posthumously award conservative activist Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom today at the White House after Kirk was fatally shot last month while speaking at Utah Valley University.Following the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire, key issues—Hamas’ disarmament, Gaza’s governance, and reconstruction—remain unresolved; only four deceased hostages’ bodies were returned, families expressed anguish, and aid groups began reentering Gaza as the U.N. warned of massive destruction and humanitarian needs.A new study in Annals of Internal Medicine found that private equity ownership of hospitals led to higher death rates among Medicare emergency patients—seven more deaths per 10,000—due to staff cuts, lower wages, and more patient transfers, with experts warning that profit-driven cost reductions are harming care and accountability remains limited because private equity firms are legally insulated from liability.Maine Gov. Janet Mills announced a 2026 Senate run against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, positioning herself as Democrats’ best hope to flip the seat while pledging to serve only one term; her entry, encouraged by Chuck Schumer, sets up a generational and ideological primary battle within the Democratic Party as progressives rally behind Graham Platner, while Mills touts her statewide wins, record of standing up to Trump, and moderate appeal to Maine voters.SpaceX successfully completed its 11th Starship test flight, launching from Texas and landing in the Indian Ocean as it prepares to debut an upgraded version of the rocket designed for future Moon and Mars missions; the flight tested heat shields, engine relighting, and water landings, marking key progress toward NASA’s 2027 Artemis lunar landing goal and SpaceX’s long-term interplanetary ambitions.Instagram announced a major overhaul to make teen accounts function like a “PG-13” experience, introducing stricter age-gating, expanded blocked search terms, and limits on exposure to adult or risky content; the move follows public backlash and congressional scrutiny over teen safety, as Meta faces criticism for prioritizing engagement and profits over child protection.Good news:Scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine developed the first fast-acting antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning, a protein therapy called RcoM-HBD-CCC that “cleans” blood in under a minute by binding and flushing out CO molecules without disrupting oxygen or blood pressure regulation; the breakthrough, published in PNAS, could transform emergency treatment and pave the way for use in respiratory distress, anemia, and organ preservation.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 13, 2025 [Trump’s Imagined Arch of Triumph], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 14, 2025. Last Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump showed to Canadian officials a plan for a triumphal arch that would sit on the banks of the Potomac River opposite the Lincoln Memorial in a traffic rotary at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge below Arlington National Cemetery.The idea, apparently, is to build the arch to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States in July 2026.On Thursday, the White House press pool reported, the plan was laid out on President Donald J. Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. The massive stone arch appears to be the same height as or taller than the Lincoln Memorial. Early in the morning on Saturday, October 11, Trump posted on social media an artist’s rendering of what such an arch might look like, complete with what appears to be a gold winged victory statue at the top of the arch.Triumphal arches are free-standing structures consisting of one or more arches crowned with a flat top for engravings or statues. They hark back to ancient Rome, where leaders built them to commemorate military victories or significant public events. Those arches inspired others, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, built to honor those who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.Observers immediately noted that the photographed plan showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong way, and compared the Trump Arch both to the Arc de Triomphe and to another arch modeled on it: the German Arch of Triumph proposed by Adolph Hitler to commemorate Germany’s victory in World War II.That triumphal arch [by Germany] was never built.Architect Eric Jenkins told Daniel Jonas Roche of The Architect’s Newspaper that the proposed arch would disrupt the symbolic connection between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The two are connected not only by the Arlington Memorial Bridge, but also by the Civil War. During that war, the nation began to bury its hallowed dead on the grounds of the former home of General Robert E. Lee, who led the troops of the Confederacy. Lee’s Arlington House sits directly behind the memorial to Lincoln, who led the United States to stop the Confederates from dismantling the nation.The proposed construction of a triumphal arch contrasts with the expected sale and probable demolition of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1940, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was built to house the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration.In August 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. That law established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.The vision of government behind the Social Security Act was very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, those behind the Social Security Act recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality. They replaced that vision with one in which the government recognized that all Americans were equally valuable.Their reworking of American government came from the conditions of the United States after the rise of modern industry. Americans had always depended on community, but the harsh conditions of industrialization in the late nineteenth century had made it clear that the government must protect that community. City governments like New York City’s Tammany Hall began to provide a basic system of social welfare for voters, making sure that they had jobs, food, and shelter and that women and children had a support network if a husband or father died.Then, in the 1930s, the overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression showed that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”And so Perkins pushed for the Social Security Act, the law that became the centerpiece and the symbol of the new relationship between the government and American citizens.Once FDR signed the law, the next step was to create a building for its administrators. To decorate a building that would be the centerpiece of the government’s new philosophy, administrators announced a competition for the creation of murals to decorate the main corridor of the new building.Among those who threw their hats into the ring was Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn, one of the most sought-after artists in the United States, a social realist painter who designed murals to illustrate “the meaning of Social Security.” Shahn wrote: “I feel that the whole Social Security idea is one of the real fruits of democracy.” He set out to show that idea in his art.Shahn depicted the evils of a world of economic insecurity, showing “endless waiting, men standing and waiting, men sitting and waiting, the man and boy going wearily into the long empty perspective of a railroad track.” He showed the “little girl of the mills” and “breaker boys working in a mine. The crippled boy issuing from the mine symbolizes the perils of child labor…a homeless boy is seen sleeping in the street; another child leans from a tenement window.” He showed “the insecurity of dependents—the aged and infirm woman, the helpless mother with her small child.”Then he illustrated the alleviation of that insecurity through government support. He showed “the building of homes…[and] tremendous public works, furnishing employment and benefitting all of society… youths of a slum area engaged in healthy sport in handball courts…the Harvest—threshing and fruit-gathering, obvious symbols of security, suggesting also security as it applies to the farm family.”Shahn finished the pieces in 1942, and said: “I think the Social Security mural is the best work I’ve ever done…. I felt I had everything under control—or almost under control—the big masses of color to make it decorative and the little details to make it interesting.”Shahn’s work stood alongside that of Philip Guston, who depicted the well-being of the family under the Social Security Act; Seymour Fogel, whose portrait of security included children learning and a table piled with food; and sisters Ethel and Jenne Magafan, who were warned their mural in the boardroom should not distract the members, so they painted mountains in snow. Gray Brechin, the founder of the Living New Deal, a nonprofit that tracks the fate of New Deal art, told Timothy Noah of The New Republic that the Cohen building is “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”But by the time Shahn and the other artists had completed their work, Noah explains, plans for the building had changed. The Social Security Administration never occupied it. First, the War Production Board, which managed the conversion of U.S. companies to wartime production, commandeered the building, and then in 1954 the Voice of America (VOA) moved in.Like most federal buildings, the Cohen building is owned by the General Services Administration (GSA), to which the agencies in the building pay rent. With a total budget of $300 million, the VOA’s rent could not keep the building up, and in 2020, under the first Trump administration, the GSA told the VOA that it would have to vacate the building by 2028. During the Biden administration, Noah reports, the GSA proposed renovating the building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” but before the report was widely circulated, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) inserted into a water resources bill a provision to sell the building.Now, although the market for commercial buildings is depressed, the Trump administration is proceeding with the sale.Since taking office in January 2025, officials in the second Trump administration have made war on the vision of government embodied by the Social Security Act, promoting in its place a return to the rugged individualism that is even less true today than it was a century ago.Now the administration is getting rid of the building built to house the Social Security Administration, along with the murals that champion the government’s role in protecting the equality and security of ordinary people, while Trump contemplates building a triumphal arch, carving MAGA ideology into the nation’s capital in stone.Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: Quid Pro Presidency, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 14, 2025. Nations that have bestowed lavish gifts to President Trump — or enriched Trump and his family by striking business deals with Trump-connected companies — have later received extraordinary benefits from the Trump administration.The apparent link between personal benefits and official acts has fundamentally changed the nature of the most powerful political office on Earth.For example, on May 21, Qatar gifted the United States government a luxury 747 jet, which originally cost over $400 million, for Trump to use as Air Force One. The plane was designed by “famed French interior design firm Alberto Pinto Cabinet, and boasts gold-colored walls and gold furnishings, reminiscent of the president’s opulent home in Trump Tower.” The cabin “is decked out with winding staircases, plush carpeting, leather couches and more.” After Trump leaves office, the plane will reportedly be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library, making it available for Trump’s personal use.In 2017, during his first term, Trump described Qatar as “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” Since the gift of the plane, however, Trump’s posture toward Qatar has changed dramatically.In a September 29 executive order, Trump describes Qatar as “a steadfast ally in pursuit of peace, stability, and prosperity, both in the Middle East and abroad.” Trump states that it is now “the policy of the United States to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar against external attack.” Specifically, the “United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States.” Such an expansive security guarantee was previously extended only to NATO members.But Trump did not stop there. On October 10, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the government will permit Qatar to establish a military presence on U.S. soil. The Qatari government thanked Hegseth for allowing the creation of “a Qatar Emiri Air Force facility at Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.” The facility “will host Qatari F-15 fighter jets and pilots who will train alongside U.S. troops.”In 2024, a few months before Trump won the presidency, the Qatari government was one of two investors in a $1.5 billion funding round for Affinity Partners, an investment firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Although Kushner had pledged not to be involved in policy-making in Trump’s second term, he has reemerged as one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisors.Several other countries have replicated Qatar’s financial approach to Trump and his family. It has paid off.The Contrarian,Words and Phrases We Could Do Without: ‘Waste, Fraud and Abuse, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 14, 2025. Removing Trump is the only way to get rid of real ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’Donald Trump and his minions endlessly rail about “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government. Meanwhile, he and his regime are the most prodigious generators of “waste, fraud, and abuse” in American history.First and foremost, no president has ever used his office to rack up anything close to the estimated $5B Trump has hauled in for himself, selling everything from tacky gold sneakers to crypto. He has mastered the art of trading on access and enticing foreigners to pony up big bucks (and even an airplane). The most pro-corruption president in history also has stopped enforcement of foreign corruption, crypto fraud and other white collar crimes.Beyond all that, in just over nine months the MAGA regime has been more egregious in its misuse of taxpayers’ money than any administration in memory.Flying top brass into Quantico, Va., to hear an obnoxiously partisan pep talk from Defense Secretary (and wrinkle warrior) Pete Hegseth and Trump: $6M. That qualifies as both waste and abuse (i.e., politicizing the military).Multiple unnecessary and unconstitutional deployments of national guard around the country (which have triggered adverse court rulings, costing a fortune in taxpayer-funded legal fees): 2/3 of a billion dollars. The Atlantic reports that the D.C. deployment will cost more than $200M while the Los Angeles invasion as of early September cost $118M. If you throw in tens of millions for deployments to other cities, the unconstitutional invasions “could wind up costing Americans roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars.” It is hard not to wonder how many NIH science grants or new air traffic controllers or SNAP meals $750M dollars would fund. Aside from the waste and abuse, the rationale for the deployments, which courts increasingly find specious, surely constitutes “fraud” as well.SubscribedMoving on to the Qatari corruption racket, Trump’s “gift”—an Air Force One, which will cost an estimated $1B to retrofit. And in the end, the government apparently does not even get to keep the jet. Waste, fraud, and abuse.Even worse, Hegseth proudly announced that “we’re signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force Facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.” Cost: Unknown. In what world is that a remotely appropriate expense for American taxpayers, let alone for our national security?Once you start looking around, waste, fraud, and abuse seem to be key features of the Trump regime. A recent General Accounting Office detailed all three offenses in the federal oil and gas program. CNN documented the bailout to farmers (necessitated by Trump’s counterproductive and possibly illegal tariffs) and the $20B giveaway to Argentina.Meanwhile, Nicholas Kristof enumerated the billions Trump has wasted in shuttering USAID—leaving warehouses full of everything from vegetable oil to family planning supplies, not to mention hundreds of thousands of doses of monkey pox vaccine and “donated medicines meant to prevent river blindness, schistosomiasis and intestinal parasites about to expire.” Worse, “the cost to American taxpayers of shutting down U.S.A.I.D. will be $6.4 billion over two years—enough to save more than one million children’s lives.” [Emphasis added.]What about Trump’s frequent Mar-a-Lago trips? The Palm Beach Post reports on items such as $800,000 per Air Force One trip, one month of security at about $478,000, and other assorted costs for Marine One helicopter and county security. Sounds like a lot of waste and abuse.Trump’s military birthday parade? That wasted $30M, which did NOT include related costs such as “Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and local police personnel to secure a chunk of downtown Washington and monitor possible threat.”The big, beautiful ugly bill was supposed to cut out a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse, but (shocker!): it created more. The big, ugly bill that takes healthcare coverage from tens of millions to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires is a cornucopia of waste, including over $165M (with little specificity or oversight) for the Department of Homeland Security’s abusive shock troops, a $100M slush fund for Office of Management and Budget(!), incentives for states to maintain high error rates in SNAP, and 10 million in income tax-free for investing in certain startup companies (75% of which goes to millionaires). The MAGA big spenders also added more waste to the already bloated defense budget, including $25B on the nonsensical “Golden Dome” missile shield. According to one watchdog group, “Another $2.5 billion would go to the controversial Sentinel missile program, which is currently 81 percent over-budget. Meanwhile, the $13-16 billion meant for ‘expediting innovation’ is filled with earmarks for Congress’ ‘pet projects.’” [Emphasis added.]Put simply, Trump only wants to eliminate “Democrat programs”—those that improve the livelihoods of real people. Meanwhile, Trump habitually clears the way for more waste, fraud, and abuse. Earlier this year he fired a slew of inspectors general. More recently, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Cal.), Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Ranking Member of the Committee on the Judiciary, demanded Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought “stop illegally withholding congressionally-approved funding” for items such as “websites for dozens of Inspectors General (IGs) that publish hotline numbers where whistleblowers can submit complaints of waste, fraud, and abuse and make reports detailing corruption available to the public.”And when the MAGA regime order cuts in the name of fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” things get worse. Trump and Elon Musk (the real president before Stephen Miller took over) cut vital programs, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of adults and children, halting hundreds of millions to fund in cutting-edge scientific research, and destroying student aid programs. DOGE itself made gob-smacking mistakes that resulted in firing and then rehiring critical personnel. (Learning nothing, Trump’s minions repeated this mind-boggling incompetence in the firing and rehiring of CDC personnel during the shutdown.)Since Trump is the all-time “waste, fraud, and abuse” champ, we should retire the phrase. If we really want to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse we should get rid of the MAGA regime—and before that, boot out the do-nothing MAGA congressional majorities that eschew oversight.More On U.S. Law, Politics, Governance, Race The Bulwark,Morning Shots Political Opinion: Fake It Till You Make It, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 14, 2025. Yesterday, we briefly mentioned Trump’s weekend Truth Social claim that the “BIDEN FBI” had “PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6.”“What a SCAM,” the president raged. “DO SOMETHING!!!”I regret glossing over it. Not only because it was an objectively insane thing to tweet—given it was Trump, not Biden, who was pretty famously president on January 6th—but because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me to be a keystone text of Trump’s second term.Start with the double standard here. Imagine that last year, during the perennial (and understandable!) news cycles around Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office, Biden himself had claimed in passing to have been president during the January 6th attack. It would have been a field day for the opposition and a multi-day story for the press. Reporters would have demanded answers for how the president could be laboring under such a delusion.Trump, too, is very old—older than Biden was when he took office in 2020. He, too, plainly seems less sharp, less aware of his surroundings than he did in the past. And yet he has set the bar so low for his own conduct and speech that drilling into individual loony pronouncements like this starts to feel like an exercise in futility, a waste of everybody’s time. He could be misremembering—but he could also just be lying for political benefit, throwing the usual low-vitamin, high-calorie chum to his base. He is perversely helped by the fact that you can’t tell whether you should attribute a specific Trump claim to his melting brain or his melted soul.But there’s more than just a simple double standard going on here. The post is the core of how Trump sees the world: Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons. All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators. He may have been president on January 6th. But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain.It isn’t just the tweets—Trump now runs the whole government this way. It’s the belief that underlies freezing half-finished green energy infrastructure projects, or purging law enforcement agents because they happened to work on January 6th cases, or carrying out firings at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency because he’s still mad at Chris Krebs. These people are the demons—they’re Biden-coded—so all you can do is root them out. On the flip side, there’s the pledges he has made to police officers not to prosecute abusive behavior, his firings of a host of internal government watchdogs, his dead-lettering of the Hatch Act and of corruption laws. All these things only exist to constrain him and his allies—the good guys.During the Biden days, questions about the president’s awareness and fitness for office tended to boil down to whether it was actually him calling the shots. Was the president being shepherded through the motions of basic sane governance by the people around him?Nobody’s asking that question today. At any given moment, Trump may be lying or he may be hallucinating. But he’s clearly calling the shots. The task for the rest of the apparatus of government is to get to work turning that lie or hallucination into reality. When he type-shouts “DO SOMETHING!!!”, there’s no question: They do.New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Hosts Argentina’s Leader After Bailout Agreement, Erik Wemple, Oct. 14, 2025. White House visit: Javier Milei, the leader of Argentina, is meeting with President Trump at the White House, just days after the United States agreed to move ahead with a $20 billion bailout of the South American nation.Democrats and U.S. farmers have criticized the bailout, which came as China has been buying soybeans from Argentine farmers instead of American growers. Read more ›Tariffs: The Trump administration has ushered in new levies on imported furniture, kitchen cabinets and lumber, adding a fresh round of tariffs as Mr. Trump once again threatened to expand his trade war with China. Read more ›Charlie Kirk: Mr. Trump is set to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to the assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in a ceremony at the White House. Read more ›New York Times, Supreme Court Denies Alex Jones’s Appeal of Payment to Sandy Hook Families, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 14, 2025. Mr. Jones was ordered to pay $1.4 billion in damages to families who lost children in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn.The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review an appeal from Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, leaving in place a lower court judge’s order that he pay $1.4 billion in damages to some of the families who lost children in a 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.In turning down Mr. Jones’s appeal, the court gave no reasons, as is its custom in issuing such orders.The families were awarded the money after suing Mr. Jones for defamation. Mr. Jones for years falsely claimed on his Infowars show and website that the shooting was a hoax and that family members of the victims were actors in a plot to enact extreme gun control legislation. Twenty children, all of them first graders, and six educators died in the shooting.The Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the case clears the way for Mr. Jones to pay the families as a result of the long-running litigation. Mr. Jones and his company Free Speech Systems had asked the justices to put off any payout until the court had determined whether to review his appeal.In response to the court’s action Tuesday, an attorney for the families said the justices “properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused.”“We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done,” attorney Chris Mattei said in a statement.Legal AF, SCOTUS PUTS AN END to Trump DOJ Civil War , Michael Popok, Oct. 14, 2025. Alex Jones’ bid to beg the MAGA US Supreme Court to overturn his $1.5 Billion in defamation and punitive damages for calling the child and teacher victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre “actors” who “faked it,” has come to an end, with the Court rejecting his appeal on First Amendment grounds.Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News joins Popok to put the ruling in a bigger context of a fight that’s broken out within the DOJ leadership between Pro Jones defenders like Ed Martin and the #2 in the office Todd Blanche. The Bulwark,Morning Shots Political Opinion: Saying Yes to No Kings, William Kristol, right, Oct. 14, 2025. I’ve been around politics quite a while, but I’ve always tended to avoid large demonstrations or mass protests. It’s not that I’m particularly hostile to crowds. I like crowds at baseball games. But I’m inclined to prefer political activity that’s filtered through organized elections and representative bodies.I’m sure my aversion to mass demonstrations comes in part from the fact that the New Left was the source of such events when I was young, and I was anti-New Left. But I also had enough sense, even then, to be put off by some of the counter-rallies on the right. So though I was an (extremely lowly!) White House intern in the summer of 1970, I remember skipping the proto-Trumpian Nixon-backed July 4th “Honor America Day” celebration on the Mall.Later that summer, though, I did attend one political demonstration. I went with a couple of fellow young anti-Communists to Central Park for a rally for Captive Nations Week. We were demonstrating for the freedom of the peoples subjugated to Soviet rule. Most of the attendees were émigrés from those nations. I recall finding the event a moving expression of what then seemed a forlorn hope: that the captive peoples trapped behind the Iron Curtain would one day be free.No Kings seems to me very much in the spirit of that demonstration. Both are protests against oppression and authoritarianism. Both are assemblies in favor of freedom. I was pleased to attend our local No Kings gathering on June 14, and I plan on being there this coming Saturday, October 18.I’m far more inclined to attend because of the desperate and disgraceful Trumpist smears of No Kings as part of antifa and associated with domestic terrorism that Andrew and JVL detailed yesterday.The fact is that the No Kings organizers have worked hard to try to ensure that the events are peaceful. This statement is featured on the No Kings website: “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”The organizers have also gone out of their way to make No Kings non-sectarian. As Ellen Chapman, a member of the Sacramento planning committee, told the American Prospect, the organizers understand that “we need a big tent of opposition,” and that regardless of other differences, “we can all agree on one thing—that in America we don’t tolerate kings.” And so, Chapman says, “We’re hoping for a day where people come together and find courage for what’s to come, to know they can say no to all this in a safe and nonviolent way and that they’re not alone.”Speaker Mike Johnson and one of his deputies in the Republican House leadership, Rep. Tom Emmer, called No Kings a “hate America rally.” But in fact, the three million-plus people who showed up on June 14, and the still larger number expected this Saturday, are there to speak for America. It’s not just that they’ll be peacefully exercising a core constitutional right—“the right of the people peaceably to assemble”—it’s that they’re assembling in order to defend our core constitutional rights.One might say they’re rallying against the prospect of our becoming a home-grown captive nation.
- Recapturing America… On the Flagship Pod, BILL KRISTOL and TY COBB join TIM MILLER to talk about the No Kings protests, Insurrection Act chatter, ICE abuses, and how to restore the rule of law.
- What Is Going on Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Brain?! The Georgia congresswoman has been increasingly restless with Trump. What does it mean for MAGA’s future? WILL SOMMER investigates at False Flag.
- The Dark Passions and How to Counter Them… BILL GALSTON discusses his new book with MONA CHAREN about the vulnerabilities of liberal democracies and how to relearn the importance of rhetoric.
- Barron Goes Corrupt and Vivek Faces Racism at TPUSA! This week on FYPod, CAMERON KASKY and TIM MILLER break down one of the strangest stories yet: Barron Trump being floated for a leadership role at TikTok as the platform transitions to U.S. ownership. Also, the two discuss Vivek Ramaswamy’s rough reception at a Turning Point USA event, and what his experience reveals about racism and hypocrisy within the GOP’s youth movement.
- Locking Down the Pentagon Press Is Dangerous… Pete Hegseth’s proposed restrictions would harm the people whom both the military and the press are meant to serve, argues GEN. MARK HERTLING.
New York Times,Will the Supreme Court Use a Louisiana Case to Gut the Voting Rights Act?Abbie VanSickle, Oct. 14, 2025. The justices have shown a willingness to chip away at the landmark civil rights legislation. A Louisiana case could unravel much of its remaining power.In a landmark 2013 case, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had required some states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the federal government before changing their voting laws.In that case, Shelby County v. Holder, the justices split along ideological lines in a decision that showed they differed on how much progress the country had made in race relations since the law was adopted as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion, “and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”The court’s decision left untouched a central piece of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2, which prohibits election or voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. In the Shelby County opinion, the chief justice wrote: “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”A little more than a decade later, Section 2 is now squarely at issue. On Wednesday, the court will consider a challenge focused on this remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, the key legislation that aimed to unravel Jim Crow laws in the South and that has served to protect the voting power of Black Americans.Just how far the court is willing to go may become more clear as the justices hear Louisiana v. Callais, a complex dispute over the state’s congressional map.After punting on a decision in June, the justices announced they would rehear the case this month and this time focus specifically on whether allowing race to be used as a factor in drawing voting maps is unconstitutional.For generations, lawmakers seeking to avoid legal challenges under the Voting Rights Act have drawn districts that aimed to maintain minorities’ voting power. A finding that it is unconstitutional to consider race in drawing districts would upend that process.Election law experts, civil rights groups and politicians are watching Wednesday’s case closely because of the immediate, enormous impact it could have on local, state and federal districts.At a time when Republican state legislatures are already being pressed by President Trump to redistrict to expand the party’s congressional majority, such a ruling could throw into question majority-Black districts now held by Democrats.“You’re going to essentially cast doubt on dozens of congressional districts at a time when we’re undergoing incredible political polarization and a lack of confidence in the electoral system,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford and an elections law expert.Should the justices even signal that they are ready to gut Section 2 and prohibit the use of race as a factor in drawing electoral maps, the effects could be felt quickly.The Republican speaker of Louisiana’s state House of Representatives has already asked legislators to clear their calendars in the weeks after the argument in case state leaders call a special legislative session to begin redrawing the map.U.S. Economy, Tariffs, JobsNew York Times,Trump Ramps Up Trade War as New Tariffs on Lumber and Furniture Take Effect, Ana Swanson and Sydney Ember, Oct. 14, 2025. The president is threatening to widen his trade war against China as tariffs on timber, lumber, kitchen cabinets and other products took effect on Tuesday.President Trump ushered in new tariffs on imported furniture, kitchen cabinets and lumber on Tuesday, adding a fresh round of levies as he once again threatened to expand his trade war with China.Tariffs ranging from 10 to 50 percent on foreign wood products and furniture snapped into effect just after midnight. The tariffs are meant to encourage more domestic logging and furniture manufacturing. But critics say that the levies will raise prices for American consumers and could slow industries including home building that rely on materials from abroad.The tariffs come in addition to import taxes President Trump has already imposed on cars, steel and other goods. And they take effect as Mr. Trump is engaging in a high stakes game of chicken with China, one of America’s biggest trading partners, which could end up derailing trade and slowing the U.S. economy.On Friday, the president said he might add an additional levy of 100 percent to all products from China beginning Nov. 1. Beijing last week placed restrictions on its exports of rare earth minerals, which could be crippling for American and European makers of semiconductors, electric vehicles and other products.The S&P 500 index ended Friday down more than 2 percent, its steepest one-day slide in six months. But stocks rebounded strongly Monday after a social media post by Mr. Trump saying, “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine!”“Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment,” the president wrote early Sunday morning. “He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!”More Global NewsNew York Times, Israel Identifies 2 Bodies Handed Over by Hamas, Liam Stack and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 14, 2025. The return of the remains of four former captives has spurred anger that more were not retrieved. The devastation to Gaza is likely to make the task especially hard.The Israeli military on Tuesday publicly identified two of the four bodies of former captives in Gaza whose remains were returned to Israel. The announcement added a sorrowful note to the joyful celebrations across the country on Monday after the release of the last 20 living captives held in Gaza.The military named the two as Guy Illouz and Bipin Joshi. The cease-fire agreement called on Hamas to release on Monday the bodies of the 28 hostages who are believed to have died.The deal acknowledged that recovering many of the bodies could be difficult, especially because of the widespread devastation in Gaza. The territory was highly urbanized before the war, but two years of Israeli strikes have turned large parts of it into a flattened landscape of cement rubble.The agreement outlined how the remains could be located and returned if Hamas was unable to do so by Monday. That process would center on the establishment of a joint task force, to include the United States and other mediators, that would share information and help locate the remaining bodies, according to three Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak publicly.Israeli officials and some families of the hostages have criticized Hamas for not returning the remains of more of the former hostages.Israel Katz, the country’s defense minister, accused Hamas of failing “to uphold its commitments.” But he did not say Israel would take immediate military action in response, suggesting that the cease-fire would hold.Oct. 13 President Donald Trump talks with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on Oct. 13, 2025, in Jerusalem (Evelyn Hockstein Pool photo via AP)Associated Press via Politico,Hamas frees hostages and Israel releases prisoners, Staff Report, Oct. 13, 2025. President Trump is visiting the region to see the outcome of the deal he brokered.Hamas released all 20 of the last living hostages on Monday, the Israeli military said. It is part of a breakthrough ceasefire after two years of war between Israel and Hamas in the devastated Gaza Strip.Buses carrying dozens of freed Palestinian prisoners drove to the West Bank city of Ramallah and the Gaza Strip, the Hamas-run Prisoners Office said. Israel is freeing more than 1,900 prisoners as part of the ceasefire deal. U.S. President Donald Trump is in the region to discuss the U.S.-proposed deal and postwar plans with other leaders.New York Times,Live Updates: Hostages and Palestinian Prisoners Are Freed as Trump Hails ‘Historic Dawn’ in Mideast, David M. Halbfinger, Aaron Boxerman, Natan Odenheimer, Isabel Kershner, Adam Rasgon, David E. Sanger and Liam Stack, Oct. 13, 2025. Hamas freed the last 20 living hostages and Israel released some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners as part of a cease-fire. President Trump, in Israel, proclaimed an “end” to the war, but Israel and Hamas have not agreed on next steps in Gaza.Here’s the latest.President Trump received applause and cheers on Monday in Israel’s Parliament, where he celebrated an initial cease-fire deal in Gaza that he proclaimed was “the end of a war,” despite lingering questions over whether Israel and Hamas can reach a lasting peace.Mr. Trump hailed “the historic dawn of a new Middle East,” hours after Hamas released the last 20 living hostages from Gaza and Israel began releasing some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners — an exchange that is the cornerstone of a cease-fire deal brokered in part by the United States.The hostages returned to Israel early Monday. Soon afterward, buses carrying Palestinian prisoners released by Israel arrived in the West Bank city of Ramallah.The cease-fire deal brought relief to the families of the hostages and prisoners and raised hopes for ending a two-year war that has devastated Gaza. But it did not formally end the hostilities, and many questions remain about what comes next in Gaza, including whether Hamas will agree to Israel’s demand that the group disarm.Many of those questions were expected to come up at a summit on the cease-fire deal that Mr. Trump and other world leaders were scheduled to attend in Egypt later on Monday. The Egyptian government said that Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, would participate in the summit, but Mr. Netanyahu’s office said he would not, citing a Jewish religious holiday.Among both Israelis and Palestinians, the cease-fire and the start of the exchange brought relief after two devastating years of war.“You are coming home!” Einav Zangauker, the mother of Matan Zangauker, 25, said on a video call with her son in Gaza for the first time since he was abducted two years ago, according to footage broadcast on Israeli television.In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, crowds of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah, where video footage showed Palestinian prisoners stepping off the bus that brought them from Israel’s Ofer Prison . Some of the men wore keffiyehs and flashed victory signs as they were greeted by crowds of people.But for some Gazans, the relief was clouded by sadness over a war that has reduced much of the territory to rubble. “There’s nothing to be happy about,” Saed Abu Aita, 44, said. “My two daughters were killed, my home was destroyed and my health has deteriorated.”Hamas militants attacked Israel in October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and abducting about 250. In response, Israel invaded Gaza, killing about 67,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health authorities.Here’s what else to know:
- Trump’s speech: Mr. Trump, the first U.S. president to address the Knesset since George W. Bush in 2008, went into lengthy digressions as if delivering a campaign speech, praising Israel and touting his own accomplishments while denigrating his Democratic predecessors, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. He also shattered diplomatic taboos, at one point urging Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, to pardon Mr. Netanyahu, who is the defendant in a long-running criminal trial on charges including bribery.
- The logistics: Under the deal reached last week in talks brokered by U.S., Arab and Turkish mediators, Israeli forces withdrew to a new defensive line inside Gaza by noon on Friday, opening a 72-hour window for the hostages to be released.
- Hostages: Hamas is required under the cease-fire to turn over the remains of deceased hostages, but it is unclear how quickly that will happen. Israel believes at least 26 hostages are dead, while the condition of two other captives has not been confirmed. Officials have said that Hamas will have to search for the remains of some hostages, which may take some time.
- Aid deliveries: Hours before the first Israeli hostages were released, the United Nations said that “real progress” was being made in delivering aid to Gaza, where a United Nations-backed panel of food experts has said that some areas are officially under famine.
- Red Cross: The International Committee of the Red Cross plays a central role in exchanges of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails. The group has come under sharp criticism from both Israelis and Palestinians.
The Pentagon Headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. New York Times,Several News Outlets Reject Pentagon’s Reporting Restrictions, Erik Wemple, Oct. 13, 2025. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsmax and others said their journalists would not agree to the Defense Department’s policies on news gathering ahead of a Tuesday deadline.Listen to this article · 4:25 min Learn moreSeveral news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsmax and NPR, have announced that their journalists will not sign a new set of Pentagon restrictions affecting news gathering in the massive military complex.“We fundamentally oppose the restrictions that the Trump administration is imposing on journalists who are reporting on matters of defense and national security,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, said in a statement on Monday announcing that the outlet’s staff would not sign the Pentagon document. “The requirements violate our First Amendment rights, and the rights of Americans who seek to know how taxpayer-funded military resources and personnel are being deployed.”The 21-page Pentagon document lays out a number of requirements at odds with freedom of press protections, according to lawyers representing news organizations. One is a provision stating that journalists could be deemed a “security risk” based on several considerations, including whether they disclose classified or even unclassified information without the Pentagon’s authorization. Media lawyers worry that the stricture could expose reporters to punishment for engaging in routine reporting.The document replaces a simpler, one-page form that outlined access limitations for journalists, according to the Pentagon Press Association.Implementation of the new policy is on a fast track: Journalists have until Tuesday at 5 p.m. to decide whether or not to sign the form. Those who do not must turn in their credentials a day later.Other news outlets, including the Guardian and CNN, have also said they would reject the policy. The announcements reflect the news media’s wide-ranging frustration with efforts by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to curtail the physical movement of reporters in the building and impose fresh limits on their activities.“CNN’s mission to report fairly and fully on the Department of War, the U.S. military and the Trump administration will continue regardless of physical access to the Pentagon. We will not be deflected from our duty to hold all three fairly and fully to account, and we will continue to report on the actions and decision-making processes of the U.S. government without fear or favor,” CNN said in a statement last week.In a statement on Friday, Richard Stevenson, the Washington Bureau Chief of The Times said, “Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy, which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment. Since the policy was first announced, we have expressed concerns that it constrains how journalists can report on the U.S. military, which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually.”The press association that lobbies for Pentagon reporters issued a statement on Monday saying, “This Wednesday, most Pentagon Press Association members seem likely to hand over their badges rather than acknowledge a policy that gags Pentagon employees and threatens retaliation against reporters who seek out information that has not been preapproved for release.”News RoundupsThe Parnas Perspective,Ghislaine Maxwell gets favorable treatment and secret meetings in prison, Seattle airport refuses to air Kristi Noem video, ceasefire deal begins in Middle East, and Vance considers insurrection act, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 13, 2025. Today, I’m tracking several major developments, including reports of special treatment Ghislaine Maxwell is receiving in prison, the first phase of the ceasefire deal taking effect in the Middle East, and the Trump Administration moving closer to invoking the Insurrection Act on U.S. soil.Meanwhile, I woke up to messages flooding my social media: “Dude, shut up. You belong in jail. You tried to get ICE officers k*lled. You’re a bought-and-paid-for shill, a worthless pawn of the violent Democrat Party.”This came from someone with hundreds of thousands of followers. The attacks have been getting worse in recent days. But here’s the truth: I won’t back down. I don’t answer to them. I answer to you. Your support makes independent reporting possible, even under fire. Subscribe to keep this work alive, especially as the pressure intensifies from those close to the White House.With that, here’s what you missed:American news:Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a Texas minimum-security prison has sparked complaints from fellow inmates over alleged preferential treatment and increased lockdowns, after a mysterious chapel meeting with visitors led to restricted movement, heightened security, and reports of special privileges such as private workouts, meal deliveries, and guarded escorts.Vice President JD Vance confirmed the Trump administration is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces in U.S. cities amid legal blocks on using federalized National Guard troops, citing rising crime — though critics note violent crime has fallen sharply and accuse the administration of escalating tensions with Democratic-led states during the ongoing government shutdown.Seattle-Tacoma International Airport refused to play a video from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that blamed Democrats for the ongoing federal government shutdown, citing its “political nature.” Port of Seattle officials said they are instead focusing on supporting unpaid federal employees at the airport and encouraging bipartisan efforts to resolve the shutdown, which began October 1 and has disrupted travel and government operations nationwide.Sean Duffy criticized the No Kings protest as an Antifa-linked, paid demonstration, questioning who is funding it.The Trump administration reversed layoffs for some CDC employees after a system glitch mistakenly issued termination notices during the ongoing government shutdown, with officials confirming the affected staff were never actually separated from the agency.German farm machinery giant Krone has halted U.S. exports after the Trump administration imposed new “hidden” tariffs on more than 400 steel-derived products, forcing European exporters to prove the precise origin and weight of every metal component — a bureaucratic burden that has disrupted trade, paused production, and raised costs for American consumers.California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a landmark law making the state the first in the U.S. to phase out ultra-processed foods from school meals, requiring the definition and ban of such products by 2029 and full removal by 2035, as part of a broader effort to improve child nutrition and combat diet-related health issues.The remnants of Typhoon Halong caused catastrophic flooding and hurricane-force winds in western Alaska, destroying homes and leaving several people missing as rescue teams conducted large-scale operations in the isolated villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, where hundreds have taken shelter and a state disaster declaration was expanded.Economists Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their pioneering research on innovation-driven economic growth, highlighting how scientific understanding and “creative destruction” fuel sustained progress and prevent economic stagnation.More On U.S. Governance, History, PoliticsThe Contrarian,Opinion: It Turns Out, Americans Don’t Want a Police State, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 13, 2025. Voters, Courts, and GOP Governors slam Trump’s militarization of cities.Donald Trump and his chief attack dog Stephen Miller have bitten off more than they can chew. Their invasion of American cities is based on obvious lies (e.g., “war ravaged Portland”), has antagonized voters, outraged judges, and triggered public opposition from two Republican governors — a rare act of defiance that may trigger more defections.The publicA strong majority of Americans do not approve of deploying military troops at home. “Some 58% of Americans—including seven in 10 Democrats and half of Republicans—think the president should send armed troops only to face external threats,” according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Trump’s overall approval has dropped to 40%. Only 37% say the national guard should be deployed despite the governor’s objection.Disapproval of his military deployment domestically has substantial increased from an NPR/Ipsos poll last month that found a significant plurality (47-37) opposed deploying guardsmen to cities, and a majority opposed deploying them to their own city (52-34).Moreover, the deployments may be feeding the perception that Trump is abusing his power. The Pew Research Institute last week reported, “Overall, 49% of U.S. adults say Trump is trying to exercise more presidential power than previous presidents and that this is bad for the country.” Only 21% say he merely is exercising as much power as his predecessors.The courtsWhile the public fumes, Trump’s losing streak in court continued last week in Chicago with a trifecta of humiliating losses.First, a federal judge enjoined deployment of National Guard troops in a blistering opinion. U.S. District Court Judge April M. Perry wrote, “While the Court does not doubt that there have been acts of vandalism, civil disobedience, and even assaults on federal agents, the Court cannot conclude that Defendants’ declarations are reliable.” In other words, she thinks the government is lying.Judge Perry extensively quoted Trump’s vindictive, hysterical rhetoric about crime, and then thoroughly rejected the notion that courts should defer to him:Defendants are not entitled to “deference” on the issue of what constitutes a rebellion for the purposes of the Act, nor what it means to be “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws.” Those are matters of statutory interpretation, a function committed to the courts. … Defendants must support their position by pointing the Court to some of the facts upon which it bases its conclusions and by offering explanations which paint a substantially reasonable picture justifying the Executive’s position.She therefore concluded that “there has been no showing that the civil power has failed.” She continued: “The agitators who have violated the law by attacking federal authorities have been arrested. The courts are open, and the marshals are ready to see that any sentences of imprisonment are carried out. Resort to the military to execute the laws is not called for.”Instead, Perry found that Trump is making matters worse:[T]he Court finds that deployment of National Guard members is likely to lead to civil unrest, requiring deployment of state and local resources to maintain order. There has been overwhelming evidence presented that the provocative nature of ICE’s enforcement activity has caused a significant increase in protest activity, requiring the Broadview Police, ISP, and other state and local law enforcement agencies to respond.In a second case, U.S. District Court Judge Sara L. Ellis cracked down on the Trump’s regime’s First Amendment violations. Her TRO “blocks Trump administration authorities from requiring journalists to leave public spaces and using riot control weapons on the press, protesters or clergy ‘who are not posing an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer or others.’” In particular, federal forces must stop “[d]ispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, threatening or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a journalist,” absent probably cause a crime was committed. The order also prohibits use of a long list of riot control weapons “on members of the press, protesters, or religious practitioners” who pose no immediate threat.And in a third loss for the authoritarian bullies, District Court Judge Jeffrey I. Cummings in Chicago held that a previous consent decree barring ICE use of warrantless (or blank warrants) remains in effect throughout Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky and Kansas. That should short-circuit ICE’s abusive practices in those states.The New York Times explained that the decision “sharply limits ICE’S authority to make ‘collateral arrests’ of unknown individuals who officers encounter in the field, unless the agents have probable cause to believe those people are likely to escape before a warrant can be issued.” That should halt racial profiling of the kind the Supreme Court recently condoned in California.In sum, three separate federal court judges intervened in Chicago to block unconstitutional, abusive, and violent practices Trump has used to intimidate Americans. Not one judge bought the government lawyers’ misrepresentations and specious arguments for Trump’s unlimited power.SubscribedThe GOP governorsIn addition to public opposition and courts’ stinging rebukes, Republican governors have begun to slam Trump publicly, a rare sign of dissention within the GOP. “Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, the chair of the National Governors Association, said Thursday that he opposes sending National Guard troops across state borders without the permission of the state receiving them,” the Associated Press reported. Stitt declared, “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.” This follows threats from Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom to leave the NGA if it did not oppose Trump’s use of guardsmen to invade other states. Considering Trump won Oklahoma in 2024 with 66 percent of the vote, the White House (and other GOP governors) should worry about the extent to which he is fracturing the party.Meanwhile, in a blue state, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott chimed in: “From what I’m seeing, I just think it’s unnecessary. It further divides and threatens people.” He added, “We need stability right now in this country — we don’t need more unrest.” Twisting the knife, he added: “I don’t think our guards should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional… [u]nless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw Jan. 6 a few years ago.”Bottom lineWe should be encouraged that the public, courts, and even some Republican governors have begun to reject Trump’s authoritarian push to militarize our streets. (Interestingly, this may be part of lower court judges’ brewing revolt against “the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders” that have empowered Trump.)MAGA cultists may buy the canard Trump is battling the “enemy from within,” but voters, courts, and governors are effectively confirming that Trump is the menace. Republicans would be smart to flee the losing side of an unsustainable position that has unified opposition to MAGA’s despotism. White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.The Hartmann Report,The Brutality Is the Message: Why America’s Violence Against Immigrants Isn’t About Immigration, Thom Hartmann, below right, Oct. 13, 2025. Every raid, every body slammed to the pavement, is a public ritual meant to teach us obedience. The goal isn’t enforcement — it’s submission… For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Homan, Noem, Trump, et al, engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?There are now so many videos of ICE thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protestors, and journalists — even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes — that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (Feb. 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (Jul. 21, 2025), and even pepper-balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (Sept. 2025), the videos keep piling up.Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (Oct. 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (Jul. 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state — with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield — against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.It was the first major Nazi book-burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”But it never ends with “them.”Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get non-citizens to leave the country.Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step — arrest and forced deportation — takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.For a reason.Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like Trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration — by their own declaration — is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation. Timothy Snyder from “Thinking about…” Gaza and Protest: Why freedom of speech matters, Timothy Snyder,above, Oct. 13, 2025. Today thepresident is taking credit for a cease-fire in Gaza. But who, in America, was first in calling for that exact thing?Students on campuses.And what happened to them? They were banned from their own public spaces, all over the country.So the president should be thanking them for their foresight. And he and all of his supporters should naturally be calling for campus bans on public assembly to be lifted.Iwould be very happy to hear such voices! But I fear we won’t.If we don’t, we will see that those bans were never about Gaza or Israel or any one issue. They are about silencing young people, in general, as a first step toward silencing the rest of us.I recognize that things were said and done on campuses (often by people from outside the schools) that should not have been said and done. Antisemitism is a very real and sadly a growing problem in the US and around the world.But the presence of individual actors and of undesirable acts was never a good reason for broad bans on freedom of speech and assembly on campuses.Freedom of speech has a point. It is there so people can speak truth to power. Often that truth is spoken first by young people. What student protestors said about a cease-fire early became the mainstream about eighteen months later.And what if they hadn’t been silenced? More freedom of speech on this issue would have been healthy for everyone — including Israel, whose image has suffered hugely. And it would have saved many, many lives in Gaza.When we as Americans are trained to think that suppression of speech is normal once, in a major area of life such as college campuses, we take a step towards agreeing with authoritarianism in general.So for those who support the president, a challenge: thank the students and give them back their freedom to express themselves.For the rest of us, another challenge: gather to speak about all of our freedoms.The Parnas Perspective, Commentary: No Kings Day 2.0 Shaping Up to be One of the Largest Protests in American History, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 13, 2025. This evening I am debunking lies about the upcoming No Kings Day protests. As excitement builds, those around the White House are spreading falsehoods about the demonstrations, questioning who is “funding them,” and attempting to link the movement to antifa and domestic terrorism.These claims are not only false but dangerous. There is no evidence to support them, and it is essential to debunk these lies and make sure the truth spreads far and wide.I will be on the ground in Washington, D.C. this weekend, credentialed as a reporter, covering the No Kings Day demonstration in real time.Organizers expect more than 100,000 people to gather in the capital. I will be there to show you exactly what happens and to cut through the noise and misinformation coming from political operatives and partisan media outlets.In recent days, Republican lawmakers have escalated their rhetoric, spreading a new and dangerous lie that Democrats are waiting until the October 18 No Kings rally in Washington to deliver the votes needed to fund the government. This accusation is not just baseless, it is deliberately inflammatory.At a news conference on Capitol Hill, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer claimed, “This is about one thing and one thing alone: to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold a hate America rally in D.C. next week.” Speaker Mike Johnson went even further, calling it “a hate America rally,” and asserting that “the antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists” would gather on the National Mall for “outrageous purposes.”This morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy repeated the false claim that the demonstrations are “Antifa-linked” and “paid,” once again questioning who is funding them. These talking points are designed to delegitimize dissent and distract from the legitimate grievances fueling the movement. Demonstrators across the country will take to the streets on October 18 for No Kings Day, a national series of protests against the Trump administration and its growing authoritarian tendencies.The movement began on June 14 in response to the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary parade in Washington, D.C., which coincided with Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday. That day became a rallying point for millions who reject the idea of concentrated power and the erosion of democratic norms.According to organizers with the Indivisible project, more than 2,000 No Kings protests are scheduled for Saturday across the United States. Demonstrations are planned in major cities including Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Kansas City, and Bozeman, Montana. Solidarity rallies are also expected in Canada and Mexico. Organizers estimate more than 10 million people will take part.“On October 18, millions of us are rising again to show the world: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people,” reads the main page of the No Kings website.In Washington, protesters will gather in front of the U.S. Capitol building. The crowd will include citizens, activists, and labor groups like the American Federation of Government Employees, which has called on federal workers to participate.“The protest movement has taken on new urgency with the government shutdown that began Oct. 1,” the AFGE said in a statement. “Shutting down the government is another authoritarian power grab by this administration, which has threatened to lay off masses of federal workers as part of an ongoing quest to gut programs and services it finds objectionable.”If No Kings Day 2.0 reaches its projected size, it would meet what political scientists call the 3.5 percent rule. Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth and researcher Maria Stephan found that when just 3.5 percent of a population actively participates in sustained, nonviolent protest, those movements almost always succeed in bringing about political change.Associated Press, North Carolina GOP announce plans to vote on new House map amid nationwide redistricting battle, Staff Report, Oct.13, 2025. North Carolina Republican legislative leaders announced plans Monday to vote next week on redrawing the state’s U.S. House district map, taking up President Donald Trump’s call to secure more GOP seats nationwide and resist rival moves by Democrats.The push to retool already right-leaning boundaries for the ninth-largest state comes amid a major party battle spanning several states to revamp district lines to partisan advantage ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.North Carolina Republicans created a map in 2023 that resulted in GOP candidates winning 10 of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats in 2024. That compared to a 7-7 seat split between Democrats and the GOP under the map used in 2022.Now only one of the House districts — the 1st District currently represented by Democratic Rep. Don Davis — is considered a true swing district and could be targeted by the GOP for an 11th seat. Davis won a second term last year by less than 2 percentage points, so shifting slightly portions of the district covering more than 20 northeastern counties could help a Republican candidate in a strong GOP year. But it could weaken districts held by GOP incumbents.The state’s top Republican legislators said their planned action follows Trump’s “call urging legislatures across the country to take action to nullify Democrat redistricting efforts.” Davis wasn’t mentioned by name in their news release.Trump “earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat,” House Speaker Destin Hall said in the release. Trump has won North Carolina’s electoral votes all three times that he’s been on the presidential ballot.But state House Democratic leader Robert Reives said Monday his GOP colleagues “are stealing a congressional district in order to shield themselves from accountability at the ballot box.”New York Times,Originalist ‘Bombshell’ Complicates Case on Trump’s Power to Fire Officials, Adam Liptak, Oct. 13, 2025. As the Supreme Court seems poised to expand the president’s power, a leading scholar whose work the justices have often cited issued a provocative dissent.The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December about whether President Trump can fire government officials for any reason, or no reason, despite laws meant to shield them from politics.There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the “unitary executive theory,” which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit.But a new article, from a leading originalist law professor, has complicated and perhaps upended the conventional wisdom. The legal academy treated the development like breaking news.“Bombshell!” William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago who himself is a prominent originalist, wrote on social media. “Caleb Nelson, one of the most respected originalist scholars in the country, comes out against the unitary executive interpretation” of the Constitution.Professor Nelson, who teaches at the University of Virginia and is a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the text of the Constitution and the historical evidence surrounding it grants Congress broad authority to shape the executive branch, including by putting limits on the president’s power to fire people.Professor Nelson’s article was published Sept. 29 by the Democracy Project, an initiative at the New York University School of Law that plans to release 100 essays in 100 days by an ideologically mixed group.The article is particularly notable, said Richard H. Pildes, who is a law professor at N.Y.U. and one of the project’s founders.“If a highly respected originalist scholar like Professor Nelson, on whom the court relies frequently, denies that originalism supports the unitary executive theory,” Professor Pildes said, “that inevitably raises serious questions about an originalist justification for the court’s looming approach.”Professor Nelson’s scholarship has been exceptionally influential. It has been cited in more than a dozen Supreme Court opinions, including ones by every member of the six-justice conservative majority.Editors’ PicksMy Liberal Friend Won’t Protest. Do I Drop Her?To Honor the King of Lox, Lots of Lox19 Easy, Comforting Dishes to Make for Someone Who Is SickJustice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion last year, listed him among “respected scholars” who are “continuing to undertake careful analysis” about the role tradition plays in determining the Constitution’s original meaning. Justice Thomas cited one of his articles six times in a single concurring opinion in 2023 and two of his articles in another concurring opinion that year.Still, the new article is unlikely to have a practical effect, and Professor Nelson acknowledged that the Supreme Court “appears to be moving toward a sweepingly pro-president position.” New York Times,Part Enabler, Part Buffer: The Bind of the Justice Dept.’s No. 2, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, Oct. 13, 2025. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, has helped usher in President Trump’s retribution campaign. But he faces anger on the right for resisting some of the most extreme measures.Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, awakened one morning in late September to the news that his cheerful, at times insubordinate subordinate Ed Martin had blindsided him again.Mr. Martin, given nearly free rein inside the department by President Trump to investigate perceived administration enemies, had sent a threatening letter to an ex-F.B.I. agent who had testified, years before, against the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for spouting lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.A ticked-off Mr. Blanche asked Mr. Martin: Why pick a pointless fight that would embarrass the administration on behalf of a fringe activist? He demanded that Mr. Martin rescind the letter, according to three people briefed on a phone call between the two men.Mr. Martin, who had used his brief tenure as the top federal prosecutor in Washington to purge government lawyers who charged Jan. 6 rioters, complied.Mr. Blanche has, in a few instances, defended the Justice Department against the most extreme efforts of Mr. Trump and his allies to pursue an intensifying campaign of retribution. But he has hardly been a bulwark of resistance. In seven months as deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, the former head of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team, has more often than not enabled the president’s effort to discard processes and restraints that once preserved the department’s independence.And even when Mr. Blanche has pushed back, he has often been overruled by the White House or undermined by Trump stalwarts picked to execute the president’s orders.On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Virginia indicted New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat who won a civil fraud case against Mr. Trump, even after Mr. Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi warned the White House there was not enough evidence to secure a conviction.Mr. Martin, who wears a Columbo-inspired trench coat and goes by “Eagle Ed,” was a driving force behind the indictment, which was secured by Lindsey Halligan, hastily installed by the president as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.Mr. Blanche and Ms. Bondi, who had raised doubts about Ms. Halligan’s appointment, did not play a significant role in drafting court documents for the James indictment and were not given a head’s up about its timing, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.Editors’ PicksIs Kansas City Still the Barbecue Capital of America?What to Do When the Gas Doesn’t Work in Your BuildingThe Pleasures of Reading Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Master of DoomThe charges against Ms. James and an earlier indictment obtained by Ms. Halligan against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, have erased any doubts that Mr. Trump is personally directing key prosecutorial decisions.The encounter also illustrated the jumbled power dynamic inside a Justice Department where inexperienced operatives like Mr. Martin wield authority that rivals officials like Mr. Blanche, with their impressive titles, black SUVs and responsibility to obtain convictions, not just trophy indictments.And as further proof of the cross currents blowing through the department, Mr. Blanche has started to be viewed with suspicion by some Trump allies on the right who wonder about his commitment to carrying out the president’s desires.ImageEd Martin, in a suit, standing by a lectern.Ed Martin, whom President Trump has given wide latitude in the Justice Department to investigate perceived administration enemies, has frequently clashed with Mr. Blanche.Credit…Craig Hudson for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesAs a former federal prosecutor turned arch-MAGA loyalist, Mr. Blanche finds himself in a predicament common among the highest-credentialed Trump appointees.Unlike many of Mr. Trump’s high-ranking appointees in the first term, Mr. Blanche knew Mr. Trump well when he took the job and knew he was expected to carry out his boss’s orders. Yet Mr. Blanche has also shown himself on occasion to be an institutionalist, holding off the president’s more extreme impulses. He has defended some subordinates against attack and pushed back, with limited success, against prosecutions he believes are unsupported by the evidence, seen by critics on the right as proof of disloyalty.This account of Mr. Blanche’s actions since he took over one of the most powerful posts in federal law enforcement is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters.Mr. Blanche, 51, declined to be interviewed.Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, described Mr. Blanche as Mr. Trump’s “close adviser and trusted ally,” adding, “Todd is working in lockstep with the rest of the administration.”True to that description, Mr. Blanche has been willing to disregard core department norms.He has allowed political investigations to move forward and has often flouted limits on publicly discussing ongoing inquiries that his predecessors generally honored.Nor is there any indication he will take a public stand like William P. Barr, who resigned as attorney general after Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election amid demands from the president that he find evidence of election fraud. Before stepping down, Mr. Barr demanded that Mr. Trump “stop the tweet The Triad via The Bulwark, Are YOU Antifa? Plus: Hostage releases and prisoner swaps, Jonathan V. Last, above, Oct. 13, 2025. Andrew [Egger] talked about Antifa and No Kings this morning, but I want to dig in a little more to draw your attention to three Antifa-related actions Republicans have taken over the last four weeks. Because they aren’t really about “Antifa.”They’re about you.First, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.”The text of the EO itself is ridiculous. There is no Antifa “organization.” There are loose associations of people who consider themselves to be part of an anti-fascist movement. But “Antifa” is not like the Oath Keepers. There is no leader, no membership roster, no organization.Just read the EO: “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”“Explicitly”? Where’s the mission statement? Where’s Antifa Code of Conduct? Who’s the chairman? Who’s the treasurer? How much are membership dues?If you wanted to seriously talk about Antifa as a terrorist threat, you’d compare it to white nationalism or Islamist terrorism. Those are diffuse movements that lack unifying organizations—like Antifa. (Important caveat in the footnotes.¹)But the administration realizes that there is no “enterprise” that “explicitly” does anything. The president is merely attempting to link the ideas of Antifa and terrorism in the minds of the public.Why would he do that?Next, Trump held an “Antifa roundtable” at the White House. The most notable aspect of this meeting was that Trump shifted his definition of Antifa from being an organized criminal enterprise to a more nebulous ideological concept. Here are the relevant passages:It should be clear to all Americans that we have a very serious left-wing terror threat in our country, radicals associated with the domestic terror group Antifa. . . .In July, approximately a dozen Antifa-aligned militants stormed the ICE facility in Texas. . . .The epidemic of left-wing violence and Antifa-inspired terror has been escalating for nearly a decade.The bold is mine because I want you to note the sleight of hand. We’ve gone from “Antifa is an enterprise” to “the people who did these bad things were somehow associated with, or philosophically aligned with, or inspired by Antifa.”Those are very different things.Why the prestidigitation? Because ultimately what the Trump administration is trying to do is label you a terrorist. You can tell because late last week the talking points went out among Republicans for the October 18 No Kings Protests and what did they say?Speaker Mike Johnson, right, on the planned October 18 protest: It will be a “hate America rally” that will draw “the pro-Hamas wing” and “the Antifa people.”House Majority Whip Tom Emmer: “This is about one thing and one thing alone—to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold a hate America rally in D.C. next week.”Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy: “The No Kings protest, Maria, really frustrating. This is part of Antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question who’s funding it.”This is all bullshit, obviously. I say “obviously” because if any of it were true, Republicans would be showing you evidence.Who is being paid? When were they paid? How much? How was the payment transacted? Is there videotape of a No Kings protester accepting a Cava bag full of cash from someone wearing an Antifa badge on his black bodysuit?Another way you can tell that it’s bullshit is because if Antifa really were a domestic terrorist organization and it really was behind the No Kings event, then the government would not allow the events to take place.Pretend that an actual terrorist organization—let’s say ISIS—announced that it was going to hold a series of rallies across the country on October 18. Would they have permits? Would American law enforcement allow them to gather? Or would the FBI scramble the entire bureau in an attempt to arrest every ISIS member who showed up, anywhere?Here is the question reporters should be asking Republicans:
- If Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization and the No Kings protests are “Antifa,” shouldn’t you arrest everyone who shows up to them?
So what is Trump doing? It’s a two-track approach.The first is fake-it-until-you-make-it. The administration does not believe that it has enough public support to do mass arrests of dissenters. So it is trying to build up to that point. Making the Antifa-dissent link now is predicate-laying.The second is a call to violence. Look: The president of the United States says that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. High-ranking elected Republicans and a member of his own cabinet say that the people who will gather in protests across the country this Saturday are Antifa.Ergo, these protestors must be domestic terrorists.Trump and Republicans are putting a target on dissenters in the hopes that either (a) stochastic violence will be visited upon them, or at least (b) the threat of stochastic violence will convince some of them to stay home.That’s what this “Antifa” bullshit is all about. It’s about coming for you and anyone who would stand up to the authoritarians. White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.The Hartmann Report,The Brutality Is the Message: Why America’s Violence Against Immigrants Isn’t About Immigration, Thom Hartmann, Oct. 13, 2025. Every raid, every body slammed to the pavement, is a public ritual meant to teach us obedience. The goal isn’t enforcement — it’s submission…For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Homan, Noem, Trump, et al, engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?There are now so many videos of ICE thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protestors, and journalists — even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes — that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (Feb. 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (Jul. 21, 2025), and even pepper-balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (Sept. 2025), the videos keep piling up.Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (Oct. 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (Jul. 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state — with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield — against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.It was the first major Nazi book-burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”But it never ends with “them.”Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get non-citizens to leave the country.Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step — arrest and forced deportation — takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.For a reason.Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like Trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration — by their own declaration — is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 12, 2025 [Columbus Day, The Rest of the Story], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 13, 2025. On October 9, President Donald J. Trump’s office issued an official proclamation declaring Monday, October 13, “Columbus Day.”The proclamation says that the day is one on which “our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus—the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”The proclamation goes on to present a white Christian nationalist version of American history, with much more emphasis on Christianity than Trump’s previous, similar proclamations. It claims that Columbus was guided by a “noble mission: to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands.” “Upon his arrival,” it says, “he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.”“Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve,” it goes on, “Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas—paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”Then the proclamation turns to MAGA’s complaints about modern revisions of this triumphalist history, saying: “Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.” Our nation, the proclamation says, “will now abide by a simple truth: Christopher Columbus was a true American hero, and every citizen is eternally indebted to his relentless determination.”This proclamation completely misunderstands the fifteenth-century world of expanding European maritime routes that entirely reworked world trade—including trade in human beings—and the role of Italian mariner Christopher Columbus, who worked for Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, in that expansion.It also misses what historians call the “Columbian Exchange”: the transfer of plants and animals between the Americas and the “Old World”—Europe, Asia, and Africa—after Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. That exchange went both ways and transformed the globe, but its effect on the Americas was devastating. When Columbus and his sailors “discovered” the “New World,” they brought with them both ideologies and germs that would decimate the peoples living there.Estimates of the number of Native people living in North America and South America in 1490 vary widely, but there were at least as many as 50 million, and possibly as many as 100 million. In the next 200 years, displacement, enslavement, war, and especially disease would kill about 90% of those native peoples. Most historians see the destruction of America’s Indigenous peoples as the brutal triumph of European white men over those they perceived to be inferior.Historians are not denigrating historical actors or the nation when they uncover sordid parts of our past. Historians study how and why societies change. As we dig into the past, we see patterns that never entirely foreshadow the present but that give us ideas about how people in the past have dealt with circumstances that look similar to circumstances today. If we are going to get an accurate picture of how a society works, historians must examine it honestly, seeing the bad as well as the good. With luck, seeing those patterns will help us make better decisions about our own lives, our communities, and our nation in the present.History is different from commemoration. History is about what happened in the past, while commemoration is about the present. We put up statues and celebrate holidays to honor figures from the past who embody some quality we admire.The Columbus Day holiday began in the 1920s, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan tried to create a lily-white country by attacking not just Black Americans, but also immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. This was an easy sell in the Twenties, since government leaders during the First World War had emphasized Americanism and demanded that immigrants reject all ties to their countries of origin. From there it was a short step for native-born white American Protestants to see anyone different from themselves as a threat to the nation.The Klan attacked the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. Klan members spread the rumor that one became a leader of the Knights of Columbus by vowing to exterminate Protestants and to torture and kill anyone upon orders of Catholic leaders.To combat the growing animosity toward Catholics and racial minorities, the Knights of Columbus began to highlight the roles those groups had played in American history. In the early 1920s they published three books in a “Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions” series, including The Gift of Black Folk by pioneering Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois.They also turned to an old American holiday. Since the late 1860s, Italian Americans in New York City had celebrated a “Columbus Day” to honor the heritage they shared with the famous Italian explorer. In the 1930s the Knights of Columbus joined with media mogul Generoso Pope, an important Italian American politician in New York City, to rally behind the idea of a national Columbus Day. In 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aware of the need to solidify his new Democratic coalition by welcoming all Democratic voters, proclaimed Columbus Day, October 12, a federal holiday. In 1971 the day became unfixed from a date; it is now the second Monday in October.The Knights intended for Columbus Day to honor the important contributions of immigrants—and Catholics—to American society. But in the 1960s a growing focus on the lives and experiences of Indigenous Americans forced a reckoning with the choice of Columbus as a standard bearer. Currently, seventeen states and the District of Columbia use the official holiday to celebrate Indigenous history. Some Oklahoma tribal members simply use the day to honor their tribe.As society changes, the values we want to commemorate shift. In the 1920s, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because celebrating an Italian defended a multicultural society. Now, though, he represents the devastation of America’s Indigenous people at the hands of European colonists who brought to North America and South America germs and a fever for gold and God. It is not “left-wing arson” to want to commemorate a different set of values than the country held in the 1920s.What is arson, though, is the attempt to skew history to serve a modern-day political narrative. Rejecting an honest account of the past makes it impossible to see accurate patterns. The lessons we learn about how society changes will be false, and the decisions we make based on those false patterns will not be grounded in reality.And a society grounded in fiction, rather than reality, cannot function.New York Times,Coal Miners With Black Lung Say They Are ‘Cast Aside to Die’ Under Trump, Lisa Friedman, Oct. 13, 2025. President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard.When coal miners came to Washington in April, they posed behind President Trump at the White House, wearing their hard hats and thanking him for trying to reinvigorate their struggling industry.But on Tuesday dozens of miners and their families will be in a more unusual position: protesting the Trump administration outside the Labor Department building, arguing it has failed to protect them from black lung disease, an incurable illness caused by inhaling coal and silica dust.They have been waiting months for the government to enforce federal limits on silica dust, a carcinogen that has led to a recent spike in the disease. But mining industry groups have sued to block the rule, and the Trump administration has paused enforcement while the lawsuit plays out.Labor unions, Democrats and a growing number of miners accuse the Trump administration of ignoring workers while using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies to bolster the companies that operate coal plants and mining operations.“The companies might be getting a handout, but the miners ain’t getting none,” said Gary Hairston, 71, a retired coal miner from West Virginia who is the president of the National Black Lung Association. Mr. Hairston has been living with black lung disease since he was in his 40s.Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that President Trump “cares deeply about unleashing America’s energy potential, as well as standing up for those who fuel our country” like coal miners.“Blue collar Americans played a key role in sending President Trump back to the White House because they know he has their back,” she said, adding that “he is working tirelessly to deliver policies that improve the livelihoods of working families across the nation.”More On U.S. Law, Courts, Public Safety, Protests
The Bulwark,Political Opinion: Have You Seen This Domestic Terrorist?Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 13, 2025. The groundwork has been laid to go after innocent people, opposition groups, and even No Kings protesters.When it comes to slowly tightening a lawless grip on a people, one of the authoritarian’s most potent tools is guilt by association. The bedrock idea that force of state is justified only against those persons who have committed specific illegal acts is abandoned, replaced by the idea that force can permissibly be deployed against certain kinds of people. The vaguer the definitions involved, the more room the authoritarian has to maneuver.This year, the Trump White House has gone to some pains to habituate the American people to guilt-by-association enforcement. They’ve tried to deport migrants with no due process based merely on the accusation that they were gang members—an accusation based, in some cases, on no more than the migrant’s clothing and tattoos. They’ve sent masked plainclothes agents in unmarked vans to arrest international students they claim are terrorist sympathizers—which might mean no more than they publicly criticized Israel. And lately, they’ve been laying the groundwork to exercise similar tactics against American citizens. The White House has used the label “domestic terror” to describe a vast swath of anti-Trump protest and organization, from Antifa protesters to left-wing NGOs.“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Stephen Miller said last month.So the question now is: Who counts under Miller’s definition? How broad a brush does the administration intend to use amid this promised crackdown? Some recent comments from Republican lawmakers suggest they’re prepared to go further than you’d think.SubscribedOn Friday, both House Speaker Mike Johnson and his top deputy, Rep. Tom Emmer, made some eyebrow-raising comments about a forthcoming protest in D.C. This protest, Johnson said, would be a “hate America rally” run by “the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people.” Standing next to Johnson a few hours later, Emmer sneered about “the terrorist wing of [the Democratic] party, which is set to hold a hate-America rally in D.C. next week.”What protest were Johnson and Emmer referring to? The second “No Kings” protest, scheduled to take place on October 18.If you followed (or participated in) the first “No Kings” event back in June, you might already be laughing. That protest, which was planned by a coalition of normie liberal groups and which attracted millions of people across dozens of cities, was almost comedically star-spangled in its affect and remarkably peaceful in its execution. One vignette to give you an idea: In Chattanooga, Tennessee, rally speakers dressed like 1776 colonists, solicited rounds of applause for the military veterans in the crowd, and encouraged rallygoers to be “the most boring protesters ever.” Organizers took deliberate measures to ensure no violence would break out around their protests and, with genuinely minimal exception given the size and scale, they were successful.Now No Kings is happening again, and this is how Republicans are talking about it.But it’s not merely grossly unfair. These days, after all, accusations like “terrorist wing,” “pro-Hamas,” and “Antifa” aren’t just insults. They’re talismans—phrases that unlock, in the view of the administration, a permission structure for the deployment of state violence. The largest, most organized, peaceful protest movement of the Trump 2.0 Resistance is coming back this week—and Republicans are talking as if they’re prepared to unleash the might of their increasingly politicized federal law enforcement (and, perhaps, accompanying military?) on it.This isn’t to say, of course, that a state crackdown on No Kings 2 is guaranteed to take place. Even Donald Trump and Stephen Miller might flinch from the headlines that would result from their militarized cops cracking heads in a peaceful crowd flying American flags. That’s no way to win a Nobel Peace Prize!The point, though, is that they’re keeping their options open. It may be better to put down protest through fear than through action—but either works. In the rhetoric of today’s Republicans, a No Kings protester is functionally equivalent to a domestic terrorist. That gives them all the room to maneuver they might need.Actually, it’s not quite the same constellation of normie lib groups behind No Kings this time around. Our friends at Home of the Brave are participating too—rolling out a $1 million campaign today to encourage Americans to attend this Saturday. You can watch the video George Conway cut for the campaign here. The Bulwark,Political Opinion: Keeping Hope Alive, William Kristol, right, Oct. 13, 2025. As you may have noticed, we’re in a kind of “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” moment for the American republic.Yesterday morning, I watched Vice President JD Vance refuse to rule out the Trump administration invoking the Insurrection Act—eventhough there is nothing resembling an insurrection going on in America. At noon, I had as my guest on The Bulwark on Sunday Tom Joscelyn, who compellingly analyzed the progress of the Trump administration’s purposeful and sometimes cunning authoritarianism, along with MAGA’s dark and nihilistic worldview. Last night, I listened at a dinner to a couple of former senior government officials lamenting, accurately and intelligently, the extraordinary damage done by the Trump administration to the parts of the government in which they’d previously been proud to serve.And all of this came after the Mets failed to make the playoffs on the last day of the baseball season and the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs. Ugh.So why am I surprisingly cheerful this morning? It’s not simply because the Yankees quickly lost in the next round.It’s because of the kids, the Pope, and the protesters.I was in the L.A. area last week for talks at the University of Southern California and at Claremont McKenna College, and was able to spend some time with the students.Now I’ve had my ups and downs on college campuses. (For example, having a chocolate cream pie thrown at me by a student two decades ago as I spoke on a campus more or less defending George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a bit of a downer.) But the college students with whom I was able to meet in small groups last week, while admittedly a self-selected bunch, were impressive. They were sane and open-minded, neither entranced by the intolerant wokeness of the left nor the rabid fanaticism of the right. They seemed to be going about their business of getting a good education. They were concerned but not despairing about the future of the country.And so, I thought, perhaps the kids will be alright. And after all, it’s not the kids who have failed America in the last decade. It’s the boomers on Facebook who have fallen for lies and been tempted by bigotry. And it’s the grownups running our major institutions who’ve capitulated to authoritarianism. Pope Leo XIV (Photo via Vatican Media).Speaking of major institutions, there is at least one American boomer now running such an institution who’s truly impressive: Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago, now Pope Leo XIV. He’s been a consistent voice of reason and compassion since ascending to the papacy five months ago.Just this past Thursday, Pope Leo asked journalists to “act as a barrier against those who, through the ancient art of lying, seek to create divisions in order to rule by dividing.” He urged them to “be a bulwark of civility against the quicksand of approximation and post-truth.” And he quoted Hannah Arendt’s warning that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”Could the first American pope succeed in defending freedom, civility, and truth against the assault on it by our first truly authoritarian president? (And let me also applaud Pope Leo’s use of the word “bulwark”!)Finally, one has to be impressed by the courageous and peaceful resistance of so many Americans in Chicago and Portland and elsewhere to the armed and masked men deployed by the Trump administration in its indefensible assaults on immigrants. And one has also to be impressed by the protesters’ use of humor and ridicule. I especially like the excellent inflatable costumes. I trust we’ll see lots of them at the No Kings gatherings on Saturday.So I’m oddly cheerful. Could the inflatables ultimately carry the day against ICE? Could the pope prevail over the president? Could young people save the country from their elders?AROUND THE BULWARK
- What’s a College President to Do in the Trump Era? Not going on bended knee to Washington would be a good start, writes Wesleyan University president MICHAEL S. ROTH.
- The Speaker of the House Is Abetting Authoritarianism… Every Trump needs his Johnson: a flunky who will rationalize his crimes, argues WILL SALETAN.
- The Birth Pangs of the U.S. Navy… It was founded 250 years ago today—and, oddly, was promptly ordered to attack what is today its biggest base, ANDREW LAWLER explains.
- Can Democrats Mock Trump Into Defeat? As the president embraces strongman politics, Democrats are increasingly trying to make him seem little, notes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
OpEdNews,Political Commentary: What is the plan to prevent the National Guard, ICE, and others from 2026 voting intimidation?Robert Weiner, right, Oct. 13, 2025. The biggest possible threat is a stop to fair and free elections.We regularly hear about the problem, but have not heard any concrete plan to counter it effectively. We hear little beyond the need for mass mobilization of protests. There is no guarantee those will stop the voter intimidation and suppression, harassment, detainments, and even ballots — and people — from being scooped up.Recent federal court rulings blocking National Guard deployments for immigration enforcement in Oregon and Illinois prove both that overreach is being attempted and that legal remedies can work. The question is whether pro-democracy forces are preparing similar strategies specifically for election protection. Will fences be in place (as the Capitol uses now since Jan 6 for key events) in major voting sites to protect voters and ballots at local voting places?Are the lawyers ready to surround and do emergency injunctions against the Guard, ICE and their allies? Can they move fast enough to assure the courts allow local law enforcement to protect people from harassment, suppression, and other interference?Are the DNC and the local parties ready? Are the ACLU and other effective legal organizations ready?Ty Cobb, Trump’s former White House Lawyer, told Stephanie Ruhl on her show, in a remarkable coming out interview, that deploying the Guard for training in blue states “isn’t accidental.” He said Trump will use section 12406 of the National Guard Act which permits the president to send the Guard if there is an “invasion” and will use the Insurrection Act to give presidential power to use military troops, contrary to the Posse Comitatus Act which bars the military from local law enforcement.Is anyone ready to do a pre-empt like Oregon and Illinois Attorneys General just did on the Guard? However, this time to get a ruling to block the president from inaccurately declaring a non-existent “emergency” or “invasion” around voting time?With President Trump declaring Antifa a terrorist group, despite no leadership, has anyone moved to declare the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys as terrorists, who do have organizational structures, the way they proved they were on video January 6? Have pro-democracy advocates taken steps to stop people who participated and were convicted, but pardoned, from new crimes in the 2026 elections? Shouldn’t they be watched since nothing stops new convictions if they gather weapons illegally (Some pardoned Jan 6 people have in fact been convicted later for new crimes).We’ve heard a lot of good and helpful statements on the shows about the expected danger of the Guard, ICE, Oathkeepers, Proud Boys, and other extreme right groups conducting likely suppression of the upcoming 2026 vote. However democracy forces, crucially, have no strategy to actually stop them. What is the concrete plan? That really is the ball game. It appears that is where the administration intends those agencies and organizations to go, with the training and planning clearly occurring now. If we can answer and act, timed appropriately and with sophistication to insure non-violence, we’ll accomplish what Al Sharpton declares, “We gotcha.”More Global NewsNew York Times,News Analysis: Why Now? The Lost Chances to Reach a Hostage Deal, and a Cease-Fire, Months Ago, David E. Sanger and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 13, 2025 (print ed.). On Gaza, President Trump put few, if any, guardrails on Israel’s offensive, bucking international demands for a cease-fire. Then he changed course.Why now? Why did it take 736 days?That was the question coursing through the celebrations on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Saturday night, as hundreds of thousands of people poured into Hostage Square. They were anticipating the release early Monday of the 20 hostages believed still alive and the possible end of a brutal war that left Gaza destroyed, and Israel at once stronger and more diplomatically isolated than ever.Holding up photos of the remaining hostages, the crowds cheered on Saturday evening at the mention of President Trump, who many Israelis believe forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seize this moment. They listened intently to Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, address the cheering throngs.But overarching the moment was the question of whether this deal could have been done far sooner, when more hostages may have been alive, and before tens of thousands more Palestinians were killed. That argument lay behind the boos that ran through the crowd when Mr. Witkoff, right, mentioned Mr. Netanyahu. Hearing the reaction, Mr. Witkoff tried to defend Mr. Netanyahu, insisting that “I was in the trenches with the prime minister” and saw how he was seeking “a safer, stronger future for the Jewish people.” That was met with more booing.Historians may argue for years whether the Israel-Hamas war could have ended a year ago this week, when Israeli forces tripped upon and killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief and architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. Or, alternatively, whether Israel and Hamas missed a chance to build on the cease-fire that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his aides left in place before Mr. Trump took over. Despite the fact that Mr. Witkoff was involved in the January deal, it did not stick, and early in Mr. Trump’s term the war resumed, bringing with it more death and suffering.Debates over how wars could have ended sooner, and saved thousands or millions of lives, are hardly new. Historians are still arguing over whether Japan would have surrendered anyway if President Harry S. Truman had decided against dropping two atomic weapons; whether President Richard M. Nixon waited years too long to get out of Vietnam. Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump argued for an earlier exit from Afghanistan.“This is a different moment — we didn’t have then what President Trump has now,” Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s secretary of state, said in a telephone interview over the weekend. “Hamas is defeated as a military organization, isolated diplomatically, it’s lost its patrons — Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis — and it has alienated the people of Gaza.”He added: “Israel long ago achieved its war aims of destroying Hamas’s capacity to repeat Oct. 7 and killing the leaders responsible — at great cost to Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire. The Israeli people want the remaining hostages home and the war to end.”Here is a look at some of the explanations for why the hostage release — and perhaps a new start for Gaza — is happening now.Feints, Bluffs and an ElectionTwo years ago this week, after the Oct. 7 attack, Mr. Biden traveled to Israel to show his solidarity. But he also issued a warning — strongly in private, his aides reported later, and more gently in public — that there was a risk to overreaction.New York Times,Who Are the Hostages Released From Captivity in Gaza?Liam Stack and Isabel Kershner, Updated Oct. 13, 2025. Hamas released the last remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza on Monday, a key component of an agreement reached last week between Israel and the Palestinian group that mediators hope could lead to the end of the two-year war.The release began on Monday morning when the first seven hostages were handed over to the Red Cross in Gaza. The Red Cross then brought them to the Israeli military, which transferred them back into Israel. Hours later, another 13 hostages were freed. According to the agreement, Israel will respond to the release of the hostages by releasing 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in Israel and another 1,700 Palestinians detained during the war, including women and children.There were 48 Israeli hostages in Gaza, according to Israel, the last of about 250 people taken during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 others.Hamas is required under the cease-fire to turn over the remains of deceased hostages, but it is unclear how quickly that will happen. Israel believes 26 hostages are dead, while the condition of two other captives has not been confirmed.Here is a list of the living hostages and those whose circumstances are unknown. Their names and ages have been provided by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group that advocates on behalf of the hostages and their loved ones.New York Times,They Helped Topple Roe v. Wade. Now Their Sights Are Set on Britain, Jane Bradley and Elizabeth Dias, Oct. 13, 2025. An organization that fought abortion rights in the United States is now an unlikely conduit between MAGA Republicans and Britain’s ascendant Reform U.K. party.For nearly three hours, Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s once-fringe populist Reform U.K. Party, commanded an audience in Congress on Sept. 3 as he testified against his own country’s free-speech rules.The presence of Mr. Farage, a longtime Trump ally, as the Republicans’ star witness in Washington was not merely a symbol of his growing political clout or the power of conservative populism.Rather, it was the result of a discreet, monthslong campaign by one of America’s most influential conservative Christian groups, famous for being an architect of the effort that helped overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion.The group, Alliance Defending Freedom, has taken its playbook to Britain and has rapidly established itself as a power broker between the country’s rising populist movement and President Trump’s Washington. They are catalyzing Reform U.K., Britain’s fastest growing political party that is seeking to upend the Conservative Party with an agenda centered on anti-establishment and anti-immigration sentiments. The A.D.F. is guiding its leadership even further to the right, on a conservative Christian agenda similar to the one that is sweeping through the United States.The A.D.F.’s British arm orchestrated Mr. Farage’s appearance in Congress, reaching out to ask if he would like to give evidence on censorship and passing on his interest to the House Judiciary Committee, which formally invited him, according to both a Reform U.K. and a Republican official. An A.D.F. lawyer testified alongside Mr. Farage in the hearing, together building a case against what they saw as growing government censorship in Europe. A.D.F. officials have also quietly arranged briefings in Britain with visiting congressional leaders. They brokered a secret meeting between Mr. Farage and top State Department officials in London. And in private briefings, they have supplied the Trump administration with attack lines that cast the British government as hostile to free speech.In Britain it is highly unusual for advocacy groups to hold influence the way they do in the United States.U.S. Economy, Markets, JobsNew York Times Magazine,The Rules of Investing Are Being Loosened. Could It Lead to the Next 1929? Andrew Ross Sorkin, Oct. 13, 2025. Andrew Ross Sorkin is the founder and editor at large of DealBook and the author of “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation,” which is being published this week.Back in the 1920s, Charles Mitchell — the swaggering head of National City Bank, the forerunner to Citigroup — had a ritual. He would take his bond salesmen to lunch at the Bankers Club, perched atop the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, and point to the city below, stretched out in miniature. “There are six million people with incomes that aggregate thousands of millions of dollars,” he’d say. “They are just waiting for someone to come to tell them what to do with their savings. Take a good look, eat a good lunch and then go down and tell them.”Nearly a century later, we are in the grip of a sweeping new age of financialization and innovation — the boldest transformation in money and investing since the 1920s — that is also driven by the idea of expanding access to markets. Private equity, venture capital and private credit, once the preserve of institutions and wealthy individuals, are now about to be repackaged for the masses, even woven into 401(k) retirement plans. Crypto tokens are being sold as a way to buy slices of private firms like SpaceX and OpenAI, in the gray zone of securities law.It all comes amid a new stock boom, fueled by a mania for A.I., and with a new administration in Washington that is determined to loosen rules — creating a permissive spirit similar to the one that passed for innovation in the 1920s.The Trump administration is working on rolling back key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, easing capital requirements for midsize banks and sidelining the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency born after 2008 to police predatory lending. Congress, for its part, has advanced measures like the Genius Act and, more recently, the so-called Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act — billed as modernization and, in practice, opening the gates for crypto and other speculative products.Yet history offers a blunt reminder: When transformation comes this quickly, it rarely benefits everyone unless it is paired with transparency, oversight and regulation. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was pitched as a democratizing moment, too, until it collapsed under a wave of hype and fraud. The pattern is familiar, stretching back to 1929: Whenever access expands faster than safeguards, charlatans rush in and ordinary investors are often left holding the bag.The greatest speculative asset class of the past decade has been cryptocurrency, a realm where risk itself is part of the appeal. For years it was dismissed by some of the most venerated investors, like Warren Buffett, as a plaything for gamblers and thrill-seekers. But under a crypto-friendly Trump administration, a new group of financiers is working to reimagine it as something every American should own — not just through exchanges and wallets but through investment vehicles built to slip into retirement accounts and mutual funds.New York Times, Global Markets Whipsaw on Latest Tariff Drama, River Akira Davis and Jason Karaian, Oct. 13, 2025. Stocks in the United States recovered from their worst decline in months, after President Trump softened his tariff threat on China. But markets in Asia dropped.Stocks in the United States and Europe bounced back from steep declines on Friday, after Mr. Trump posted on social media that he was considering a “massive increase in tariffs” on Chinese products and threatened cancel a planned meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. But in the past day, Mr. Trump and his allies have struck a more diplomatic tone toward China.U.S. Media, Sports The Athletic via New York Times, Investigation: Only five games into Bill Belichick’s first season, UNC football has spiraled from nationally relevant to national punchline, Bruce Feldman, Brendan Marks and Stewart Mandel, Oct. 13, 2025. Tabloid fodder surrounding the 73-year-old’s relationship with 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson has given way to mockery over the 2-3 Tar Heels’ lopsided losses to TCU (48-14), UCF (34-9) and Clemson (38-10).North Carolina ranks 133rd out of 136 teams in total offense (263.8 yards per game), and opponents are completing 70.3 percent of their passes, which ranks 131st. New York Times,Opinion: The New Julia Roberts Movie Seethes With Anti-Woke Resentment, Michelle Goldberg, Oct. 13, 2025. “After the Hunt,” Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller about the fallout from the #MeToo movement, has been in theaters for only a few days, but it already feels dated. It’s a memento of the micro-era, toward the exhausted end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when the backlash against self-righteous progressivism was cresting, and taking on sanctimonious college students seemed, at least in some circles, like a brave provocation.Now, at a moment of ferocious federal government repression of the campus left, “After the Hunt” is a bit of a silly anachronism. It’s interesting mostly for what it inadvertently reveals about the seething resentments that helped set the stage for today’s right-wing crackdown.“It has gotten so hard for me to listen to these kids, when they have had everything, everything handed to them in their lives, insist that the world stop at the first small injustice,” says a school counselor played by Chloë Sevigny, using an obscenity. That peevish spirit animates much of the movie, which turns on not one but two possibly made-up allegations of sexual abuse.In 2018 the Democratic strategist Aaron Huertas coined the term “reactionary centrism” to describe a style of politics that prides itself on even-handedness while being disproportionately obsessed with left-wing overreach. Always deployed as an epithet, “reactionary centrism” is overused by progressives to inoculate themselves from criticism.But it describes a real ethos — a loathing of wokeness so intense, it led some elite former Democrats to support Donald Trump. “After the Hunt” brings reactionary centrism to prestige cinema.There’s nothing wrong with making a movie about the anguish of cancellation, like the brilliant 2022 film “Tár,” or about an ambiguous claim of sexual transgression. “After the Hunt” fails not because of its premise but because it’s overwrought and self-satisfied. It’s about the terrifying power of the mob, with the mob conceived as the unreasonably angry students of the Ivy League.The movie offers insight into the politics of victimhood, just not in the way its creators intended. Oct. 12New York Times,A Test Now for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 12, 2025. Israel’s advocates fear that its conduct of the war has cost it the support of an entire generation of U.S. voters.The war in Gaza may finally be ending, after two years of bloodshed and destruction. But among the damage that has been done is a series of devastating blows to Israel’s relationship with the citizens of its most important and most stalwart ally, the United States.Israel’s reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on college campuses or among progressives. For the first time since it began asking Americans about their sympathies in 1998, a New York Times poll last month found that slightly more voters sided with the Palestinians than with Israelis.American Jews, long Israel’s strongest domestic backers, have turned sharply critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government over the Gaza conflict. A majority believe Israel has committed war crimes as it has killed tens of thousands of civilians and restricted food aid, and four in 10 believe it is guilty of genocide, a new Washington Post survey found — a charge Israel denies. The shift has created new incentives for even moderate Democrats in Congress to get tough on Israel, including by curtailing U.S. military aid.The damage is also increasingly bipartisan. Despite Republican efforts to identify their party with Israel and to tag Democrats as providing aid and comfort to its enemies, younger evangelical Christians are breaking with their parents on the issue, seeing Israel as an oppressor rather than as a victim. And the breakup extends beyond evangelicals.“Everybody under 30 is against Israel,” the conservative commentator Megyn Kelly offhandedly told Tucker Carlson on his podcast last month.The question is whether those younger Americans will be lost to Israel long-term — and what Israel’s advocates will do to try to reverse that.Shibley Telhami, a pollster and scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Maryland, argues that it’s too late.“We now have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a Pearl Harbor generation,” he said. “There’s this growing sense among people that what they’re witnessing is genocide in real time, amplified by new media, which we didn’t have in Vietnam. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as a villain. And I don’t think that’s likely to go away.”New York Times,Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error, Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Oct. 12, 2025 (print ed.).Friday’s layoffs swept up scientists involved in responding to disease outbreaks and running an influential journal. Officials said the mistaken dismissals were being rescinded. The Trump administration on Saturday raced to rescind layoffs of hundreds of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were mistakenly fired on Friday night in what appeared to be a substantial procedural lapse.Among those wrongly dismissed were the top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.After The New York Times reported the dismissals, two federal health officials said on Saturday that many of those workers were being brought back. The officials spoke anonymously in order to disclose internal discussions.The mistakes rocked an agency already in tumult, and which has been a particular target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, The C.D.C. lost about a third of its staff in April; many were rehired weeks later.In August, a gunman emptied more than 500 rounds of ammunition at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta. Later that month, Mr. Kennedy orchestrated the ouster of the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, and precipitated a series of high-profile resignations.Among the workers whose firings were revoked were members of the elite corps of “disease detectives” who are typically deployed to the sites of outbreaks. The team that puts together the M.M.W.R., which communicates the agency’s recommendations and research, has also been brought back.The employees “were sent incorrect notifications, which was fixed last night and this morning with a technical correction,” a senior administration official said. “Any correction has already been remedied.”In order to ensure that teams confronting disease outbreaks include scientists with varied expertise, they comprise staff from various parts of the agency.The two top leaders of the measles response, for example, are officially employees of the office of the director at the Global Health Center, and the office of the director at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. When outbreaks die down, team scientists return to their regular positions.Editors’ PicksLet Us Help You Find Your Next Children’s BookRose Byrne as Mother of the YearCan I Take Batteries on a Plane? What to Know Before You Fly.The leaders of the measles team were let go when the administration eliminated those two offices. But just as entire units must be cut in such a layoff, entire units must also be restored.New York Times, Trump Is Blowing Up Boats Off Venezuela. Could Mexico’s Cartels Be Next?Paulina Villegas and Jack Nicas, Oct. 12, 2025. U.S. strikes on boats that President Trump says are drug smugglers have unsettled America’s biggest trading partner, where powerful criminal groups produce and smuggle drugs.As President Trump has blown up one boat after another off Venezuela’s coast and declared an “armed conflict” against drug cartels, a question with stark consequences has arisen much closer to the United States.Could Mexico, where far more drugs are made by some of the world’s most powerful criminal groups, be next?“I would be honored to go in and do it,” Mr. Trump said in May, about using U.S. forces to hunt cartel members. “The cartels are trying to destroy our country. They’re evil.”Yet three senior Mexican officials said in interviews that, although they are watching the U.S. military action with caution, Mexico is not worried — for now.That is because, they said, the cooperation between the countries has become simply too robust and yielded too many results on migration and drugs for them to imagine the Trump administration jeopardizing it by conducting unilateral military strikes. Their assessments were reinforced by two Trump administration officials who emphasized collaboration between the countries.But perhaps more surprisingly, these views were shared by several members of a top cartel who said they were unafraid of American intervention. They were more focused on an ongoing conflict within their ranks, they said.So far, the U.S. government says it has targeted only boats leaving Venezuela, a country ruled by an autocratic government that Washington has long wanted gone.Mexico, the largest U.S. trading partner, presents a far different case. Any U.S. intervention would have major diplomatic, economic and political consequences, given Mexico’s red line over impeding on its sovereignty.New York Times,Black Unemployment Is Surging Again. This Time Is Different, Lydia DePillis, Oct. 12, 2025. Federal layoffs and an end to diversity initiatives have weakened a historically strong labor market for Black workers.Joblessness for Black workers is rising again, two years after reaching a record low. It’s a troubling indicator: Joblessness often spikes higher for historically marginalized groups during economic downturns, and takes longer to fall.This time, the Trump administration’s assault on diversity programs and cuts to the federal work force could make it even more difficult for Black workers to recover when conditions improve.The African American unemployment rate has surged over the past four months, from 6 to 7.5 percent, while the rate for white people ticked down slightly to 3.7 percent. On top of a slowing economy, the White House’s actions have disproportionately harmed Black workers, economists said.“I think the speed at which things have changed, in such a dramatic fashion, is out of the ordinary,” said Valerie Wilson, who directs the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There’s been such a rapid shift in policy, rather than something cyclical or structural about the economy.”At least since the 1970s, when the federal government started tracking unemployment by race, the rate for Black people has run about twice the rate for white people. Because of inferior educational opportunities, the legacy of mass incarceration and discrimination over generations, Black people confront greater challenges in the job market.A strong economy during President Trump’s first term created more jobs for Black workers, but many of them were lost when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in-person employment particularly hard. Generous public subsidies, though, cushioned the blow, and hiring rebounded quickly.Black Unemployment Has Surged in Recent MonthsIt’s always higher than average, but it jumped even as the rate for other demographics remained level.In 2023, conditions for Black workers looked as healthy as ever. Unemployment reached a low of 4.8 percent. Wages rose at their fastest pace since data collection began in the 1990s, and median Black household wealth reached the highest level on record.Conditions started to deteriorate in 2024 after pandemic-era subsidies expired. Hiring slowed, and high prices weighed heavily on low-income earners. Black households were the only racial group last year in which median income fell and the poverty rate rose, according to the Census Bureau.Job losses are concentrated among Black women working in professional services such as human resources, according to Ms. Wilson’s analysis of federal data. A hiring freeze and mass layoffs in the federal work force, which have continued during the government shutdown and now exceed 200,000, have also fallen disproportionately on Black workers.The hiring freeze is an impediment to young workers trying to get their foot in the door, too.“The federal government is one of those places people are able to get an entry-level job,” said Gbenga Ajilore, the chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which researches the social safety net. “That’s a whole industry that’s closed to new hires.”More Global News New York Times,Arson in Nepal Looked Like Spontaneous Rage. Evidence Suggests Otherwise, Hannah Beech and Sajal Pradhan, Oct. 12, 2025. A New York Times investigation points to a coordinated campaign of destruction during last month’s unrest. An official inquiry is underway but answers are growing harder to find. Many of Nepal’s trappings of state went up in smoke in a single afternoon.On Sept. 9, coordinated arson attacks across the Himalayan nation destroyed hundreds of government buildings, from a storied palace and top courts to grand ministries and humble ward offices. Hundreds of other properties were targeted, too, including businesses and schools connected to the political elite, as well as homes of current and retired politicians.The widespread arson followed the fatal shootings the day before of 19 anti-corruption protesters by security forces in Kathmandu, the capital. The prevailing narrative is that mobs of young protesters sought retribution, setting fires as their outrage over the killings flared.But a New York Times investigation — based on dozens of interviews with witnesses, participants and arson experts; a review of photos and videos from the havoc; and visits by The Times to the wreckage sites — reveals new details that cast doubt on the idea that such a tightly coordinated nationwide campaign of destruction could have been an entirely spontaneous response to the deaths the day before.The bedlam on Sept. 9 was punctuated by the resignation of Nepal’s prime minister [with Sushila Karki, left, a former chief justice and staunch anti-corruption crusader who was the choice of student protesters, was named as Nepal’s caretaker leader.Soon, the government fell. Nepal’s bureaucracy was charred. In Kathmandu and its suburbs, more than 110 police stations were set on fire, according to a police spokesman. The damage and lost business is still being tallied, but initial estimates put it at more than a third of Nepal’s gross domestic product, one cabinet minister said.A few hours after the shootings on Sept. 8, “ready-to-use lists” began surfacing online with the private details of members of society accused of being part of Nepal’s graft and patronage network.The next afternoon, most of these people’s residences began to burn. Nepal’s executive, legislative and judicial branches were also consumed by fire. The scale of the devastation was catastrophic, akin to hundreds of airstrikes in a handful of hours.U.S. Law, Courts, Crime New York Times,Investigation: Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders, Mattathias Schwartz and Zach Montague, Oct. 12, 2025 (print ed.). Dozens of sitting judges shared with The Times their concerns about risks to the courts’ legitimacy as the Supreme Court releases opaque orders about Trump administration policies.The judges were nominated by both Democratic and Republican presidents.
- 37 by Democrats
- 28 by Republicans
- 10 nominated by Trump
They were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following: The Supreme Court has made appropriate use of the emergency docket since President Trump returned to office.
- 47 disagreed
- 6 were neutral
- 12 agreed
More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public.At issue are the quick-turn orders the Supreme Court has issued dictating whether Trump administration policies should be left in place while they are litigated through the lower courts. That emergency docket, a growing part of the Supreme Court’s work in recent years, has taken on greater importance amid the flood of litigation challenging President Trump’s efforts to expand executive power.While the orders are technically temporary, they have had broad practical affects, allowing the administration to deport tens of thousands of people, discharge transgender military service members, fire thousands of government workers and slash federal spending.The striking and highly unusual critique of the nation’s highest court from lower court judges reveals the degree to which litigation over Mr. Trump’s agenda has created strains in the federal judicial system.Sixty-five judges responded to a Times questionnaire sent to hundreds of federal judges across the country. Of those, 47 said the Supreme Court had been mishandling its emergency docket since Mr. Trump returned to office.The judges responded to the questionnaire and spoke in interviews on the condition of anonymity so they could share their views candidly, as lower court judges are governed by a complex set of rules that include limitations on their public statements.Of the judges who responded, 28 were nominated by Republican presidents, including 10 by Mr. Trump; 37 were nominated by Democrats. While those nominated by Democrats were more critical of the Supreme Court, judges nominated by presidents of both parties expressed concerns.In interviews, federal judges called the Supreme Court’s emergency orders “mystical,” “overly blunt,” “incredibly demoralizing and troubling” and “a slap in the face to the district courts.” One judge compared their district’s current relationship with the Supreme Court to “a war zone.” Another said the courts were in the midst of a “judicial crisis.”The responses to The Times serve as the most comprehensive picture to date about the extraordinary tensions within the judiciary, hints of which have begun to spill out publicly.At a hearing in September, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said his court was “out here flailing” as it tried to apply vague emergency rulings from the Supreme Court that left judges “in limbo.” Ruling on a different case, Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts noted that the emergency orders “have not been models of clarity.”The Supreme Court has so far issued emergency orders in about 20 cases involving the Trump administration’s policies. In at least seven of those orders, the majority offered no reasoning for its decision.At public events, some Supreme Court justices have defended their use of the emergency docket as a legitimate response to the increase in swift presidential policy-making by executive order, as opposed to legislation passed through Congress. Offering extensive reasoning or explanation, they argued, would risk locking the court into a position that might not turn out to be its final view.A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment.The Times reached out to more than 400 judges, including every judge in districts that have handled at least one legal challenge to a major piece of Mr. Trump’s agenda.Most of those who declined to participate did not give a reason. Others said they did not think it was their place to judge the work of the Supreme Court.The judges who responded may not represent the views of the entire judiciary, but to have even several dozen judges out of the nation’s more than 1,000 district, appellate and senior judges express such concern about the Supreme Court’s behavior is highly unusual.Forty-two judges went so far as to say that the Supreme Court’s emergency orders had caused “some” or “major” harm to the public’s perception of the judiciary. Among those who responded to the question, nearly half of the Republican-nominated judges said they believed the orders had harmed the judiciary’s standing in the public eye.Oct. 12Emptywheel,Analysis: “Sensitivities and Exposure:” Six Stupid Things about Lindsey Halligan’s First Filing, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D., right), Oct. 12, 2025. Lindsey the Insurance lawyer and her two loaner AUSAs didn’t do so well on their first filing.I already noted that, after Judge Michael Nachmanoff issued an order setting Monday as the deadline for prosecutors to provide Jim Comey all the discovery in his case, prosecutors submitted what they fashion as a Motion for a Discovery Order.I was going to leave the filing well enough alone. Either Pat Fitzgerald or Judge Nachmanoff will respond later today, when things will get interesting. But there are a number of stupid things about the filing I can’t shake.1) First, the prosecutors (it was submitted by Gabriel Diaz) do not fashion this as a motion for reconsideration. They just … pretend that Nachmanoff’s order doesn’t exist, and pretend they’re submitting this for the first time. That seems like a spectacular way to infuriate a judge.2) They’re asking for two deadlines — October 14 for the things pertaining to the vindictive prosecution motion and October 20 for everything else, a transparent attempt to keep things from Comey, left, that might be pertinent to his vindictive prosecution motion.Part of their justification for filing this is that the parties had not reached an agreement and so they were following Nachmanoff’s order to submit competing versions on Monday.On October 8, 2025, the Court ordered “the parties immediately confer regarding the entry of a joint discovery order” and further ordered “that if after good faith discussions the parties are unable to agree on and file a joint discovery order by Friday, October 10, 2025, . . . the parties shall each submit a proposed discovery order by Monday, October 13, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. D.E. 24.But then, in a high school debate-worthy footnote, they suggest that Monday couldn’t be the deadline because it’s not five business days before the first pretrial motion deadline, since it’s a holiday.Following the Court’s orders regarding discovery at docket entries 28 and 29, the Government conferred with Defense as to what the discovery deadline is. The Defense position was that, per the Court’s Order, discovery could have technically been due on Friday, October 10, 2025. But the notion that discovery was due prior to the Court entering a discovery order is not plausible. Alternatively, the Defense identified October 13, 2025, as the due date. This date is a Federal Holiday and is also inconsistent with the discovery order from this Court that lists discovery as due five business days before the pretrial motion deadline.You’re already treating Monday as a business day!! Your entire premise here — that Fitzgerald, right, should have held off on filing until Monday — is that you’re working on Monday.3) Elsewhere — apparently in an attempt to suggest they were being really nice by letting Comey submit a second set of pretrial motions on October 30 — they describe that the default pretrial motion deadline going into last week’s hearing would have been October 22.The defendant requested, the government agreed, and the Court ordered two motions Deadlines, October 20, 2025, and October 30, 2025. Notably, EDVA Local Criminal Rule 12 states that pretrial motions should be filed within 14 days of the arraignment. Here, the 14 day deadline would have been October 22.This amounts to a confession that the default deadline for discovery going into last week’s hearing would have been five business days before October 22, or October 17. Prosecutors provide no explanation why they need an extra five days simply because Comey has two sequential pretrial motions.4) They describe that Comey wouldn’t discuss the discovery order on October 7 when — for the first in the 12 days since Comey had been indicted — prosecutors first reached out, because Comey’s team first demanded to know who the people described in the indictment were.At that time, the government discussed with the defendant the proposed standard EDVA discovery agreement and a discovery protective agreement. At the initial discussion the defendant would not agree until the government provided information on the U.S. Attorney’s appointment and the identities of PERSON 1 and PERSON 3 on the Indictment.Remember: Pat Fitzgerald said three different times in the arraignment the next day that he still hadn’t been told who these people were. So Diaz is effectively confessing that prosecutors wouldn’t — perhaps couldn’t — describe who these people were.5) The only justifiable reason they give for delay is that the two sides have yet to agree on a protective order, which they claim is really important because of “the sensitivities and exposure associated with this prosecution.”Additionally, the parties have yet to agree on a discovery protective agreement. Considering the sensitivities and exposure associated with this prosecution, a discovery protective agreement is a vital part of the overall discovery plan.[snip]On the afternoon of October 9, 2025, the defendant emailed back the government’s proposed protective agreement with significant proposed edits.[snip]Consistent with the Court’s direction at arraignment, the parties have also conferred regarding a discovery protection agreement. The government provided a past template used in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Defense made substantial edits, and the government agreed to those edits in large part. However, the parties still lack agreement as to whether the discovery can be provided and retained by the Defendant.But they don’t provide the protective order (AKA “protection agreement”) with this filing. By their logic, they’re refusing to turn over discovery until they have one. By not turning it over, they’re ensuring that they cannot meet the currently set deadline of Monday.6) Finally, they spelled North Carolina wrong. U.S. Media, Education, Religion, Technology and Culture Wars Pope Leo XIV (Photo via Vatican Media).Invisible Threads,“Never Sell Out Your Authority”: Pope Leo XIV’s Warning About Press Freedom, Kate Woodsome, right (Georgetown University professor and former Pulitizer Prize winner at the Washington Post), Oct. 12, 2025. The first American pontiff calls for a “virtuous circle” between citizens and the press. Here’s what’s breaking — and how we can fix it. This article explores threats to democracy and journalism. Here are three ways to engage with difficult information while staying empowered:Pope Leo XIV was preaching to the choir when he told global news executives on Oct. 9 that press freedom is “a pillar that upholds the edifice of our societies.” But he offered them as much warning as pep talk.Speaking at the Vatican to a consortium of news agencies spanning The Associated Press to Japan’s Kyodo News, the pope urged media leaders to “never sell out your authority” while calling on citizens to actively support journalism as “a public good that we should all protect.” He framed this as “a partnership between citizens and journalists” that creates “a virtuous circle that benefits society as a whole.”Then came the warning. “We are not destined to live in a world where truth is no longer distinguishable from fiction,” Pope Leo said. But that fate requires vigilance. “Algorithms generate content and data at a scale and speed never seen before. But who controls them? Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?” Communication, he insisted, must be freed from “unfair competition and from the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.” The stakes: ensuring “that technology does not replace human beings, and that the information and algorithms that govern it today are not in the hands of a few.”A pope shaped by two AmericasThe messenger matters as much as the message. The first American pontiff in history brings unique insight to these challenges. Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood in 1955, he spent decades doing missionary work in Peru and became a naturalized Peruvian citizen, making him the first pope with dual U.S.-Peruvian citizenship.His U.S. roots and extensive Latin American experience give him insight into the tensions between democratic ideals and authoritarian impulses, between a free press and those who seek to discredit it. When he was elected pope in May, he chose the name Leo XIV in honor of Pope Leo XIII, who developed modern Catholic social teaching during the Second Industrial Revolution — parallels with today’s challenges of artificial intelligence and technological disruption.This background shaped his address, which recognized threats both ancient and unprecedented: the timeless tendency of those in power to abuse it, of corporations to chase profit over truth, of frightened people to seek certainty from false prophets.Pope Leo urged journalists to “never sell out your authority.” But authority requires more than courage. It requires the material, physical and psychological conditions that make courage sustainable.The press cannot uphold democratic societies if journalists are dead, traumatized, broke or burned out. We cannot earn public trust if misinformation and fear dominate the attention economy. Healthy journalism requires healthy journalists. A healthy democracy requires both.Egberto Off The Record,Commentary: Saving democracy via Independent Journalism: Muckrakers Must Rise Again, Egberto Willies, Oct. 12, 2025. Patrick Lovell and Egberto Willies warn that billionaire media consolidation poses a threat to U.S. democracy. They show why independent journalism must survive corporate and authoritarian power.In this robust dialogue between progressive journalist Egberto Willies, right, and filmmaker Patrick Lovell, the two independent media voices expose the accelerating capture of information channels by billionaire interests and the growing authoritarian threat in America.Willies warns that as billionaires buy up major media platforms—such as Paramount, TikTok, CBS, and others—the public’s access to the truth becomes throttled. At the same time, propagandists like Stephen Miller push fascistic concepts, including “plenary authority.” The discussion highlights the importance of independent, community-based journalism in countering elite control and preserving democracy.The pair connect Stephen Miller’s “plenary authority” slip to Project 2025’s push for a unitary executive, warning of creeping authoritarianism.They emphasize collaboration among independent creators as an antidote to censorship and billionaire gatekeeping.The conversation between Willies and Lovell, left (a producer, investigative journalist and creator of The Con interviews) reveals a stark truth about modern America: control over media is control over democracy itself. Their exchange—part critique, part call to arms—exposes how billionaire domination of traditional and digital media ecosystems has turned public discourse into a managed commodity. Willies warns that the “plenary authority” mentality driving Donald Trump’s allies is not only political but informational—an attempt to monopolize what people see, hear, and believe.At the heart of their dialogue is the recognition that independent media functions as the last frontier for civic resistance. As Larry Ellison acquires Paramount, as Elon Musk manipulates X (formerly Twitter), and as right-wing billionaires infiltrate Substack and other content platforms, the line between news and propaganda grows dangerously thin. Corporate algorithms are designed not to inform but to pacify—to deliver narratives that protect capital, not communities. Willies’s insistence that “we will be throttled” if we rely solely on these systems is both prophetic and practical: the infrastructure of communication has become an invisible weapon of social control.Willies and Lovell advocate a revival of muckraking journalism reminiscent of the Progressive Era, when investigative reporters challenged monopolies and political corruption with pen and press. Yet today’s muckrakers face digital barriers rather than printing costs—algorithmic suppression, de-platforming, and data gatekeeping.To combat these, Willies stresses the importance of building direct relationships with audiences through newsletters, email lists, and independent websites. These mechanisms, more immune to billionaire interference, restore the human connection between journalists and citizens. In his view, true media democracy emerges from community interdependence, not corporate convenience.Lovell, for his part, situates this within a broader historical struggle against tyranny. Drawing parallels between Trump’s transactional corruption and the aristocratic systems the United States once rebelled against, he underscores how today’s billionaire class mirrors the feudal lords of old—extracting wealth, shaping laws, and wielding armies of lobbyists instead of knights. The new weapon of domination is media ownership, which allows them to craft reality itself.This conversation captures a defining moment in American history. The consolidation of media, the normalization of authoritarian rhetoric, and the monetization of misinformation represent not isolated trends but a coordinated erosion of public agency. Willies’s warning that “we will be throttled” if we do not act should echo across every newsroom, podcast, and living room. The struggle for truth is no longer metaphorical—it is infrastructural.Drop Site News,The Free Press Called Out “Incomplete” Reporting on Gaza’s Starving Children. Here’s the Complete Story, Maha Hussaini and Ryan Grim, right, Oct. 12, 2025. CBS’s Bari Weiss touted Free Press article as the “ground truth.” Drop Site spoke to the actual families.In August, The Free Press (FP), a news organization acquired Monday by Paramount for roughly $150 million, announced that it had conducted an investigation into the cases of a dozen Palestinians whose photographs were published in mainstream U.S. media outlets as examples of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza. That investigation, which the FP used as evidence the famine in Gaza is overblown, was woefully incomplete.On Monday, FP founding editor Bari Weiss, left, was named editor in chief of CBS News, and pledged in an email to staff to bring a sense of journalistic rigor to the newsroom. In an unusual setup, Weiss will be reporting directly to Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison rather than up through the news division. If the FP probe into the dozen Palestinians is any indication of what’s to come, the editorial standards at CBS News may be about to collapse.The Free Press claimed dereliction on the part of the mainstream media. “We did something so simple it’s shocking that no other journalist bothered to do it,” announced FP reporter Olivia Reingold, describing how she and her colleague Tanya Lukyanova used Google to search for news articles and interviews about the children featured in photographs. “[I]n every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action,” the outlet reported.“In leaving out that context, the outlets presented an incomplete story,” The Free Press wrote in an editorial defending their coverage. “We are proud of the report and the reporters who tracked it down. In doing so, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service.”The investigation represented journalism at its finest, the outlet argued. “In a normal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for getting to ground truth,” reads the editorial, calling the Google-based investigation “sober, meticulous work.” Weiss and other FP writers even touted the article as an example of the virtues of their approach to journalism in a series of lectures.David Ellison, heir to the fortune of his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is said to have been attracted to Weiss and The Free Press specifically for the outlet’s pro-Israel stance. Dylan Byers, who broke news of the FP sale for Puck, reported that Ellison was “smitten by Bari’s unwavering support of Israel and preoccupation with the rise of antisemitism—issues that are as near and dear to David’s father, Larry, as they are to Paramount’s outgoing owner.”Facing blowback for minimizing the famine in Gaza, The Free Press responded by saying that critics of the article, including Drop Site, are “journalists who oppose actual journalism.”Weiss added: “You’ll notice one important aspect about the uproar: No one is disputing the facts in our piece.”Well, we are. The Free Press claims in its investigation to have looked at the cases of 12 Palestinian’s photographs, as well as the child, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyouba Al-Mutawaq who appeared prominently in a New York Times article—and whose story they questioned in a previous Free Press article. Yet instead of reporting on the 12 Palestinians they claimed to have looked into, the article in fact only addresses nine, or arguably ten, an inexplicable discrepancy, and doesn’t provide original reporting on any of the cases.Drop Site asked FP reporter Reingold and editor Weiss if the outlet attempted to contact any of the people or their family members whose health conditions they reported on. Neither responded to a request for comment.The FP article probed the cases of nine Palestinians: Maryam Dawas, Youssef Matar, Hamza Mishmish, Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, Mosab al-Debs, Atef Abu Khater, Abdullah Hani Muhammad Abu Zarqa, Karam Khaled Al-Jamal, and Osama Al-Raqab. It also references another unnamed case, saying the Washington Post published an outdated photo of a malnourished child, which Drop Site identified as eight-year-old Jana Ayad.For Drop Site, Gaza-based journalist Maha Hussaini looked into the backstories of those cases highlighted by the Free Press to examine whether the claim—namely that starvation did not drive their deteriorating health condition—was accurate. Hussaini tracked down families of three of them before her reporting was cut short by her own forced displacement from Gaza City amid a concentrated Israeli military offensive. What she found is that their underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health. Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crises. Such is the hallmark of a famine. The first to fall victim are generally those who had underlying conditions to begin with; those Palestinians were managing their conditions before the restrictions took hold, but the starvation drove their decline. Additionally, it is difficult to separate their underlying health difficulties from the conditions under which their mothers lived while pregnant and in the first weeks and months of their lives.The fact that so many children in Gaza have such pre-existing conditions by no means exonerates the Israeli siege, but rather is further evidence of its harm. While Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007, Israel began severely restricting the amount of aid allowed into Gaza in October 2023. On March 2 of this year, Israel cut off all entry of food, medicine, fuel and other supplies, only partially lifting the blockade in late May, while continuing extreme restrictions.By the summer, starvation was widespread. By late August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s leading expert on food crises that is used by the UN, declared the governorate of Gaza to be in the grip of the most extreme form of famine, the severity of conditions in North Gaza governorate to be similar or worse, and the thresholds for famine in the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis governorates soon to be crossed.Oct. 11New York Times,Some Americans Are Starting to Feel the Impact of the Government Shutdown, Eileen Sullivan, Oct. 11, 2025. The Trump administration said over 4,000 workers would be laid off. Farmers trying to plan next year’s crops don’t have all the tools they need. Some medical services have been curtailed in Native communities.Reverberations of the federal government shutdown, now in its second week, are starting to be felt by certain segments of Americans, hinting at problems that could deepen for the public if Congress cannot reach a funding agreement soon.In some Native American communities, key medical services, such as diabetes monitoring and telehealth sessions, have been curtailed or canceled. Veterans no longer have access to career counseling or go to regional benefits offices. Taxpayers rushing to meet a Wednesday deadline for extended filing are going to have to wait on hold because fewer Internal Revenue Service customer service agents are working to answer questions.In addition, many of the country’s fruit and vegetable farmers face hurdles in planning for next year’s crops because there is so much uncertainty about what federal assistance they can expect. Large segments of the federal work force on Friday received what will be their last paycheck until the government reopens.And the Trump administration said on Friday that more than 4,000 federal employees will be laid off in a new round of mass firings, a maneuver that is already facing a legal challenge.New York Times,Trump’s Shutdown Layoffs Deepen Impasse, Angering Democrats, Catie Edmondson, Oct. 11, 2025. The president’s move to fire federal workers and his threats to make others go without pay were aimed at pressuring Democrats to cut a deal to reopen the government. The tactics have fueled Democrats’ resolve.In almost any other government shutdown, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, both of Virginia, would probably top the list of Democrats most likely to try to find a quick off ramp.They represent the state with the second-highest concentration of federal employees in the nation. Both have historically been eager to join the so-called bipartisan gangs of senators who try to negotiate their way through partisan gridlock.Instead, the two have appeared remarkably dug in, even as President Trump and his top lieutenants have threatened to use the shutdown to drastically accelerate their campaign to reduce the size of the government. They say they are channeling federal workers who are furious at the White House’s ongoing assault on the bureaucracy and are urging their representatives in Congress to keep up the fight.“I’ve heard that sentiment more loudly than I thought, because in Virginia, we have an awful lot at stake,” Mr. Kaine said in a recent interview. “We suffer more in a shutdown scenario than anybody else. But I think they feel like, ‘You’re threatening to hurt us. You’ve been hurting us since Jan. 20.’ In some ways, it’s kind of not a credible threat, because you’ll do it anyway, whatever happens.”The dynamic has fueled Democrats’ resolve not to back down as the shutdown impasse drags into its second week. Democrats representing large populations of federal workers have for months heard from livid employees about the Department of Government Efficiency emails they received asking them to provide a list of accomplishments; the chaos and upheaval at their agencies; and the fears of retaliation.Mr. Trump has stepped up the threats in recent days, saying that he would deny furloughed workers back pay earned during the shutdown, and promising that he would seize the opportunity to slash programs and projects Democrats care about.So far that has only fueled Democrats’ outrage, strengthening their determination to continue demanding health care concessions as a condition of any deal to fund the government. But that determination will be tested in the days ahead.Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, announced on Friday that the administration was beginning another round of federal worker layoffs, fulfilling Mr. Trump’s threats. And many federal employees, including military personnel, are set to miss their first paycheck next week.“To their credit, the White House has now for 10 days laid off doing anything in hopes that enough Senate Democrats would come to their senses and do the right thing and fund the government,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said at a news conference on Friday, minutes before Mr. Vought’s announcement. “But now where we’re getting to is where people are going to start missing paychecks. This gets real.” Letitia James has only once reported rental income associated with the house. In 2020, she said that she had made between $1,000 and $5,000 from it (New York Times photo by Gregg Vigliotti).New York Times,In the Eye of a Political Storm, a Tiny Yellow House in Norfolk, Va., Jonah E. Bromwich, Kate Kelly and Stefanos Chen, Oct. 11, 2025. Attorney General Letitia James of New York purchased the $137,000 home for a grandniece who needed tranquillity. Prosecutors say it is an impermissible investment property.Five years ago, the door of a modest yellow house on a quiet stretch of avenue in Norfolk, Va., swung open to admit a young family looking for a peaceful life after years of turbulence in several cities.The family, Nakia Thompson and her children, have lived at the address ever since, according to two people familiar with the home, and until this week, the plan for a more placid existence had largely gone as expected. Several times a year, the people said, a great-aunt who had purchased the house in 2020 with Ms. Thompson in mind would come for an extended stay.This week, with the filing of court papers some 200 miles north, the plan came to an abrupt end. The great-aunt — Letitia James, the New York attorney general — was indicted by President Trump’s Justice Department. The yellow house, with its gabled roof and tidy lawn, was revealed to be at the heart of the case that Mr. Trump’s chosen prosecutor brought against Ms. James, one of the president’s most prominent adversaries.In the indictment, the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, accuses Ms. James of having misrepresented the purpose of the house when she purchased it in August 2020 for $137,000. The indictment says that while Ms. James indicated to her mortgage broker that she expected to use the house as a second home, she had instead used it as a “rental investment property, renting the property to a family.”But in June, Ms. Thompson testified to a grand jury in Norfolk that she had lived in the house for years and that she did not pay rent, a person familiar with her testimony said. She was not asked to testify again, and the grand jury that voted to indict Ms. James was not seated in Norfolk, but in Alexandria.The specter of Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign has so far overshadowed the facts of the case, given how he has pushed for Ms. James’s punishment. For years, he has railed against her on social media, calling her a “crook” and “corrupt.” Last month, he also appointed Ms. Halligan, once one of his personal lawyers, to replace Erik S. Siebert, the previous U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia. Mr. Siebert had cast doubt on the case, as had career prosecutors in the office.That sequence of events has prompted outrage from Democrats and even some Republicans, as has the paltry amount Ms. James is accused of having stood to gain — $18,933. But Mr. Trump’s allies celebrated the indictment, calling it airtight and suggesting that it represents fair play against a state attorney general who had sued Mr. Trump in 2022, accusing him of “staggering fraud.”A lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, has flatly denied the charges on her behalf. Ms. Halligan, in a statement, said that they represented “tremendous breaches of the public’s trust.”Ms. Thompson and Ms. James’s yearslong use of the house and Ms. Thompson’s testimony to the grand jury — neither of which has been previously reported — illuminate the straightforward factual dispute that will animate the case. Real estate and legal experts said that it would be difficult to assess the strength of Ms. Halligan’s case until more facts were presented in court.Editors’ PicksAfter a Crisis, ‘a Miracle’ Gave Them a Second Chance in BerkeleyWhy Can’t Fashion See What It Does to Women?In This Pageant, the Ugliest Face WinsBut the burden of proof is high. If the case makes it to trial, the charges, one of bank fraud and one of false statements to a financial institution, will require prosecutors to convince a jury that Ms. James intentionally misled the mortgage broker, OVM Financial, and First Savings Bank, which, according to the indictment, acquired the loan in 2021.Ms. Thompson’s testimony that she has lived in the house rent-free — Ms. James pays even for basic upkeep, the people said — could make it difficult for prosecutors to convince a jury that the house was meant to be used as a rental investment property.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.“The question is, what is the proof and what are the facts,” said Stuart Slotnick, a former prosecutor who heads the New York City office of Buchanan, Ingersoll and Rooney, concentrating in part on real estate litigation. “James is claiming that she was singled out,” he said. “And at the same time, this indictment can be legally sufficient. They’re not mutually exclusive and they can both be true.”The case will ride in part on the legal definition of real estate terms — in particular, distinctions in what Fannie Mae, the government enterprise that backs the mortgage market, refers to as occupancy types. In 2020, the year the house was purchased, Fannie Mae noted in its guide to the market that a second home must be occupied by a borrower “for some portion of the year,” and “must not be a rental property or a timeshare agreement.”That is where Ms. James’s regular visits to the property to see her grandniece and other family, including Ms. Thompson’s mother, who also lives in a Norfolk home Ms. James owns, may be useful to the attorney general’s defense team.An investment property, by contrast, is owned, but not occupied, by the borrower. A “rental investment property” is not a specific occupancy type, and, in its glossary, the Fannie Mae guide from 2020 does not define the term “rent” or “rental.”Mortgages on investment properties often carry higher interest rates because they are inherently riskier; the owner’s expectations of regular rent could be upended by a shifting market or an unreliable tenant.Under the terms of a document that amended Ms. James’s mortgage agreement, she was expected to use the Norfolk property as a second home, with the exception of occasional, short-term rentals, according to the documents and to real-estate experts who analyzed them for the Times.ImageCars along a road in Norfolk, Va.The quiet Norfolk neighborhood that includes the yellow house is at the center of a noisy national battle.Credit…Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesBeginning 12 months after the deed was signed, Ms. James had wider latitude to use the property as she wished, according to the document and the experts. “After a year, people’s circumstances change,” said Clifford Rossi, a University of Maryland finance professor who once oversaw risk management for Citi’s consumer lending practice.That caveat raises questions about when exactly prosecutors believe that Ms. James used the property as a rental. The indictment does not include those dates.Mr. Rossi said that during his years at Citi, he saw cases in which a parent allowed an adult child to live in a second home rent-free — prompting the bank to consider pursuing the matter in court as a violation of the original borrower agreement. Citi’s lawyers, he recalled, often advised against doing so.“We were told by counsel basically to stand down, that it would be very difficult to prove that out in a court of law, because there’s a lot of gray in these cases,” he said.Mr. Rossi said that at times, tax documents would reveal that a borrower had been collecting rent despite classifying a property as a second home. That would be a red flag, he said, to see if the borrower had misled the lender. “It would warrant further scrutiny,” he said.The indictment suggests that Ms. James collected at least some rental income, saying that she filed a tax form where she reported “thousand(s) of dollars of rents received.” It does not say in what year those forms were filed.On New York State annual financial disclosures that Ms. James is required to file as attorney general, she has only once listed rental income associated with the Norfolk house. In 2020, she said that she had made between $1,000 and $5,000 in income from it. In the following years, she did not list any income from the house.She did, however, list the house as an “investment property” from the year she bought it until the disclosure she made this year, once she was already under investigation.On Friday morning, children’s toys were scattered across the front porch of the house. A woman answered the doorbell intercom: “No comment,” she said, before curtly noting a no-trespassing sign.A neighbor, Jacob Neufeldt, a Navy sailor who said he had lived next to the house for several years, was more forthcoming.Mr. Neufeldt said he hadn’t had much contact with Ms. Thompson in the last month, though he knew her well enough to refer to her by her first name. He expressed astonishment that the drama unfolding in New York and Washington all sprang from a two-story colonial on his quiet, neighborhood block.MeidasTouch Network via YouTube,Newsom attacks Trump, Ben Meiselas, Oct. 11, 2025. California Governor Gavin Newsom powerfully goes on the offense against Trump and brings Democratic Governors together such as Governor Pritzker and Governor Kotek to join forces. White House Chronicle,Commentary: Fear Is Afoot, Be Afraid America, Llewellyn King, above, Oct. 11, 2025. Llwellyn King, born in Africa, began his journalism and business careers in the late 1950s, with posts in London’s Fleet Street and Washington, DC and, most currently, his long-running White House Chronicle series aired on PBS. There is enough fear to go around.There is fear of the indescribable horror when the ICE men and women, their faces hidden by masks, grab a suspected illegal immigrant. Their grab could come at the person’s home or place of work, while picking up a child from school or standing in the hallway of a courthouse.That person knows fear as never before. That person’s life, for practical purposes, may be over: loved ones left behind, hope shredded. He or she may be shipped to a place where they won’t be able to survive.Fear is there because, maybe decades ago, they sought a better life and voted for it with their feet.There is no time to argue, no time to ask why, no time to say goodbye. No time to prove your innocence or your U.S. citizenship. It is raw fear — the fear that secret police have always used.There is the fear of those who work in government — once one of the securest jobs in the country — that they will be fired because their legitimate work in another administration is an affront to this one.This hammer has come down in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. The crime: supposedly being on the wrong side of history.There is fear in the universities. Once a babel of free, even outrageous speech, they are cowed. Mighty Harvard, one of the shiniest stars in the education firmament, is dulled, and other universities fear they will be next. Everywhere academics worry that what they say in their classrooms might be reported as inappropriate — their careers ended.There is fear in the law firms. A new concept is at work: an advocate is somehow guilty because of whom they defended. This violates the whole underpinning of law and advocacy, dating back to Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, now asunder in the United States.Media is afraid. Disney, CBS and The Washington Post have bent before the fear of retribution, the fear that other aspects of their business will pay the price for freedom of speech. Journalists fear the First Amendment is abridged and won’t protect them.There is fear, albeit of a lower order, across corporate America as it has become apparent that the government can reach deep down into almost any company, canceling contracts, withholding loan guarantees and, worse, ordering an “investigation.” That is a punishment that costs untold dollars and shatters good names, even if no prosecution follows.Elected officeholders have reason to feel fear. President Donald Trump has suggested that Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should be in jail. Is his compliant DOJ working on that? Fear is unleashed for the elected. Doing your job is no protection.If you have expressed an opinion that could be judged as subversive, the state could come after you. Suppose you walk in a demonstration, exercising your constitutional right to assemble and petition? Suppose you wrote something on social media, so easily traced with AI, which is now out of step with the times? Satire? Opinion? News? Facts that are out of fashion? If you have posted, be afraid.If you take a flight these days, the TSA will ask you to look into a camera. Then government has a fresh picture of you in its active system, ready for facial recognition software to identify you. It will ID you if you should be walking in a demonstration or just be near one. Your own picture, so easily captured by modern technology, can convict you.What is the purpose of that picture? It has no bearing on the flight you are about to take. The same thing is true when you reenter the country from abroad. Smile for Big Brother.Surveillance is a favored tool of the authoritarian state. I have seen it at work in Cuba, in apartheid South Africa and in the Soviet Union. Successive U.S. administrations have been quick to criticize the increasing use of technology for surveillance in China. No more.Troops are being ordered into cities where the locals don’t want them. They come under the promiscuous use of the Insurrection Act of 1807.Does America fear insurrection? No, but there is fear of federal troops in our cities. Lawfare,The Comey Indictment and Selective or Vindictive Prosecution, Ema Rose Schumer, Oct. 7, 2025. A primer on the powerful legal tools and the high evidentiary burden placed on defendants to use them successfully. The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding touched off furious allegations and widespread concern that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing a campaign of personal retribution.Days before a grand jury indicted Comey, Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring criminal charges against Comey and several of the president’s Democratic rivals, writing on Truth Social, “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!!!” The president fired off the post a day after the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia resigned, reportedly for refusing to bring the case against Comey due to inadequate evidence.Analysts have observed that these facts offer Comey potentially powerful tools in defending against his prosecution—claims of selective or vindictive prosecution. These claims, which are brought in the form of motions to dismiss, are intended to provide legal remedies to certain types of prosecutorial misconduct.But it is notoriously difficult for defendants to prevail on selective and vindictive prosecution motions. The executive branch enjoys broad prosecutorial discretion under long-standing interpretations of the Constitution’s Take Care Clause. And under the presumption of regularity, a general principle applied to cases involving executive discretion, courts presume that “in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary,” officials “have properly discharged their official duties.”Still, courts have recognized certain constitutional constraints on the executive branch’s power to prosecute individuals—specifically, the protections afforded to criminal defendants under the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause. Selective prosecution motions invoke the former; vindictive prosecution motions invoke the latter. In practice, both kinds of claims are difficult to prove and involve burdensome doctrinal hoops. Whether Comey would succeed on either claim, then, is far from certain.What Is Vindictive Prosecution?Vindictive prosecution arises when a prosecutor uses the charging system to penalize a defendant for having exercised his legal rights. The Supreme Court stated in a 1978 case involving a claim of vindictive prosecution that to punish someone “because he has done what the law plainly allows him to do is a due process violation of the most basic sort.”To succeed on a vindictive prosecution claim, a defendant must either (a) prove that a prosecutor actually charged the defendant to retaliate against the individual for exercising his legal rights or (b) show facts sufficient to create a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” which creates a presumption the government must then rebut by justifying its charging decision.In the absence of a presumption of vindictive motive, a defendant must show that charges were brought solely to punish him and could not be justified on other grounds—an exacting standard.The Supreme Court held in Bordenkircher v. Hayes that a prosecutor did not violate due process when he carried out a threat made during plea negotiations that he would seek to indict the defendant on a more serious charge if the defendant exercised his right to trial. The Court stated there is no element of punishment in the “give-and-take negotiation” of plea bargaining, where the prosecutor’s goal is to persuade a defendant to give up his right to a trial and the defendant is free to accept or reject the prosecutor’s offer.Even if a defendant does not provide actual evidence of a prosecutor’s retaliatory motive, the Supreme Court in Blackledge v. Perry established that a defendant can make out a vindictive prosecution claim by presenting facts that “pose a realistic likelihood of vindictiveness.” The Supreme Court subsequently framed its decision in Blackledge as creating a “legal presumption of prosecutorial vindictiveness,” which the government can rebut by justifying the reasons for its charging decision.In the Blackledge case, the Supreme Court held that a presumption of vindictive motive arose when a prosecutor secured a felony indictment against a defendant convicted of a misdemeanor after the defendant received a new trial before a higher court. The Supreme Court reasoned that the opportunities for vindictiveness were significant in situations where a prosecutor with “a considerable stake” in discouraging a defendant from exercising his right to appeal his conviction has the ability to deter such appeals by “upping the ante”—filing more serious charges. The Blackledge court suggested in a footnote that it would not have dismissed the felony charge if the prosecution had shown it was “impossible to proceed on the more serious charge at the outset.”Notably, the presumption of vindictiveness generally does not apply in a pretrial setting. In United States v. Goodwin, the Supreme Court held that changes in charging decisions during the early stages of criminal proceedings are less likely the result of retribution and more likely the result of developing understandings of the significance of a case.Attorneys for Trump argued in 2023 that his indictment in the election interference case should be dismissed for vindictive prosecution, calling the case “a straightforward retaliatory response to” Trump’s constitutional right to criticize the government. They argued specifically that Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith filed federal charges against Trump in the District of Columbia after Trump had exercised his constitutional right to plead not guilty in a criminal case in Florida, which was also brought by the special counsel.U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan denied the motion, ruling that under the totality of the circumstances, Trump had failed to meet the threshold standard that his indictment was “more likely than not attributable to the vindictiveness on the part of the Government.”Trump, the judge stated, did not “proffer a single evidentiary link between” his indictment and his public criticism of the 2020 election and then-President Joe Biden. Factors Chutkan weighed against Trump’s argument that the government retaliated against him for pleading not guilty in the Florida case were the distinct, independent bases of the prosecutions in Florida and D.C.—the Florida case pertained to Trump’s handling of classified documents, while the case in D.C. pertained to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results—and the Supreme Court’s holding in Goodwin that a change in charging decision after a defendant exercises a pretrial procedural right is insufficient to create a presumption of vindictive motive. The holding was not tested on appeal because the Justice Department later dismissed all charges against Trump.More recently, one federal district court judge found the Trump administration’s actions in another criminal case created a presumption of vindictive prosecution. A U.S. district judge in Tennessee held on Oct. 3 that the circumstances surrounding the indictment of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an immigrant wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States to face fresh criminal charges, created a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness.” Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in the case.The judge found that Abrego Garcia’s attorneys offered facts sufficient to establish a presumption of vindictiveness by (a) showing the government had a “significant stake” in retaliating against Abrego Garcia for legally challenging his deportation and (b) showing the prosecution’s actions were unreasonable. Regarding the latter, the judge highlighted the timing of the government’s actions. Abrego Garcia’s indictment on charges of conspiracy and unlawfully transporting noncitizens centered around a Homeland Security investigation into a 2022 traffic stop in which Abrego Garcia was discovered driving individuals who were in the country illegally. Homeland Security’s investigation into Abrego Garcia remained pending for more than two years, closed—without referral for prosecution—three days before the government deported him to El Salvador, and reopened a week after the Supreme Court affirmed a district court order requiring the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.The judge pointed to administration officials’ own words as strongly suggestive of their vindictive motive. “Most tellingly,” the judge noted, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche “strikingly” stated during a television interview that the government reopened its investigation into Abrego Garcia after a judge presiding over Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit challenging his removal ruled against the government—direct evidence connecting the government’s prosecution to Abrego Garcia’s exercise of his legal right. While those comments “could directly establish” prosecutors indicted Abrego Garcia to retaliate against him, the judge stated the defendant had sufficiently met the lower standard of proving a presumption of vindictiveness that entitled him to discovery and a hearing.Comey will have to prove as a threshold matter that his indictment was “more likely than not attributable to the vindictiveness on the part of the Government.” Comey’s lawyers may argue that Trump’s Truth Social post provides direct evidence that the prosecution against Comey was motivated by animus, and but for such animus, the Department of Justice would not have indicted Comey. Two factors weigh in Comey’s favor: first, Trump has publicly railed against Comey for nearly a decade because the former FBI director opened an investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign; and second, the U.S. attorney investigating Comey was forced out of his role because he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to bring charges. Even if those facts established a presumption of vindictive motive, the government must show only that there were legitimate reasons for its conduct.What Is Selective Prosecution?Selective prosecution occurs when the government pursues criminal charges against a defendant not in response to the alleged criminal conduct, but for invidious purposes, such as targeting individuals because of their religion, race, or other impermissible factors. The Supreme Court stated in Oyler v. Boles that “the decision to prosecute may not be deliberately based upon an unjustifiable standard such as race, religion, or other arbitrary classifications.”Rooted in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the doctrine embodies the constitutional principle that the government may not single out one defendant for prosecution while overlooking others who engaged in the same conduct, unless it has a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for doing so. The Supreme Court first articulated this principle in 1886, holding that a selective prosecution claim arises when the law is “directed so exclusively against a particular class of persons” and applied “with a mind so unequal and oppressive” that the prosecution amounts to “a practical denial of equal protection of law.”To establish a selective prosecution claim, the Supreme Court in Wayte v. United States articulated a two-part test: A defendant must demonstrate that the prosecutorial discretion (a) caused a discriminatory effect and (b) was driven by a discriminatory purpose.To prove the prosecution’s discriminatory effect, the defendant must show that the prosecution did not indict a “similarly situated” individual. In the landmark case United States v. Armstrong, the Supreme Court explained that a person is considered similarly situated when they are in comparable circumstances, such as having engaged in the same criminal conduct while subject to the same state or local laws. In Armstrong, the defendants, who were indicted on charges of selling drugs and discharging a firearm, contended that the prosecution was racially selective. The Supreme Court held the defendants failed to satisfy the first prong because they produced no evidence that individuals of a different race who engaged in similar conduct were not prosecuted for the same offenses.To satisfy the second prong of a selective prosecution claim—discriminatory purpose—a defendant must show that the prosecution was brought “because of” a protected characteristic or activity, and not merely “in spite of” it. In Wayte, which involved a 1980 draft registration law, the claimant argued he was criminally charged for failing to register for the draft because of his protest activities. The Supreme Court found, however, that the government applied draft-registration laws uniformly, prosecuting all reported nonregistrants without imposing any special burden on anti-war protesters. The petitioner thus failed to prove the prosecution was brought because of the defendant’s political activities and the second prong of discriminatory purpose was not satisfied.Notably, the Armstrong court underscored the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors and imposed a high evidentiary burden on defendants. Concerned that allowing unfounded or speculative claims could impose heavy burdens on the executive branch and chill legitimate law enforcement efforts, the Court required defendants to present “clear evidence” of both discriminatory effect and purpose before obtaining discovery. The central paradox of this rule is that defendants are required to prove the prosecution’s intent, which is often inaccessible without discovery, before discovery is granted, leading some legal scholars to characterize the rule as a “Catch-22” dilemma. Indeed, selective prosecution motions, in practice, have proven largely illusory; defendants have prevailed in approximately three dozen cases over the past 50 years.The difficulty prevailing on selective prosecution claims was illustrated recently in United States v. Rundo, a case against members of the white supremacist group Rise Above Movement (RAM) who were indicted for conspiracy to violate the Anti-Riot Act and for substantively violating the Act after violently attacking counterprotesters. The district court dismissed the indictment on selective prosecution grounds; however, on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed.According to the appellate court, the defendant failed to satisfy either prong of the selective prosecution test. He argued that far-left Antifa members present at the same protests were not prosecuted, but the Court found that they were, in fact, prosecuted for their own offenses. Thus, the defendant failed to show discriminatory effect because others who were similarly situated were also prosecuted.The Ninth Circuit also rejected the argument that the timing of the arrests, occurring after the death of a left-wing protester, indicated improper motive, thus finding no discriminatory purpose. The Court stated that the federal government “is permitted to set its own ‘enforcement priorities’ and create an overall ‘enforcement plan’ if it has a legitimate reason to do so.”In a selective prosecution claim, Comey will face significant hurdles proving the discriminatory effect of the Justice Department’s indictment and the government’s discriminatory purpose—“clear evidence” of which is required to access discovery.Demonstrating discriminatory effect through “similarly situated” individuals will be particularly challenging for Comey, as courts demand they be nearly identical in relevant circumstances. But Trump’s Truth Social post from Sept. 20 may serve as potential evidence of discriminatory purpose. Trump’s demand that Bondi prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), paired with his reference to his own criminal cases, could serve as evidence that the Trump administration is targeting individuals for prosecution because they are the president’s political opponents. The government could counter that Trump’s tweet undermines a discriminatory effect argument, as the inclusion of multiple individuals shows that prosecution is not limited solely to Comey.Comey might also point to the timing of the indictment, which was secured just before the statute of limitations was set to expire. Yet, as the Ninth Circuit in Rundo emphasized, the government maintains broad discretion in setting its enforcement priorities and timing alone is insufficient to establish bias.***Trump’s public pressure on his Justice Department to aggressively prosecute his political enemies may provide an avenue for Comey to challenge his indictment on grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution. That the facts surrounding Comey’s prosecution are dissimilar to those of traditional vindictive and selective prosecution claims does not foreclose challenges to his indictment on such grounds. Indeed, Trump’s public comments have shattered norms that the White House refrains from commenting on active Justice Department investigations. Nonetheless, they may be insufficient to prove selective and vindictive prosecution given the high evidentiary burden placed on defendants to overcome courts’ presumption that law enforcement exercises discretion in good faith.New York Times, U.S. Immigration: Appeals Court Allows Federalized National Guard, But Leaves Block on Chicago Deployment in Place, Ernesto Londoño and Mattathias Schwartz, Oct. 11, 2025. An appeals court said National Guard troops could remain under the Trump administration’s control, but left in place an earlier temporary ruling barring troops from deploying into the Chicago area as a legal fight proceeds.A federal appeals court on Saturday ruled that National Guard troops could remain in Illinois under federal control. But the appeals court left in place, for now, a ruling by a district court judge on Thursday that bars those troops from being deployed into the streets over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and other top Democrats in the state.The unsigned one-page order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did not address the question of whether President Trump exceeded his legal authority in attempting to send troops into the Chicago area to protect federal property and federal agents carrying out his deportation efforts.The order also did not include a rationale for the decision, which is temporary. Appeals courts often issue short, temporary rulings on time-sensitive matters. Courts generally issue lengthier rulings once judges have had time to review and consider arguments from each party.The ruling on Saturday allows 200 Texas National Guard troops to remain in the Chicago area without potentially being in violation a judicial order, so long as they are not deployed. Another 300 members of the Illinois National Guard have also been activated, according to a statement by Northern Command, which said the troops “are conducting planning and training” but not “operational activities.”On Friday, Judge April Perry of the Federal District Court for the District of Northern Illinois issued a 51-page opinion explaining why she had placed a two-week block on both the deployment of National Guard troops and their federalization. Her opinion questioned the candor of administration officials. Contrary to the administration’s stated goals of enforcing immigration law and reducing crime, the opinion said, Mr. Trump’s decision to bring in the military “is likely to lead to civil unrest.”“The significance of the public’s interest in having only well-trained law-enforcement officers deployed in their communities and avoiding unnecessary shows of military force in their neighborhoods cannot be overstated,” wrote Judge Perry, a former prosecutor and nominee of President Joseph R. Biden.Saturday’s ruling largely maintained the status quo in Chicago, where immigration agents have clashed with protesters in recent weeks as the agents have pursued people suspected of being in the country illegally.A similar court fight over the White House’s efforts to deploy the National Guard in Portland, Ore., is before a different appeals court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In a hearing last week, two members of a three-judge panel from that court sounded open to the administration’s arguments for why a military response was legally justified, but they have not yet ruled.Lawyers representing the Trump administration have argued that National Guard troops are needed to protect immigration agents. The Illinois attorney general’s office called the deployment unnecessary, describing it as “startling, unbounded, limitless and not in accord with our system of ordered liberty of federalism.”Saturday’s ruling did not indicate how soon the court might issue a formal decision. It said the National Guard members who traveled to Illinois from out of state may remain in the state unless a judge orders them to return home.On Saturday afternoon, demonstrators chanted near an ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., a suburb of Chicago that has regularly drawn protests and prayer vigils.A few protesters were arrested, officials said, accused of moving beyond an area that had been designated for demonstrations as a federal immigration crackdown has ramped up in the Chicago area since early September. As vehicles came in and out of the facility, several dozen people waved signs and chanted from the designated protest area.Lev Remembers,Commentary: Trump’s Tariff Shock EXPOSED — The $1 Billion Crypto Heist They Don’t Want You to See, Lev Parnas, Oct. 11, 2025. Minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on China, a secret wallet moved over $1 billion into crypto — triggering the biggest market crash in months and revealing how insider corruption and market.He announced 100% tariffs on China — and within minutes, the U.S. stock market went into a death spiral.Trillions vanished in hours. The S&P collapsed. Nasdaq crashed. Tech giants bled red. But as the chaos hit, a different kind of storm was already brewing — not on Wall Street, but deep inside the blockchain.Because while everyone else was watching Trump’s Truth Social post, someone was already cashing in.Before that announcement even hit the airwaves, an anonymous crypto wallet suddenly transferred over $1 billion into stablecoins — digital dollars that hold value even when everything else collapses. Then, within seconds of Trump’s post, that same wallet started placing $100 million buy orders across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and multiple altcoins just as the market imploded.And Trump? He’s not just crashing markets — he’s weaponizing them.He’s using his power, his platform, and insider leaks to move money, to reward those who know, and to destroy those who don’t.This is what corruption looks like when it’s no longer hidden — when it’s played out in real time on the global stage.And while the markets are burning and billions evaporating, something else is coming this week. As I’ve been telling you, we’ve already seen it start with the indictments of Comey and Letitia James. Now I’m hearing from my sources that the next wave is already in motion — and it’s pointing straight toward Adam Schiff and John Bolton.I’m also hearing that Trump is pushing Bondi hard to secure an indictment against Christopher Wray.This is how authoritarian regimes take shape — by flipping the law on its head, by prosecuting the prosecutors. Meidas Touch Network, Trump Spends Back-to-Back Weekends at His Golf Club as Shutdown Continues, J.D. Wolf, Oct. 11, 2025. Two weekends, two shutdown golf trips.As the federal government remains shuttered for a second straight weekend, Trump took an another golf club trip. This is his second consecutive weekend hitting the course while federal workers remain furloughed.Trump golfing last Saturday in VirginiaAccording to pool reports, the press corps loaded into vans at 8:45 a.m. for travel to an undisclosed location, a routine that typically precedes the president’s golf outings. The vans departed at 9:31 and the press pooler, Ben Johansen of Politico, was unable to see Trump.The motorcade arrived at Trump’s Virginia golf club just after 10:00 AM. However, the press pooler, again, didn’t see Trump. The press pool was then held at the tennis center where they can’t see Trump golf. Trump also spent last Saturday golfing during the shutdown, marking back-to-back weekends of leisure as critical services remain frozen and federal paychecks delayed. Democrats are demanding a fix for Affordable Care Act subsidies which some Republicans want to expire, which would lead to higher and likely unaffordable premiums for millions of Americans. Instead of working in a bipartisan way to reopen the government, Trump retreated again to his Virginia golf resort. These golf trips, which cumulatively cost taxpayers millions in travel and security expenses, come as Trump continues to insist that groceries prices are low and the economy is thriving, a claim contradicted by rising food prices and poor job numbers.New York Times,News Analysis: The Trump Split Screen: A Peacemaker Abroad, a Retribution Campaign at Home, Erica L. Green, Oct. 11, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump’s dueling personas were on display this week, providing endless ammunition to his allies and his enemies alike.Within a span of two hours on Thursday, President Trump won two pressure campaigns.First, he celebrated a significant victory in his self-described goal as a peacemaker when Israel approved the first phase of his plan to end the devastating war in Gaza. Just a short time later, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, was indicted after he publicly demanded she be charged, making her the latest target of his retribution.While Mr. Trump has sought to cast himself as a force for peace abroad, he is fueling a seemingly never-ending series of conflicts at home. The split screen has emerged as a defining element of Mr. Trump’s presidency, providing ammunition to his allies and adversaries alike.It’s a dizzying dichotomy that has crystallized in images and headlines that capture Mr. Trump’s dueling presidential personas over the past week.As relieved Israelis and Palestinians danced in the streets to celebrate a cease-fire that could lead to the end of the two-year war, federal law enforcement officials and protesters clashed in the streets of American cities where Mr. Trump has deployed the military to areas led by Democrats he has railed against.As he campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize on his claim of brokering an end to multiple conflicts abroad, he has refused to negotiate with Democrats over health care to end the government shutdown, instead promising to inflict pain on them and their constituents.(Mr. Trump has a history of boasting about ending multiple world conflicts — claims that, often, require some important context.)And as Mr. Trump positioned himself as a humanitarian figure to the people in the Middle East, he followed through with a plan to carry out mass layoffs of thousands of federal workers who will go without paychecks and won’t be able to provide critical services to Americans.A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Trump’s domestic and foreign policy goals were consistent. Mr. Trump felt compelled to broker peace in Gaza for the same reasons he felt compelled to send troops to Chicago: to stop violence and promote stability. And the official reiterated the administration’s position that it is Democrats who are to blame for the shutdown fallout.“This is another fake angle from the failing New York Times,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “President Trump is working to end conflicts around the world, just like he is working to quell violence in cities across the country. His efforts both at home and abroad have been successful, the end of the Israel-Hamas war is underway, and cities like Washington, D.C., are thanking him for freeing up resources to bring more justice to victims and hold more criminals accountable.”News Roundups Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: October 10, 2025 [Peace and Prizes], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 11, 2025. All of President Donald J. Trump’s lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize came to naught today as the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s prize to María Corina Machado of Venezuela, shown above.Machado has led a movement to challenge Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro. The committee cited “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”When she learned of the award, Ms. Machado responded “This is an achievement of a whole society. I am just, you know, one person. I certainly do not deserve this.”White House communications director Steven Cheung responded: “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”Russian president Vladimir Putin said the committee’s “credibility has largely been lost,” prompting Trump to thank him on social media.That Trump and his loyalists are standing with the autocrat Putin rather than democracy is clearer every day.Federal agents in Chicago have been targeting journalists, and yesterday, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis granted a two-week temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents in Chicago from “[d]ispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, threatening or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a Journalist, unless Defendants have probable cause to believe that the individual has committed a crime.”Today, masked border patrol agents pinned WGN-TV producer Debbie Brockman to the ground and arrested her after she recorded agents detaining a Latino man. The agents said she had been detained for “obstruction.” Later, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin accused Brockman of throwing “objects” at a Border Patrol vehicle and said she was arrested “for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.”According to WGN, Brockman was later released without charges against her. But the agents accomplished their goal of terrorizing a journalist as a warning to others.Yesterday a second Republican governor, Phil Scott of Vermont, opposed the administration’s deployment of federalized National Guard troops to Chicago and to Portland, Oregon. “I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” Scott said. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw January 6 a few years ago.”ICE agents denied Illinois senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats, access to the Broadview, Illinois, ICE facility today, although Congress members have the right to conduct oversight. Durbin noted that this was their fourth attempt to access ICE facilities. “I’ve never had this kind of stonewalling by any presidential administration. Something’s going on in there that they don’t want us to see. I don’t know what it is, but all Americans should be asking the same question: ‘What is it? Can you justify it under the Constitution?’”Nandita Bose, Jana Winter, Jeff Mason, Tim Reid, and Ted Hesson of Reuters reported on Thursday that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is playing a central role in the administration’s crackdown on opponents. The administration is threatening to target funding behind what the administration calls “domestic terror networks,” those it claims embrace “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got into the act of attacking the administration’s opponents today, claiming that the Democratic senators holding out for the extension of the premium tax credits so that healthcare premiums don’t skyrocket—a position supported by 78% of Americans—are taking that position only because they’re afraid of anti-Trumpers. Johnson called the October 18 No Kings rally a “hate America rally” of “[t]he antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists…. It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes,” he said.Majority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) joined in, calling those who are taking a stand against Trump’s destruction of the nation’s constitutional checks and balances “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, saying it “is set to hold…a hate America rally in [Washington, D.C.] next week.” Legal scholar David Noll noted that it’s “interesting that if you say the [C]onstitution creates a separation of powers systems in which there are no kings, they think you hate [A]merica.”Josh Dawsey reported in the Wall Street Journal today that administrative officials joke about ruling Congress with an “iron fist” and that Trump ally Steve Bannon has compared Congress to Russia’s largely ceremonial Duma.Today House speaker Johnson announced he would cancel another week’s session, making four weeks he has kept House members from their jobs. Johnson first sent the members home on September 19. Staying out of session means not working on the budget that is overdue or hammering out the necessary appropriations bills. It means not working on figuring out a way to extend the healthcare premium tax credits that Democrats are demanding.It also means not swearing in Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who won election on September 23 and who will provide the 218th vote on a discharge petition to trigger a vote on a measure requiring the release of the files the government has on the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.The administration is trying to ram its will through Congress. Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the shutdown on Democrats, sending automatic out-of-office email replies that blame Democrats for the shutdown, for example, in violation of the Hatch Act that prohibits using government resources for partisan purposes. As the shutdown drags on and most Americans blame Republicans, their efforts to shift the blame are ratcheting up. Now the administration has posted a video at airport Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines featuring Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem saying that operations are impacted because “Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government.”Immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick commented: “Can you think of a single movie in which there is a video from the government denouncing its political opponents playing on a loop in public spaces in which that government was the good guy?”Natalie Allison and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post reported yesterday that members of the administration have not engaged with Democrats at all to negotiate an end to the shutdown. Tonight the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson, Meryl Kornfield, and Jacob Bogage reported that the administration has begun another round of firings to put more pressure on the Democrats, although legal analysts say such layoffs are illegal. Trump told reporters they were laying off “people that the Democrats want.”Labor unions sued preemptively to prevent the layoffs after Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought threatened he would use a shutdown to slash more of the government.Among the duties of Congress Trump has taken into his own hands are tariff duties, authority for which the Constitution gives solely to Congress. Nonetheless, Trump is continuing to monkey with tariff rates. This morning he posted on social media that “[s]ome very strange things are happening in China!” China is the world’s largest producer of the rare earth minerals necessary for a wide range of manufacturing, including robotics, electric vehicles, and electronics. Yesterday, Chinese officials restricted exports of the minerals. In his post, Trump threatened to retaliate against China and suggested that there was no reason to go through with an upcoming meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping.Trump’s threat sent stock prices tumbling.After the stock market closed for the day, Trump posted on social media again, saying he would impose tariffs of 100% on products from China beginning on November 1. This levy is on top of current tariffs. Stocks fell further in after-market trading.The Contrarian,Opinion: Donald Trump’s latest authoritarian moves signal weakness, not strength, Norman Eisen, right, Oct. 11, 2025. It can be hard to make sense of how American democracy is doing given the incessant stream of autocratic actions by Donald Trump and the over 100 hundred court rulings against him and other pushback.My view is that Trump has been frustrated in the pursuit of his dictatorial ambitions through the use of the ordinary powers of the presidency, including by all of those court orders, and so he has turned to his extraordinary powers. They include improperly pushing his cronies to bring criminal prosecutions of his perceived enemies and deploying the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to crack down on peaceful protest–also wrongly.These dual policing initiatives represent an outrageous overreach—the besetting sin of dictators, and one that often leads to their ouster. Make no mistake, Trump’s abuse of power is a sign of his insecurity and weakness, and it is setting up massive, peaceful, lawful opposition.That includes more problems for Trump in litigation, recently recognized by The Atlantic as “the anti-Trump strategy that’s actually working”.On the legal front, I wrote with Richard Painter and Virginia Canter this week about Trump’s push to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James with unmerited charges that match the similarly baseless indictment last week of James Comey. Team Trump is, in our view, headed for bumpy judicial waters in both cases, and the three of us have already lodged multiple ethics complaints, with more on the way. We also analyzed Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and his use of ICE and the legal opposition that has occasioned—including no fewer than three court orders stopping various aspects of Trump’s Chicago activities this week.But his obstacles are deeper than the courts. As readers of this column know, most backsliding democracies make U-turns. The Trump regime is facing mounting opposition in all of the main dimensions that determine whether autocracy becomes permanently entrenched or whether democracy is poised to make a comeback.I don’t want to sugarcoat the tremendous damage Trump is doing domestically and internationally and the lives that are being destroyed and even lost as a result. And not every backsliding democracy makes a U-turn. But when you look objectively at the landscape, there are ample reasons to believe Trump is not succeeding in his dictatorial ambitions. That goes well beyond the challenges that he is facing in court.Trump’s Standing in and at the PollsA majority of the American people do not like the prosecution of Trump’s adversaries, his deployment of the National Guard, his aggressive immigration processes, his role in shutting down the government to tear health care from millions and the rest of the chaos. No wonder Trump is at historic lows in popularity at this early point in his term.The results at the polls this year have been similarly devastating. Democrats have won or outperformed in 42 of 43 elections this year. That is a reflection, in part, on Trump’s unpopularity–and augurs ill for the future for Trump’s party.Public ProtestThe size, number, and geographic distribution of protests against the Trump regime in 2025 have been off the charts. We have not seen anything like it in decades.Now, we will have the second iteration of the No Kings protests on Saturday, Oct. 18. The No Kings protests in June saw a massive coast-to-coast turnout, driven by Trump’s initial National Guard and military deployments in Los Angeles. With Trump’s planned deployments in Portland and Chicago and the deployment in Memphis that started Friday, expect millions of Americans to show up, stand up, and speak out.Political scientist Erica Chenoweth famously found that when 3.5% of the population stands against a tyrannical regime, it cannot continue (Contrarian Editor-in-Chief Jen Rubin argues it would take much less). We are well on our way to that number of peaceful, lawful protesters.Press PressureIn this category, I include both old and new media, including independent outlets like The Contrarian. We, of course, saw this coming from Day One and have been outspoken, but, in recent weeks, we have increasingly been joined by traditional media.That includes perhaps the single most authoritative source in theUnited States, The New York Times, which has broken with its more careful neutrality in recent weeks. A case in point is its banner headline on the James prosecution: “Letitia James Indicted After Trump’s Pressure Campaign.”Political LeadershipExperts also look at whether there is unified political opposition to a would-be dictator. The strong example initially set by state attorneys general has been followed in recent months by governors stepping up—and now national political leaders are succeeding in doing the same.In this column last week, I noted that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and national Democrats were winning the shutdown messaging war by making clear that their votes were not available to strip health care from millions of Americans or make it prohibitively expensive. Another week has gone by, and their success has now become evident—recognized in poll after poll and in Republican disarray.When you add all that up, there is cause for hope. Obviously, it’s too soon to say which path the United States will take and whether we will follow the majority of other democracies that have executed a U-turn following democratic backsliding. Trump and his enablers certainly are not slowing down, and the damage is vast and growing every day.But if they are not stopping, neither must the friends of democracy—including you, Contrarians. Our rundown of all the week’s stories here at The Contrarian shows that Trump’s “flood the zone” continues to meet “rule of law shock and awe.” See for yourself…Shutdown & CongressHow long can this last? April Ryan & Paul Osadebe on the true cost of the government shutdownOn a special edition of The Tea, April Ryan sat down with federal worker and organizer Paul Osadebe to talk about the real and worsening harms of the government shutdown. “This is crisis moment, guys.”Democrats must stay on message with the shutdownNorman Ornstein examined how congressional Democrats’ undisciplined messaging has hindered their impact in the past — and how the ongoing shutdown offers an opportunity to realign and strengthen their communication strategy. “When the shutdown ends, the responsibility for the healthcare catastrophe will be clear.”Is Trump’s Overreach Starting to Fail? Senator Mark Warner with Jen RubinSen. Mark Warner joined Jen to unpack the latest on the MAGA government shutdown, Trump’s notice of “armed conflict” to Congress, and the constitutional strength of our military. “The briefings we’ve got from the administration so far are not satisfying.”Militarization, ICE and ChicagoWe Found the ‘Enemy from Within’Jen Rubin unpacked the unchecked cruelty of Trump’s troop deployments and ICE overreach, which prove daily that the “enemy within” is him and his lackeys. “ICE’s raid on a Chicago apartment building and the ensuing ICE violence against civilians make clear that Trump has initiated an unconstitutional, brutal war against ordinary Americans.”Trump’s Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Immigration StrategyOn the Contrarian Podcast this week, Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) and immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained why Stephen Miller and ICE are doing anything but making Americans safer.Dispatch from Chicago: This is not a ‘war zone’Lorraine Forte shared her time with a local activist in Chicago fighting to restore her city after last week’s shocking military-style apartment raid and offered a look at the mood on the ground as the city braces for a National Guard deployment. “The city is still reeling.”New York Times,16 People Killed in Blast at Tennessee Explosives Plant, Officials Confirm, Rick Rojas, Emily Cochrane and Chris Hippensteel, Oct. 11, 2025. Local authorities said on Saturday that they had shifted their focus to searching for remains. The cause of the explosion was unclear.After a desperate but fruitless search for survivors, officials in Middle Tennessee confirmed on Saturday that an explosion at an ammunition plant killed 16 people.The announcement on Saturday evening was the first time that the authorities provided a death toll after the blast ripped through the plant the previous day. Earlier on Saturday, they said that hope had all but vanished after no survivors were found in the search.And by Saturday evening, Sheriff Chris Davis of Humphreys County, Tenn., said the doubt was gone. The families of 16 people had been notified their loved ones had been killed.It breaks my heart to tell you that,” he said in a news conference, “but I think that can be said.”Officials had initially said that 19 people were missing, but three people believed to be at the facility turned out to be alive and safe elsewhere. In some of those cases, investigators had found personal items belonging to an individual in the rubble but could not immediately locate the person.The investigation was focused on determining the cause of the explosion, which remained unclear on Saturday. Officials described a painstaking search at the site. “We’re having to clear it foot by foot,” Sheriff Davis said. Investigators were also collecting evidence spread farther afield, with debris from the blast found as far as two miles away.Global NewsNew York Times, Israeli Military Says Cease-Fire Is in Effect in Gaza, Liam Stack and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 11, 2025 (print ed.). The statement came after Israel approved a deal between Israel and Hamas to pave the way for the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.The Israeli military said on Friday that a cease-fire had come into effect at noon and that its soldiers were repositioning themselves within Gaza.In a statement, the military said that soldiers in the Southern Command would “continue to remove any immediate threat.”The statement came after the Israeli government approved a deal early on Friday between Israel and Hamas.Benjamin Netanyahu, left, the Israeli prime minister, said in a recorded statement on Friday that the cease-fire deal would allow Israel to bring back the remaining hostages while maintaining its forces in Gaza.Israel would not compromise on the rest of its demands, he added, including that Hamas lay down its weapons and that Gaza be demilitarized. But Hamas regards disarmament as tantamount to surrender and views armed struggle as a legitimate form of resistance against Israeli control over Palestinian lands.“If this is achieved the easy way, so much the better. If not, it will be done the hard way,” Mr. Netanyahu said.It was not immediately clear what the situation on the ground in Gaza was on Friday, but Arab news media showed thousands of people walking along the seaside road from southern to northern Gaza.Avichay Adraee, a military spokesman, said the Israeli military would allow Palestinians in southern Gaza to travel along major roads to the north. But he warned people not to approach several areas across Gaza where Israelis troops would remain active, saying those places were “extremely dangerous.”On Thursday night, the Israeli military said it had struck a site in northern Gaza, which it said was being used by Hamas fighters who “posed an immediate threat” to Israeli troops.More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime New York Times,James Indictment Mirrors Her Civil Case Against Trump in Miniature, Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 11, 2025 (print ed.). The president and New York’s attorney general accused each other of real estate fraud. But the sum involved in her case is $18,933, while millions were at stake in his.It has long been President Trump’s impulse to tar his enemies with the same accusations they have lobbed at him.And his Justice Department’s criminal case against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, above, carries echoes of the civil fraud case she brought against him — albeit at a scale so small that most federal prosecutors would never deign to pursue it.The indictment, less than a month after Mr. Trump publicly exhorted the Justice Department to pursue Ms. James, accuses her of violating a mortgage agreement on a Virginia house she purchased in 2020 by using it as a rental property.The case is a fresh reminder of how the president has taken the Justice Department in hand and directed its prosecutorial powers toward his adversaries. Ms. James is the second of his enemies to be indicted in the past two weeks after he insisted that a case be pursued. Just five days before the charges against Ms. James were handed up, he called her “corrupt” and “scum” on his social media platform and said she should be removed from the New York attorney general’s office.The indictment charges Ms. James with one count apiece of bank fraud and false statements to financial institutions and says that by misrepresenting her intentions for the house, she received favorable terms that would have allowed her to save $18,933 over the life of the loan.A federal case concerning such a small sum would be highly unusual even absent the politics shadowing the charges against Ms. James, and the indictment’s factual claims are likely to be disputed. A person familiar with Ms. James’s housing arrangements said that the property had never been used as a rental and was occupied by Ms. James’s family members. There was no rental agreement and Ms. James has continued to pay the mortgage, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly.Ms. James is set to appear in a Virginia court on Oct. 24. It is likely that she will seek to persuade a judge to dismiss the charges before a trial, arguing that they stem from a vindictive and selective prosecution. But the stakes are high — if convicted, Ms. James faces the possibility decades in prison.In a statement, a lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, said that Ms. James “flatly and forcefully denies these charges.”“We are deeply concerned that this case is driven by President Trump’s desire for revenge,” he wrote. “When a president can publicly direct charges to be filed against someone — when it was reported that career attorneys concluded none were warranted — it marks a serious attack on the rule of law.”The immediate circumstances surrounding the indictment of Ms. James on Thursday were unusual in several respects.The case, which was brought in the Eastern District of Virginia, is expected to proceed in Norfolk, but was presented before a grand jury in Alexandria, just outside Washington, D.C.Like the Trump Justice Department’s case against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, another nemesis of the president, it was brought by Lindsey Halligan, above, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump with no prior experience as a prosecutor. The president pushed out Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, for expressing skepticism about cases against Ms. James and Mr. Comey.Also like the Comey case, Ms. Halligan was the only prosecutor whose name appeared on the indictment. In most cases, the rank and file prosecutors who handled the investigation sign the court filings.In recent weeks, career prosecutors in the Norfolk division of the U.S. attorney’s office had looked at the evidence against Ms. James and believed it did not merit criminal charges, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing case. A senior prosecutor in that division relayed that determination to her superiors, according to the people.Despite that, Ms. Halligan chose to proceed.As Ms. James knows firsthand, even civil fraud cases, which have a lower burden of proof than criminal cases, can be difficult to win. Though she initially triumphed in the civil fraud trial of Mr. Trump, which was overseen by a New York judge, a state appellate court recently threw out the half-billion dollar penalty. The appeals panel reached a shaky agreement to uphold the finding that Mr. Trump was liable for fraud, but only so that the entire case could be evaluated by the state’s highest court.Still, Mr. Trump was humiliated by Ms. James’s lawsuit and the subsequent trial, which took aim at one of his most prized assets: his public image as a self-made billionaire. Ms. James accused him of a yearslong pattern of exaggerating his net worth on annual financial statements in order to receive favorable loan terms from banks and insurers.Her case was years in the making. When Ms. James ran to be New York attorney general in 2018, she pledged to investigate Mr. Trump and his family business. One of her refrains was “No one is above the law.”She was elected and, the following year, opened an inquiry into Mr. Trump predicated on congressional testimony from his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen.In 2022, Ms. James sued Mr. Trump, accusing him of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars, and the following year, she took him to trial, where the value of individual properties in his empire — many of them worth multiples of what Ms. James is accused of retaining in ill-gotten gains — was closely scrutinized.Both Ms. James and Mr. Trump attended the trial regularly, sitting just feet from one another.Mr. Trump pledged revenge before the case even reached a conclusion. In January 2024, he took over the microphone during the fraud trial’s closing arguments and fumed at Ms. James directly, saying that her case was in fact “a fraud on me.” Ms. James, he said, “should pay me for what we had to go through.”The following year, in April, Bill Pulte, right, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, initiated the case against Ms. James. He sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department suggesting that the New York attorney general “appeared to have falsified records” and indicated that she might have committed mortgage fraud.Mr. Pulte has since targeted other enemies of Mr. Trump with similar allegations. But the accusations against Ms. James are the first to make their way into an indictment.Mr. Pulte celebrated on Thursday evening, promoting a social media post that said, “Bill Pulte doesn’t play. They all thought their mortgage scams were safe. They were wrong. This is just the beginning.”Ms. Halligan, the U.S. attorney who secured the indictment, issued her own statement. It began with a familiar phrase: “No one is above the law.”President Trump (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston).Lance’s Substack,Trump’s Growing Dementia…The Friday Portland Edition, Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 10-11, 2025. Trump’s Truth Social posts claim that Portland is burning, a war zone, that there aren’t even stores anymore, or they are all boarded up with plywood.Either he is hallucinating, or “Goebbels Junior” Stephen Miller is screening video from five years ago, or from another city or country and Trump is being told this is happening in Portland now. Clearly in the posts going out under his name he is describing something which is not, and has not been, real at all.As The New Republic reports, the White House has even been caught planting fake photos of Portland riots to justify their fascist invasions of Democratic cities.It has to be video they are showing him with someone along for the ride to completely misbrief him, because it is well known that he does not read.I have seen this kind of Shakespearian nightmare play out personally when the demented head of our former organization was similarly manipulated and used by unprincipled ambitious power-grabbers in his inner circle — and this is a replay, except that in Trump’s case he epitomized weaponized malignant evil long before dementia had begun to set in.In whichever case, it is clear that Trump has very little connection to reality. He couldn’t possibly be competent if he can’t even discern old or fabricated video archival material from authentic footage, and he has no apparent interest in exploring its authenticity. Or, in the event Miller is programmng him, Trump is so psychologically dependent and suggestible that he feels no need to even consider another source from within his team, much less from outside of his hermetically sealed controlled environment.He is in fact a well cared-for mental patient who is institutionalized, not in a hospital facility but in the White House. He is managed by advisers/caregivers, and is allowed to have occasional outings for fresh air when accompanied. Rather than let him sit around talking to himself, they fill up various venues with audiences of his cult followers or people paid to be there, which is really not much different than talking to himself anyway when you get down to it.What he has been saying all along about Portland, in the aftermath of LA, DC, and in context with his current actions against Chicago, is being parodied and seen as somehow comical by wags on social media. I must ask, “who finds anything funny about this little Nazi schmuck Stephen Miller?” He is the scriptwriter for everything going out on Truth Social now anyway, and Trump signs off on all of it.Reality is that Trump has given ICE and the Red State National Guard units being deployed a green light to shoot to kill. That is what is meant by “any means necessary” to defend themselves. ICE is a paramlitary organization of broken sociopathic militia types, just like Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirt “Squadristi.” They will follow orders to shoot their fellow citizens, or might not even wait for them to be issued. That is what these social media posts and press releases are about. They are manufacturing crises, inventing terrorist incidents, and are making demands for indictment and prosecutions of law enforcement and public officials who might stand in the way whom they describe as their enemies to be gotten rid of.The overcooked vegetable they installed in the White House whom they absurdly refer to as the President Of The United States is basically functioning as Stephen Miller’s “Auto-pen.” He’s more like a Pig-pen, if you get his drift.This is not new. One hundred and fifteen years ago, a fake Russian holy man brainwashed a Queen who was a mentally ill mother of a sick child, into believing he had magic powers and secret knowledge. He took control of that royal family and because they were so badly discredited and manipulated by him, there was a World War that resulted in part from the strategic miscalculations of a disoriented and unstable Czar.This is how history works. It is not simply a breakdown of “economic systems” narrowly defined which leads to catastrophes such as war, which is the fallacious and ideologically-driven argument of the dialectical materialists. It is the blindness, corruption, the moral collapse, and desire for revenge by individual people making wrong decisions which are causal. And it is the failure of cultures to prevent, forsee, or contain such individuals and those movements which follow them which leads to social breakdowns.It is not funny. And the dementia is real. The United States passed the 25th Amendment sixty years ago after the death of President Kennedy because the question was asked, “what if he had survived the shooting but was left incapacitated?” There had to be a process for orderly succession in order to maintain a constitutional and orderly transition. Donald Trump has a head wound of sorts, which was caused by a gene from the inside, not a projectile fired from a grassy knoll or a book depository. He is incompetent, his brain function is compromised, and he must be removed. It really is that simple.I’ve heard all of the arguments about why it can’t happen, which I have already addressed until I’m blue in the face. I’m going to keep presenting evidence on why it should happen, for you to do with as you choose.U.S. Media, Education, Religion, Race, Culture Wars David Ellison, who now controls CBS and serves as strong ally of President Trump and his MAGA movement (Graphic by Lincoln Square Media).Status, ‘We Just Got Elon Musk-ed,’ Jon Passantino, Oct. 11, 2025. Bari Weiss’s first major move as CBS News chief has staffers on edge—ordering every journalist to submit a written memo justifying their work, in an apparent Elon Musk-style loyalty test.Bari Weiss, right, is taking a page out of Elon Musk’s playbook. Days after taking over as editor in chief of CBS News, Weiss sent the network’s journalists an email Friday that set off alarm bells. Every staffer, she said, must write for her a memo by Tuesday detailing how they spend their working hours, what they’ve produced, what’s broken, and how they’d fix it.In her memo, The Free Press founder framed the directive as a way to get acquainted with her new troops. “CBS News is a big place with functional titles and reporting structures that I’m learning. But more than the hierarchical niceties, I’m eager to get to know you,” she wrote.“I’m not looking for a JD or words like synergy,” she continued. “I want to understand how you spend your working hours-and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt-it will help me.”But her closing line came with a change in tone that suggested something else: “The goal is simple: I want to familiarize myself with you—and I want you to do the same with me—to know that we are aligned on achieving a shared vision for CBS News.”If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this play before—from Elon Musk. When The Tesla-billionaire’s short-lived and disastrous Department of Government Efficiency demanded federal workers email him lists of their accomplishments to justify their jobs, the move was merely a pretense to fire those he saw as expendable. Those who failed to do so, were told they would be fired. Weiss now appears to be running a similar experiment inside a newsroom.For many staffers of the storied outlet, the intent of the memo was clear. “We just got Elon Musk-ed,” one told Status. Another was more blunt: “It is a little bit like singing for your supper.”Of course, any new leader would understandably want to take stock of their newsroom and understand how it operates. But demanding written justifications from every staffer isn’t the way to do it—not in a profession built on trust, independence, and collaboration. Weiss’ version of a listening tour will also surely bury her in paperwork. Compared with the few dozen who work at The Free Press, CBS News employs hundreds of people. A memo from each would amount to a full-time job just to read them.Hours after Weiss’ memo landed in inboxes, the Writers Guild of America, which represents many CBS News employees, urged staffers to not respond to the request. “We are aware that Bari Weiss sent an email asking CBS employees to provide information about their jobs and feedback about CBS News,” the union wrote to members. “Many of you have expressed concern to us about the purpose of the email, and we share those concerns.”“That is why we sent the company an immediate demand to provide information about the email by Monday,” the WGA continued. “We suggest that you refrain from responding until we are able to share the information that we receive so that you can make an informed decision by the Tuesday deadline.”While Weiss was installed by Paramount owner David Ellison less than a week ago, outlining to staff what she described as 10 principles that will guide her leadership while condemning what she described as an “America-loathing far left” and “history-erasing far right,” many inside CBS are still trying to decode what that means.Now, with Friday’s memo, Weiss has made her intentions unmistakable. While characterizing her mandate as a get-to-know-you exercise to ask journalists to self-justify their jobs in writing, she’s positioning herself to audit the newsroom from the inside out, raising fears of terminations for those who do not adhere to her “anti-woke” worldview. Musk demanded “hard-core” dedication from Twitter employees before gutting the company. Weiss seems to be testing who inside CBS will align with her vision for the network.That should worry the journalists she now leads. The question at CBS is no longer what kind of newsroom she’ll run, but seemingly who will be left to run it with her. Meidas Touch Network,Trump Education Secretary Linda McMahon Follows Flat Earth Account, J.D. Wolf, Oct. 10, 2025. McMahon wants to close the Department of Education.Linda McMahon, right, appointed by Donald Trump as Secretary of Education, follows a prominent flat earth account on Twitter while overseeing plans to dismantle the very department she leads. McMahon’s personal account, @linda_mcmahon, which describes her as the “13th Secretary of Education” serving “under the leadership of @POTUS,” follows @FELibrary_, an account called “Flat Earth Library.”Linda McMahon follows Flat Earth Library on TwitterThe page, created in May 2024, describes itself as an “awake flat earther, truther and pattern recognitionist” and promotes flat earth and anti-science conspiracies to more than 98,000 followers. McMahon’s decision to follow the page occurred sometime over the past 16 months.Linda McMahon appears on Flat Earth Library’s follower listThe Flat Earth Library account posts content denying gravity, evolution, and space exploration, insisting the Earth is surrounded by water under a dome and that mountains are enormous, ancient tree stumps. It routinely attacks NASA as a fraud and labels those who accept the Earth’s curvature as “globetards.”Politico,Trump administration has failed to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Africa, Josh Gerstein, Oct. 10, 2025. Three African nations won’t accept the Salvadoran native, who was already deported illegally once and then brought back to the U.S.Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaks during a rally.The Trump administration has made haphazard and, so far, ineffectual attempts to find a country willing to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he’s deported again from the U.S., according to testimony and evidence presented in federal court here Friday.A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified that efforts to get the African countries of Uganda and Eswatini to accept the high-profile deportee have foundered in recent days.Another potential destination, Ghana, also seemed to fizzle Friday as that country’s foreign minister said unequivocally on X that Ghana would not agree to receive Abrego.Abrego is originally from El Salvador. He entered the U.S. illegally and lived in Maryland for more than a decade before he was arrested in March and deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison. Courts declared that deportation illegal because it violated a 2019 order from an immigration judge who barred the U.S. from sending him there due to potential persecution by a local gang.The Trump administration returned Abrego to the U.S. in June under court order. Federal prosecutors simultaneously charged him with human smuggling in Tennessee — charges Abrego denies.The administration, in the meantime, has said it wants to deport Abrego again, this time to some other country. But Abrego’s lawyers argued during Friday’s hearing that the administration is dragging its feet in those deportation efforts in order to keep Abrego in immigration jail and pressure him to plead guilty.The meager and unsuccessful deportation efforts could lead to Abrego being released from immigration detention within days, if U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis concludes the government hasn’t shown it’s making a sincere and substantial effort to find a destination for Abrego.Abrego told the administration in August that he would accept deportation to Costa Rica. One of his lawyers, Andrew Rossman, said Friday that the administration’s scattershot attempts to identify African countries instead show that the administration is intent on refusing the Costa Rica offer.“We now know they are 0 for 3. Three strikes and you’re out. They have spun the globe and picked various places … to fail on purpose by selecting places that would be completely unpalatable for Mr. Abrego,” Rossman told Xinis. “What we’ve been getting in this courtroom is a lot of run-around.”The appearance that arrangements for Abrego’s deportation were being intentionally or unintentionally fumbled by the administration was underscored by the testimony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement official John Schultz, who said lower-level personnel at his agency erred by formally notifying Abrego Thursday that the U.S. government intended to send him to Ghana.New York Times, Among Portland Protests, It’s Frogs and Sharks and Bears, Oh My! Anna Griffin and Aaron West, Oct. 11, 2025. Images of anarchists clad in black gave the city a bad name in 2020. Now, demonstrators in Portland are poking fun at President Trump’s apocalyptic talk with colorful animal suits.Exceedingly aware that the black garb worn by demonstrators in 2020 informed President Trump’s apocalyptic view of Portland, Ore., protesters this year have gone to the frogs — and unicorns, raccoons, sharks, bears, dinosaurs and the hot animal of this particular pop culture moment, a capybara.“It was just to contrast the narrative that we are violent extremists,” said Seth Todd, 24, whose appearance at Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility early in the summer as a bulbous green frog started the trend. “The best way to show that for me is being in a frog costume.”New York Times,Diane Keaton, a Star of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘First Wives Club,’ Dies at 79, Anita Gates, Oct. 11, 2025. She brought an unconventional personality to scores of roles on television and in movies ranging from zany comedies like “Sleeper” to piercing dramas like “The Godfather.”Diane Keaton, the vibrant, sometimes unconventional, always charmingly self-deprecating actress who won an Oscar for Woody Allen’s comedy “Annie Hall” and appeared in some 100 movie and television roles, an almost equal balance of them in comedies like “Sleeper” and “The First Wives Club” and dramas like “The Godfather” and “Marvin’s Room,” has died. She was 79.Ms. Keaton was 31 and a veteran of eight films, most of them comedies, when she starred as the title character in “Annie Hall” (1977), a single woman in New York City with ambitions, insecurities and definite style. Annie is known for cheerful psychiatric breakthroughs, fashions that look like men’s wear, questionable driving skills and lingering hints of an all-too-wholesome Midwestern upbringing.
New York Times,Alex Jones Asks Supreme Court to Halt $1.4 Billion Payment to Sandy Hook Families, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 9, 2025. A judge ordered Jones to pay as a result of a defamation lawsuit that he is now asking the Supreme Court to review.Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to put on hold $1.4 billion in damages a judge ordered him to pay some of the families who lost children in a shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.The families were awarded the money after suing Mr. Jones for defamation. For years on his Infowars show and website, Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax and that family members of the victims were actors in a plot to enact extreme gun control legislation. Twenty children, all of them first graders, and six educators died in the shooting.The request to the justices is the latest development in the long-running litigation, as Mr. Jones seeks to put off any payout to the families. Mr. Jones and his company Free Speech Systems have separately asked the Supreme Court to review his appeal in the case. At their closed-door conference on Friday, the justices will consider whether to take the case.Mr. Jones’s lawyers told the justices that he should be afforded special First Amendment considerations because of his large audience of viewers and listeners.“Failure to reverse this case will mean all journalists will realize that they could be found liable for huge defamation awards, especially in ideologically divergent geographic regions, as Jones was and therefore refrain from publishing for fear of being hauled into court there facing a ‘trial by sanction,’” his lawyers told the court in their Thursday filing.During the defamation trial in Connecticut, the families showed that Mr. Jones ignored demands to stop airing falsehoods about the Sandy Hook shooting because they increased Infowars’s sales. Witnesses shared stories of harassment by conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s lies, including death and rape threats.The Sandy Hook families were awarded damages in the Connecticut case in late 2022, and in a separate defamation lawsuit in Texas earlier that year. Mr. Jones and his business declared bankruptcy shortly afterward, and the families have yet to receive any of the money awarded them.Politico,Gavin Newsom approves slavery reparations agency, Lindsey Holden, Oct. 10, 2025. The California governor signed the bill five years after he created a task force to study how racist policies have affected descendants of slaves.Morris Griffin holds up a sign during a meeting of the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.Gavin Newsom on Friday approved a new state agency to administer restitution for descendants of slaves — a victory for Black lawmakers and advocates despite stopping short of providing cash reparations.The Democratic governor signed the legislation, SB 518, five years after forming a task force in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to study the legacy of slavery in California and how the state could implement reparations policies — and more than two years after the panel released its extensive recommendations.Newsom mentioned the bill during a conversation about racism on the podcast “Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay.”“I signed a bill two days ago with the Black Caucus as it relates to creating a new office to address these systemic issues,” he said during an episode released Friday morning.Pushing reparations proposals across the finish line has proved challenging — especially as the post-pandemic political climate shifted rightward and the state confronted multibillion-dollar budget deficits. Newsom himself threw cold water on the notion of writing checks to descendants of slaves when he said in 2023, “Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.”Last year, late amendments sought by Newsom, combined with caucus in-fighting, sank the effort to stand up a new reparations agency. The governor later vetoed a bill that would have provided redress for victims of racially-motivated eminent domain, noting the state lacked an agency to administer the program.Until today, a state apology for slavery and discrimination was the highest-profile legislation the caucus had achieved.This year, Black Caucus members advancing similar legislation avoided labeling the policies as “reparations” instead calling their bill package the “Road to Repair.”Oct. 10 Democracy Docket,Opinion: The era political prosecutions has arrived, Marc Elias, right, Oct. 10, 2025. Yesterday’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James shocked many people who should hardly be surprised.For months, I have complained that far too few people were taking Donald Trump’s threat to use the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents seriously. Even after this indictment, I fear too many will continue to underestimate the threat.We are not approaching a constitutional crisis; we are in one. We are not risking authoritarianism; we are experiencing it. We are not crossing the Rubicon; that famous river is so far behind us that our shoes and clothes have completely dried during the journey. U.S. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth said while sitting beside Qatari Defense Minister Abdulrahman Al Thani.Occupy Democrats via Facebook,MAGA world explodes with rage as Pete Hegseth makes the jaw-dropping announcement that Qatar will build an air force facility in Idaho and station their fighter planes on U.S. soil, Staff Report, Oct. 10, 2025. The Qataris bribed Trump with a private jet and now he’s paying them back tenfold…”And I’m also proud that today we’re announcing or we’re signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emeri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idadho,” Defense Secretary Hegseth said while sitting beside Qatari Defense Minister Abdulrahman Al Thani.”The location will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, inner-operability. It’s just another example of our partnership and I hope you know, Your Excellency, you can count on us.”Qatar is a close ally of China and the two have recently entered into what has been described as a “Golden Era” of strategic partnership. Putting Qatari military facilities inside the United States is akin to stationing Chinese troops.Far-right provocateur, noted Trump ally, and virulent Islamophobe Laura Loomer had a meltdown on X over the air base announcement—”Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’ll be voting in 2026. I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis. “This is where I draw the line.”Other MAGA supporters had similar reactions all across social media. Even diehard Trump fans are having difficulty defending this decision.This truly stunning announcement — which constitutes a profound betrayal of American national security interests — comes in the wake of the equally shocking announcement that Trump has signed an executive order promising to use the U.S. military to defend Qatar. It amounts to a security pact similar to NATO’s Article 5, which interprets any attack on one member state as an attack on all. In other words, Trump has pledged to send American troops to fight and die if Qatar needs them.On top of that arrangement, Trump announced in May that he would be accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 plane as a “free gift” from Qatar to use as Air Force One. Stripping the jet down and implementing the proper security measures will cost tax payers as much as $1 billion. It also seems highly likely that Trump will try to take the plane with him when he leaves office.In April, the Trump Organization inked a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar, assuring that even more Qatar money will flow into Trump’s pockets.Any single one of these corrupt Qatari deals would have brought down any other president, leading to impeachment and removal. Imagine the outrage if President Obama had greenlit plans to station the forces of a Muslim nation within our borders. But for Trump, blatant criminality and graft is expected at this point.News RoundupsNew York Times,Trump Administration Live Updates: Federal Layoffs ‘Have Begun,’ White House Says , Staff Reports, Oct. 10, 2025. News Roundup:Shutdown layoffs: Federal health, homeland security, education, energy and Treasury Department workers received layoff notices on Friday, according to agency officials, congressional aides and court documents. The White House was carrying out another round of cuts to fulfill President Trump’s threats to cull agencies and jobs while the government is shut down. Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, did not specify how many workers, or agencies, would be affected. Read more ›China threats: Mr. Trump threatened “a massive increase” in tariffs on Chinese imports in retaliation for restrictions China imposed this week on the export of rare earth minerals, and said he had “no reason” to hold a highly anticipated meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, set to take place in two weeks. The stock market fell after Mr. Trump’s threat, with the S&P 500 down 2 percent by early afternoon. Read more ›Layoffs at the Department of Homeland Security will affect workers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which helps protect against threats to the country’s election system, power grids and water utilities. The agency has already experienced cuts to funding and cybersecurity experts in recent months.“During the last administration, CISA was focused on censorship, branding and electioneering,” Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement. “This is part of getting CISA back on mission.”Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 9, 2025 [Retribution Indictments?],Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 10, 2025. Today Trump appointee Lindsey Halligan did what President Donald J. Trump placed her at the position of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to do: deliver an indictment of New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud. The previous U.S. attorney there, Erik Seibert, refused to take either the James case or a case against former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress to a grand jury for an indictment, believing there was not enough evidence to convict.Seibert resigned in the face of Trump’s fury at his decision, and Trump replaced him with Halligan, a former aide and Trump’s personal lawyer. It is not clear that Halligan holds her position legally, but she has now delivered the indictments Trump demanded.Trump bears a grudge against Comey for his pursuit of an investigation into the relationship between members of Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—a relationship two subsequent investigations proved. He bears a grudge against James for successfully suing the Trump Organization for fraud.The Department of Justice is supposed to be nonpartisan, and it certainly is not supposed to be an arm of presidential lawfare. Nonetheless, Trump has been perverting it to protect his loyalists and persecute his perceived enemies. On September 20, Trump posted on social media a message apparently intended privately for Attorney General Pam Bondi—such a communication is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, by the way—demanding prosecution of Comey, James, and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA). “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!!!,” he wrote.Just five days later, Halligan delivered an indictment of Comey. The former FBI director appeared at his arraignment in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, yesterday. He pleaded not guilty and asked for a jury trial. Comey’s lawyers told the judge they will be challenging the charges as vindictive and selective prosecution. They will also be challenging Halligan’s appointment as U.S. attorney as “unlawful.”Now Trump has secured an indictment of Attorney General James. She responded in a statement, saying: “This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system. He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding, all because I did my job as the New York State Attorney General.“These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost. The president’s actions are a grave violation of our Constitutional order and have drawn sharp criticism from members of both parties.“His decision to fire a United States Attorney who refused to bring charges against me—and replace them with someone who is blindly loyal not to the law, but to the president—is antithetical to the bedrock principles of our country. This is the time for leaders on both sides of the aisle to speak out against this blatant perversion of our system of justice.“I stand strongly behind my office’s litigation against the Trump Organization. We conducted a two-year investigation based on the facts and evidence—not politics. Judges have upheld the trial court’s finding that Donald Trump, his company, and his two sons are liable for fraud.“I am a proud woman of faith, and I know that faith and fear cannot share the same space. And so today I am not fearful, I am fearless, and as my faith teaches me, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. We will fight these baseless charges aggressively, and my office will continue to fiercely protect New Yorkers and their rights. And I will continue to do my job.”The Trump administration’s attempt to consolidate power by claiming a vast conspiracy is trying to undermine the government appears to be too much for increasing numbers of Americans. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday showed that Trump’s approval rating fell after the president’s speech to the nation’s top military officials. In his rambling remarks, Trump claimed the U.S. faces “a war from within” and suggested the military should use cities as “training grounds.”The poll said that 58% of American adults think the president should deploy troops only to areas with external threats, while 25% disagree. Eighty-three percent of adults think the military should remain politically neutral. That number includes 93% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans. Only 10% of the adults polled disagreed that the military should remain politically neutral. That number included 5% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans.Federal judges are standing firm against the administration’s overreach. Today U.S. District Judge April M. Perry stopped the federal deployment of 200 National Guard troops from Texas and another 300 from Illinois in and around Chicago, Illinois, for two weeks. “I have found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois,” Perry said.She pointed to the refusals by grand juries—including one Tuesday night—to indict protesters accused of assaulting law enforcement, and said they cast doubt on the Department of Homeland Security’s “credibility and assessment of what is happening on the streets of Chicago.”Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Donald Trump is not a king—and his administration is not above the law. Today, the court confirmed what we all know: there is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago.”Earlier in the day, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis granted a two-week temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents from “[d]ispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, threatening or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a Journalist, unless Defendants have probable cause to believe that the individual has committed a crime.” Federal agents in Chicago have been targeting journalists.Both Governor Pritzker, right, and California governor Gavin Newsom have asked Republican governors to take a stand against the administration’s attacks on state sovereignty, even as Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has permitted soldiers from the Texas National Guard to be deployed in Illinois. Pritzker and Newsom have threatened to leave the National Governors Association, a bipartisan organization founded in 1908 to enable governors to work together outside of partisanship, if it did not speak up about the unlawful deployment of federal troops in their states.Parnas Perspective,MAGA Extremely Upset as Trump Does Not Win Nobel Peace Prize, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 10, 2025. Donald Trump does not win Nobel Peace Prize, Maria Corina Machado does, White House and MAGA blast decision with some blaming “affirmative action,” Judge blocks troop deployments in Chicago, and more.Despite significant public pressure and campaigning, Donald Trump was not chosen by the Nobel Committee to win the Peace prize this year.Instead, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, aged 58, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her unwavering fight to preserve democracy under President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime. Once expelled from office in 2014 and later banned from running for president, Machado now lives in hiding amid serious threats to her life.The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised her for “keeping the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness” and honoring her courage to speak out despite grave risks.Following the award to Machado, those around Donald Trump have become very upset, with the White House blasting the Nobel Committee in the process. Steven Cheung, the White House Communications Director, issued the following statement this morning: “President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will. The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”Meanwhile, MAGA influencers and Donald Trump’s top defenders online decried the Nobel Prize decision as “affirmative action nonsense,” with Laura Loomer writing: “Imagine thinking a woman who cries nonstop about Nicolas Maduro has done more for the world than President Trump. What an absolute joke. Everyone knows President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. More affirmative action nonsense.”CNN reports that senior Trump administration officials at the Department of Homeland Security proposed blocking Muslim organizations from receiving millions in FEMA security grants, raising internal alarm among agency leaders who warned the move could be discriminatory and illegal. Although the blanket ban was dropped, dozens of Muslim nonprofits were later stripped of eligibility after DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency cited alleged — and unsubstantiated — terrorism ties.A federal judge in Chicago issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops in Illinois, ruling the move unconstitutional and accusing federal officials of using unreliable evidence to justify it. Illinois Gov. JBPritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson praised the decision, calling the deployment an abuse of power, while the White House vowed to appeal, arguing the president has lawful authority to restore order amid protests.Today is World Mental Health Day, and as I noted above, this evening I am going to share my personal Mental Health journey. I also wanted to share with you that in recent months, I began working with Headspace, a company that has provided me a link, in honor of today, to give you all one month free on the platform in honor of making sure that you prioritize yourself because your mind matters. Headspace is a meditation app that has really given me the ability to disconnect, even for a few minutes a day, from the news cycle. Click here to try it out and let me know what you think!A federal judge in Illinois issued a temporary restraining order restricting federal agents from using force or chemical weapons against ICE protesters, following viral footage of a Chicago pastor being shot in the face with pepper balls while praying outside a detention facility. The 14-day order bans DHS agents, including those with ICE and Customs and Border Protection, from firing tear gas, pepper balls, or forcibly dispersing peaceful demonstrators and journalists, except when there is a credible safety threat.Nearly half of FBI agents in major U.S. field offices have been reassigned to assist with immigration enforcement, according to data obtained by Sen. Mark Warner, marking a dramatic shift in priorities under the Trump administration. About 45% of agents in the 25 largest offices—and 23% nationwide—are now supporting DHS and ICE operations, diverting resources from counterterrorism, cybercrime, espionage, and violent crime investigations.NBC News found that several OpenAI models, including versions used in ChatGPT, can be “jailbroken” to bypass safety systems and generate instructions for creating biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, raising major security concerns about AI misuse. While the flagship GPT-5 model resisted these prompts, smaller or open-source models were vulnerable in up to 97% of tests, prompting renewed calls for independent regulation of AI safety.JP Morgan Chase has mandated employees at its new $3 billion New York headquarters to provide biometric data—such as fingerprints or eye scans—for building access, reversing its earlier plan to make participation voluntary. The move, intended to enhance security following recent corporate attacks, affects up to 10,000 workers and has raised privacy concerns amid broader debates over workplace surveillance. Some exemptions remain, and other offices will continue to offer voluntary biometric enrollment.Dozens of U.S. professors have been fired, suspended, or disciplined for social media posts about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, with at least 40 dismissals reported by the American Association of University Professors. Many academics say they are being targeted by right-wing activists and pressured university administrations, creating a “climate of fear” and threatening academic freedom. Lawsuits have been filed in several states, including by faculty at Florida Atlantic University, Ball State University, and the University of South Dakota, alleging violations of free speech and due process.The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that the Gaza ceasefire agreement has officially taken effect, with troops repositioning along newly agreed deployment lines and maintaining operations only to address immediate threats. The IDF currently controls about 53% of the Gaza Strip, mostly outside urban areas.Under the agreement, Hamas has 72 hours to release all hostages, marking a critical step in the ceasefire process announced on October 9.Gaza’s Government Media Office issued a national appeal urging residents to cooperate with humanitarian and governmental agencies to ensure the success of the recovery phase, emphasizing discipline and unity to restore stability after months of devastation.Gaza’s Health Ministry reported 17 Palestinians killed and 71 injured in the last 24 hours, bringing the total death toll since October 7, 2023, to 67,211, according to figures deemed credible by the United Nations.Six anti-abortion activists, including two pardoned by Donald Trump, are facing trial in Pennsylvania for trespassing and conspiracy after entering an abortion clinic, posing as patients, and refusing to leave. The case comes amid a rise in clinic invasions after the Trump administration limited enforcement of the FACE Act and pardoned past offenders, a move abortion rights advocates say has emboldened extremists.More Global News New York Times,Aid Groups Prepare to Provide Quick Relief to Gaza Under Cease-Fire, Liam Stack, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Farnaz Fassihi, Oct. 10, 2025. The new Israel-Hamas deal contains provisions to increase aid to Gaza, and for the reopening of a border crossing from Egypt.International aid groups were gearing up on Friday to funnel as much aid as possible into Gaza after the Israel-Hamas cease-fire takes hold, but their staff on the ground said they did not yet have a clear picture of what would be allowed in under the deal.The truce agreement reached on Thursday contains stipulations for an increase of aid and the reopening of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza.Aid delivery is expected to operate on the same terms as it did during a cease-fire in January, when personnel from the Palestinian Authority and the European Union were stationed at the crossing. In the January cease-fire, the deal called for 600 trucks to enter daily.Gaza is in the grip of a deep humanitarian crisis with widespread hunger, vast destruction of property and most of its two million people displaced repeatedly in the past two years of war. The territory was impoverished before the war began, and food supplies and other aid have been sharply curtailed since the conflict began, making things much worse.“Our teams are ready,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. “We just need the green light to drive those trucks and get them in so our staff can deliver aid directly to people in need.”Ms. Touma said the agency had enough food, medicine and shelter materials in its warehouses to fill 6,000 trucks.The top U.N. humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, said on Thursday that the United Nations had a plan to scale up delivery of aid over the first 60 days of a cease-fire. He said that almost the entire population of Gaza needed some form of food aid, including 500,000 people who needed treatment to address the effects of famine.New York Times,U.S. to Send 200 Troops to Israel in Support Roles, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, Oct. 10, 2025 (print ed.). The American force will help coordinate the many aspects of the cease-fire deal. The United States is sending 200 troops to Israel to monitor the implementation of the cease-fire deal in Gaza, American officials said Thursday.The officials said the U.S. Central Command, led by Adm. Brad Cooper, will establish a civil-military coordination center in Israel to provide security and humanitarian support.The American troops, reporting to Admiral Cooper, will join soldiers from nations in the region, including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to provide oversight. The American troops are not intended to go into Gaza, one of the U.S. officials said.The first of the 200 troops have already started to arrive in Israel and more will follow over the weekend to begin setting up the new coordination center. The troops are mostly military planners and specialists in logistics, security and other support fields.The goal of the center will be to establish a hub for military, political and aid experts to help coordinate everything from humanitarian assistance to security support and the execution of the cease-fire agreement. New York Times,Live Updates: María Corina Machado Is Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Jonathan Wolfe, Oct. 10, 2025. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised the opposition politician for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela.”The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who built a powerful social movement and has been living in hiding since last year, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”Ms. Machado emerged from Venezuela’s political sidelines and corralled the country’s fractious opposition behind her before the 2024 election. That followed years of political apathy in Venezuela, where the government of President Nicolás Maduro, right, crushed protests and arrested dissidents, helping to spur an enormous exodus from the country.She backed an opposition candidate, Edmundo González, against Mr. Maduro in the presidential race last year, after being banned from running. Mr. Maduro won what was widely regarded as a rigged election, and Ms. Machado went into hiding. On Friday, Mr. González posted a video on social media of him talking to her on the phone in which she is heard saying of the Nobel announcement: “I’m in shock.”David Scheffer, an international law scholar at Arizona State University, said that in choosing Ms. Machado, the Nobel committee had “elevated a courageous hero of peacemaking — someone who works among her own people to protect them against repression and atrocity crimes in order to shape a more peaceful and democratic world.”Last year, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group representing the survivors of the atomic bombs, many of whom have campaigned for nuclear disarmament. In 2023, it went to Narges Mohammadi, Iran’s most prominent human rights activist.Here’s what else to know:
- A secretive process: The Nobel committee accepts nominations from a pool of potentially thousands of nominators, and though the official list of nominees is kept secret, some names are revealed by those who nominated them. This year, 338 candidates — 244 people and 94 organizations — were nominated for the prize. A committee of five people appointed by the Norwegian Parliament selects the recipient in secret.
- U.S.-Venezuela tensions: Tensions between the United States and Venezuela have escalated in recent weeks, after President Trump said that the United States was in an armed conflict with drug cartels. His administration has launched military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea that it says are used by drug smugglers, and some of Trump’s top aides are pushing to oust Mr. Maduro from office.
- Trump’s campaign: Mr. Trump has been obsessed with winning the award for years, complaining privately and publicly that he has not received the honor. Several groups or individuals — including the leaders of Israel, Pakistan and Cambodia — said they had nominated him, though this year’s award was intended to honor achievements in 2024, before Mr. Trump had returned to the White House.
- The other Nobels: Friday’s announcement followed a week of Nobel Prizes in the arts and sciences. Here are the recipients.
Proof,Investigative Commentary: Media and MAGA Calls for Trump to Catch a Nobel Peace Prize Rather Than An ICC War Crimes Indictment Are Obscene, Seth Abramson, left, Oct. 10, 2025. Media and MAGA Calls for Trump to Catch a Nobel Peace Prize Rather Than An ICC War Crimes Indictment Are ObsceneThe second-biggest threat to global peace after Putin has earned a cell for war crimes—not a humanitarian award. That his grotesque and scammy appeal for a Nobel Peace Prize is working is terrifying.I can’t believe I’m even writing this essay.I can’t believe U.S. corporate media, not just MAGA sycophants, is now entertaining the idea that Donald Trump—yes, that one—might be deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2026 rather than lifelong imprisonment for his past war crimes.Are we speaking of the Donald Trump who has threatened to imminently invade all of Canada (link), Mexico (link), Venezuela (link), and Greenland (link)?Yes. The same.The Donald Trump who’s indiscriminately murdering Venezuelan non-combatants across the Caribbean Ocean, then gleefully posting memes about these war crimes?The man who faked intelligence falsely claiming that the Venezuelan government had orchestrated an invasion of the United States by the Tren de Aragua gang, then fired the public servants who revealed the lie so that he could use his preposterous tale of a state-sponsored paramilitary invasion of American soil to at once move toward open warfare in South America and justify deporting hundreds of thousands of U.S. asylum-seekers without criminal records to a country where both they and their kids might be summarily executed?Yes, that’s the one.This is the Donald Trump who bragged about helping Saudi butcher Mohammad bin Salman cover-up the strangulation, dismemberment, and barbecuing—yes, really—of a Washington Post journalist. This is the man who now aims to make assassination cool rather than the war crime it is; he crowed about assassinating the second-most popular man in Iran, Qasem Soleimani, as Soleimani was in Iraq for a peace conference with the Saudis, the armed proxy conflict between Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being one of the most dangerous flashpoints on the face of the Earth right now (as it has been for years). But who could be surprised at Trump assassinating world leaders to aid the Saudis, after he negotiated the sale of weapons to bin Salman and the UAE that he knew bin Salman would use to commit war crimes and atrocities in Yemen?This is the Donald Trump who has openly advocated the killing of any innocent—boy, girl, even infant—who is related to a suspected terrorist.This is the Donald Trump who has threatened, on social media no less, to deliberately destroy Muslim holy sites—a war crime.This is the Donald Trump who has exiled U.S. citizens abroad due to carelessness and a contempt for due process, who has “disappeared” almost 2,000 people—some of them almost certainly U.S. citizens—who journalists still can’t locate, who threatens immigrants with no criminal records with deportation to countries the United States deems dangerous specifically so that the subsequent violent deaths or starvation of such persons (yes, including kids children) can be used in future propaganda films and brochures as a means to warn future migrants from even trying to enter America. (The one exception he makes is for white South Africans whose families have been accused of war crimes or who falsely claim to have been persecuted for their complexion in South Africa—a claim that’s been repeatedly debunked, confirming that these people are precisely the sort of immigration fraudsters Trump has pledged to do battle with.)This is the Donald Trump who publicly advocated for the assassination of his political rival (Hillary Clinton) during the 2016 presidential election campaign, and thereafter called for the execution for Treason of nearly every political rival he’s ever had—from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden to Liz Cheney to Adam Schiff to every whistleblower that has ever emerged from either his first or second administration.
- He even threatened to execute his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley.
- He has advocated for the death penalty to be expanded to cover nonviolent crimes.
- He has said that all persons with disabilities should “just die.”
- Trump has so little compassion that—ten years into his political career—he’s at once seeking to end all asylum cases (other than for the aforementioned racist whites from South Africa, who he helps in part to appease his biggest megadonor, Elon Musk) and appears to still think the word “asylum” refers exclusively to “mental institutions” in the context of transnational immigration. In other words, he’s willing to condemn men, women, and kids to brutal executions in their home countries because he can’t even be bothered to learn the most basic terms surrounding human rights interventions.
- Remember when he threatened—on Twitter—to bomb the newly nuclearized North Korea, despite the fact that its leader is a madman who could easily have responded with a nuclear strike against California?
- Remember how he unilaterally stabbed the largest peace-treaty organization in world history (NATO) in the back by declaring that he might not honor Article 5 if he didn’t feel like it? Remember how—two hours ago—he said our ally Spain should be booted from NATO?
- Remember how he threatened to let Russia commit a genocide in Ukraine if Ukraine wouldn’t provide him with fake political dirt on Joe Biden so that he—Trump—could fraudulently win the 2020 U.S. presidential election?
- Remember how he cut USAID to shreds after he was told that doing so would likely cause over 14 million deaths worldwide (mostly children) over the next five years?
- Remember how his reaction to the worst global pandemic in a century was to try to get Americans to hate Asians, even to the point of falsely claiming that COVID-19 was a Chinese bioweapon—a falsehood that could have started a world war between the United States and China amidst a millions-killing planetwide health emergency?
- Remember how he supported violent far-right political movements across Europe?
Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion,Let’s laugh at the sad loser who didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize and let’s congratulate the woman who did, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Oct. 10, 2025.ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.Now let’s congratulate the woman who did win the Nobel Peace Prize, María Corina Machado. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”María Corina Machado, below, is the Venezuelan opposition leader who stood up to a tyrant, worked tirelessly to bring democracy to her country, and — after arrest warrants were issued on bogus conspiracy charges — now lives in hiding, fearing for her life.Conspicuously not on Machado’s resume is renaming her Department of Defense to Department of War, disappearing people into slave-labor gulags, exploding the shit out of fishing boats, or sending armed military after her own people.Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that causing an entire country to fear for its own safety if they don’t award you a Peace Prize kind of disqualifies you from ever getting a Peace Prize.Here’s what Steven Cheung, the dime-store Bond villain who doubles as Donny Convict’s communications director, posted to Elon’s Nazi Bar (X): “President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will. The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”The Contrarian,Opinion: Jane Goodall reminds us that we all matter, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 10, 2025. I heard Jane Goodall lecture over 50 years ago. After that experience, and later watching the documentary about her early years studying chimps in the wild and reading her first book, In the Shadow of Man, I became a heartfelt devotee of Goodall, the renowned primatologist, scientist, and conservationist who passed away last week at the age of ninety-one.She was a trailblazing scientist, a glass-ceiling breaker, an elegant speaker, and a dedicated activist who possessed a level of humility and dignity one rarely sees in public figures who receive worldwide acclaim. That alone made her compelling. Personally, my love of animals and travel spurred my fascination with her career.However, it was not until I saw her posthumously-released interview that I fully appreciated that it was her abiding faith in the sanctity of individuals and the power of our collective agency that set such a powerful example for me.Her interview should absolutely be watched in its entirety. But one portion transcended her field and seemed particularly attuned to our current crises:I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters, and you are here for a reason.And I just hope that reason will become apparent as you live through your life. I want you to know that, whether or not you find that role that you’re supposed to play, your life does matter, and that every single day you live, you make a difference in the world. And you get to choose the difference that you make.I want you to understand that we are part of the natural world. And even today, when the planet is dark, there still is hope. Don’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you become apathetic and do nothing. And if you want to save what is still beautiful in this world—if you want to save the planet for the future generations, your grandchildren, their grandchildren—then think about the actions you take each day.Because, multiplied a million, a billion times, even small actions will make for great change.She may have been focused primarily on climate change and conservation, but her guiding philosophy delivered with such sincerity also serves us well as we battle not just for the survival of the planet, but the survival of our democracy. Her faith that we all have a role, a purpose (what Nancy Pelosi calls our “why”) speaks to people who may currently feel powerless. Her insight that finding one’s purpose is a lifelong process recognizes that we can find our path at age nine or age ninety. And her clarion call to use our agency to save “what is beautiful” applies to the ongoing struggle to save what is just and decent and true. Goodall’s message translated into the world of politics and governance is powerful and universal. It is not hard to figure out why despotic, cruel, hateful, anti-intellectual, and corrupt forces spend so much effort trying to intimidate and cow us into submission, silence our voices, and prod us to collapse in a puddle of fatalism.Donald Trump’s over-the-top invective, deployment of violent shock troops, nonstop lies and chaos, and utter domination of his own party are all designed to paralyze or at least disorient pro-democracy forces. It would be so easy to conclude that the MAGA storm is so destructive and all-encompassing that resistance is futile.But, as Goodall warns us, “If you lose hope, you become apathetic and do nothing.” Her admonition to preserve hope applies directly to the fight for democracy, truth, fairness, decency, and human progress. Without hope, we do not vote, protest, speak out, or resist. In other words, democracy dies in paralysis and despair.Her remarks also remind us that very few people attain the reach and influence of a Jane Goodall (or a Ghandi, a Martin Luther King, Jr., or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg) but that our failure to achieve universal recognition should not be the measure of our success or effectiveness. Indeed, those heroic figures succeeded to the degree they did by influencing the rest of us. They became who they were because millions, if not billions, echoed their words, magnified their actions, and built on their insights.In the political realm, an undaunted figure such as Goodall provides a much needed infusion of energy and optimism. But there are innumerable others who provide inspiration every week, all with different purposes, and all of whom we need to carry on the fight—from the Portland Frog demonstrator whose gentle humor perfectly embodies the essence of its city to WNBA star Napheesa Collier who took on the clueless and condescending league commissioner to ACLU lawyers filing dozens of cases around the country to ordinary Americans documenting government misconduct and photographing ICE abuse to activists from Indivisible and other groups organizing the second No Kings Day to teachers devoted to protecting and enlightening their students. Each plays a critical role in preserving our democracy. And so do you.Goodall’s impactful life should inspire and energize us in the fight for democracy—but as do so many others who are finding their role. We will need every one of them to defeat a movement built on lies, intimidation, abuse of power, cynicism, greed, ignorance, and hate. We salute the undaunted, the unbowed, and the unafraid—however large or small their profile.More On U.S. Politics, GovernanceLincoln Square Media,Political Opinion: What Trump Understood about the Republican Party, Stuart Stevens, right, Oct. 10, 2025. How did a party that once prided itself on principle become in thrall to the most unprincipled president in history?How did this happen? How did one of the two major American political parties become controlled by one man? How did 53 Republican Senators abdicate any pretense of advice and consent? How did it become a threshold for advancement in the party to deny who won the 2020 election?To call it partisanship is to call Ebola an airborne virus like the flu. It’s both true and woefully inadequate. The level of subservience in the Republican Party is unlike anything we’ve known in American politics. Running for office is often humiliating, inevitably exhausting, rarely enjoyable. You must suffer fools to an enormous degree and do so while feigning interest and appreciation. All of these Republican Senators and Congressmen endured the dehumanizing gauntlet of election only to come to Washington and do what? Whatever it is Donald Trump requires.This doesn’t happen by chance. We did something in the Republican Party. Over decades we developed a system that rewarded compliance and punished independence. The path to advancement was to go along, to wait your turn.For a self-avowed conservative party, it is particularly ironic. We were the party that railed against the Evil Empire of Communism that crushed individuality for the Greater Good of the State. Now any hint of non-compliance is crushed. There is no tolerance for differences of opinion. The Republican Party is now a “conservative” party that has no room for a Cheney.What we are seeing in the Republican Party is like a genetic experiment that took decades to cultivate. Like much of American politics, race is a key factor. In 1956, Eisenhower got 39% of the Black vote. That dropped to 7% support for Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act, in 1964. In 2020, Trump received 8%. That’s one point every 56 years. In 2024, Trump increased that to 15% but if anyone thinks that Trump has ushered in a new paradigm for Republicans, take a look at Trump’s approval with Black voters, now at 11%. Only 25% of Hispanic voters view him favorably.Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has operated as a homogenous white party, with non-college-educated white voters the dominant subgroup. As a Republican consultant, I saw this play out for decades. To win an election, you had one simple task: appeal to white voters. Consider this under-appreciated fact: Over the last fifty years, no Republican has been elected to the House of Representatives, Senate, or won a governor’s race who did not win the majority of the white vote.It’s often said that Republicans are better at messaging, but it’s a false standard. It’s easy to stage a successful concert for an audience that likes the same kind of music. It’s much more difficult to do the same for a crowd that enjoys very different types of music.The Republican Party’s homogeneity cultivated a top-down hierarchy. Like a corporate headquarters laying out a marketing strategy for regional offices, a political party that needed to appeal to the same demographic for victory gave candidates no reason not to echo its message. You were graded within the party on your ability to articulate the proscribed message and penalized for being “off message.”If a party follows this formula for decades, election after election, the process curates a particular kind of candidate. Those who have a natural affinity for following direction and embrace the meritocracy of conformity advance in the party. Those who try to assert individuality and push back against the party line are rarely successful. It was not the role of Republican candidates to develop their own message. It was their role to follow the message.This uniformity allowed the Republican Party to assert it had fundamental values and principles. Since everyone was saying the same thing, the belief system was obviously fundamental and deeply held. Character was destiny; the party of strength with a muscular foreign policy; personal responsibility was an essential character trait essential to successful leadership.The Republican Party was the adult in the room, so stable and predictable that a Bush could seamlessly follow a Bush. The candidate who came in second in the presidential primaries would be the next nominee. You waited your turn and were rewarded.When Donald Trump looked at the Republican Party, he saw through the artifice of values and understood it was a party of followers. The soul of the party was conformity, not values. The “family values” party would embrace a three-time married casino owner who talked in public about dating his daughter if he could give them power. The most “conservative” element of the party that was the fiercest opponent to the Soviet Union and an expansive Russian Federation would become the beating heart of the pro-Putin movement in American politics.Politico,Mike Johnson sticks to no-show shutdown strategy as resistance mounts, Meredith Lee Hill and Mia McCarthy, Oct. 10, 2025. “There is absolutely no reason for the House to be out of session,” GOP Rep. Kevin Kiley said. “It’s embarrassing.”“Is it better for them, probably, to be physically separated right now?” Johnson asked Thursday. “Yeah, it probably is, frankly.”For Mike Johnson, right, not showing up is the entire battle.The speaker made clear Thursday — nine days into the government shutdown — he is committed to keeping the House out of session as long as it takes to pressure Senate Democrats to act on the stopgap funding bill his chamber passed three weeks ago.Johnson is holding firm on the indefinite recess strategy even as pressure mounts inside his own conference to bring members back to Washington, with more and more GOP lawmakers prodding him to change course.“There is absolutely no reason for the House to be out of session — it’s embarrassing,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said in an interview. “The government is shut down, Americans are losing access to critical services, workers are being furloughed and the House isn’t even in Washington.”Dozens of House Republicans are begging Johnson to reconvene the House to advance a standalone bill to pay troops during the shutdown, so active-duty servicemembers don’t miss their paychecks Oct. 15. That includes Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York — a member of Johnson’s own leadership team.Senior House Republicans and leadership aides are mindful of the growing unrest. But they fear the alternative: Bringing members back to Washington without a resolution to the shutdown in hand, they believe, would invite chaos.“We’d have people tearing each other from limb to limb,” said one senior GOP aide granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal party thinking.Johnson, who clashed in the hallway this week with two Democratic senators over the shutdown, acknowledged those concerns Thursday.“Emotions are high. People are upset — I’m upset,” he said. “Is it better for them, probably, to be physically separated right now? Yeah, it probably is, frankly.”GOP leaders have drawn a hard line on a variety of tactics their members have proposed. But some in the GOP who were already wary of the looming troop pay deadline were rattled by the speaker’s remarkable C-SPAN exchange with a Republican military mom Thursday morning, in which she begged him to advance the standalone troop pay bill, warning her medically fragile children “could die.”“I don’t think it’s going to be any consolation to members of our military who miss paychecks to say, ‘Oh well, it is the Senate’s fault,’” Kiley said.But Johnson counseled Republicans to say exactly that in a private call Thursday, saying the best message would be to tell voters “we’ve done our job” and now the onus is on Senate Democrats to reopen the government.One option being pushed by the group concerned about troop pay is to try to pass that legislation by unanimous consent on the floor during Friday’s pro forma session, which would not require calling members back to Washington.“If we have a way to make sure our troops get their paychecks, we should pursue that,” Kiley said.GOP Reps. Jay Obernolte of California and Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota warned the speaker directly on the Thursday call about the political fallout of keeping the House in recess as the Senate standoff continues.At least one Senate Republican shared that sentiment: “I think you’ve got to be here,” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said. “The leadership of the House and other members, I think they should be here.”But some in the House GOP fired back across the Capitol, arguing Senate Republicans should simply go “nuclear” and change their chamber’s rules to pass the House continuing resolution with a simple majority vote.“You need to get rid of this cloture vote so you can do what the American people want us to do,” Rep. John Rutherford (R-Fla.) said. Senate Majority Leader John Thune ruled out that possibility Thursday.The back-and-forth among Republicans underscored the risks for Johnson of bringing all 432 members back to town. Not only would he have to contend with a barrage of potential off-message comments about the shutdown, he would have to tackle the Jeffrey Epstein saga — with his promised swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) likely forcing a long-awaited floor vote on the late sex offender.Rutherford is one of many rank-and-file House Republicans who are backing up Johnson’s strategy, arguing there’s no reason at the moment to bring members back. Rutherford, a GOP appropriator, said “there’s nothing to do.” That includes the nine fiscal 2026 appropriations bills the House still needs to pass — because, he said, lawmakers have not yet reached a topline agreement with the Senate on how much those bills will spend.But then there is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a MAGA stalwart who has taken the rare step of openly bashing Johnson’s strategy — and backing up Democrats’ focus on an impending health care “crisis.” Her critical comments have incensed many of the speaker’s leadership allies and rank-and-file Republicans alike.Watch: The Conversation49:25Oregon AG Dan Rayfield and Vani ‘Food Babe’ Hari | The Conversation“I’m not putting the blame” on President Donald Trump, she said in a CNN interview Thursday. “I’m actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader Thune in the Senate. This should not be happening.”Trump’s interests, however, continue complicating matters for Republicans on Capitol Hill. While Johnson and Thune try to pin servicemembers’ potential missed Oct. 15 paychecks on Democrats, the president has publicly promised this week that he wouldn’t let troops go unpaid. White House officials privately say they are considering how to shift funds to ensure the checks go out.One Senate Republican said Thursday night their understanding for now is “the White House is going to take care of it.”GOP leadership circles have been increasingly frustrated by the White House position, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss private sentiments. But among those House Republicans supporting White House action include Rep. Mike Bost of Illinois, the Veterans Affairs Committee chair.“If we find that there’s a way that the administration can do it, then more power to them,” said Bost. “But right now, [Democrats] all of a sudden, asking us to take a vote we’ve already made three weeks ago makes no sense.”Meidas Touch Network,Important Friday Message from MeidasTouch Founder, Ben Meiselas, right, Oct. 10, 2025. We’ve been through a lot together this week, so I wanted to pause and check in on you and talk about what’s ahead. I am proud that this community has stuck together through it all and that the resistance is growing stronger.Trump’s approval continues to plummet. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous, but it does show that people across the country are waking up and recognizing the existential threat we face together. Despite Trump’s attempts to crush the resistance, people are not giving up their power.There seems to be no end in sight to the Trump government shutdown. Republicans in the House and Senate are on vacation. They are refusing to talk to Democrats, let alone negotiate with them. Republicans don’t want the ACA subsidies extended. They believe the health care subsidies are too expensive, and their priorities are using government resources to subsidize the lives of billionaires.Also, Trump likes the shutdown since he hates a functioning government and prefers people to suffer. Shortages and scarcity force people to beg him for help and favors and allow him to behave more like a dictator in his mind. The shutdown also provides a way to avoid the release of the Epstein files by using it as an excuse to refuse to swear in Congresswoman-Elect Grijalva, who would be the 218th signature on the discharge petition to release the Epstein files.So what’s the end game for Republicans as their shutdown makes them even more unpopular? The answer is—they don’t have an end game and they don’t have a plan. There is a reason why Donald Trump had so many bankruptcies before he was involved in politics. Trump compounds problems and makes them worse by ignoring them or blaming others instead of ever admitting to any mistakes and trying to solve the problems. The way Trump threw others under the bus during his business bankruptcies, he’s now positioning people to blame for the coming calamity instead of taking responsible action.In addition to the shutdown, yet another federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into a city was unlawful. Last weekend, Oregon federal judge Immergut blocked Trump’s invasion of Portland, and yesterday Illinois federal judge Perry ruled Trump’s invasion of Chicago was unlawful. The recent images and videos of ICE terrorizing cities and trying to provoke pretexts for escalating invasions are something we never thought we’d see in the United States.And then, of course, there was Trump having his former personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, left—who now runs the Eastern District of Virginia—bring an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James.Halligan had zero experience as a federal prosecutor before getting an indictment of James Comey and now Letitia James, after Trump made a social media post demanding the prosecutions. We also now learned that Trump thought he was sending a direct message to Attorney General Pam Bondi when he made the public order to indict James, Comey, and Senator Schiff. We can assume that Senator Schiff will likely be indicted soon as well.In both indictments so far, Lindsey Halligan was the only federal prosecutor in the country willing to sign off on the charging documents. I suspect we will learn that she provided false information to the Grand Jury and refused to provide exculpatory evidence as required by law. I suspect we’ll learn that in the next two to three weeks. Stay tuned for our future reporting on that.Both Comey and James issued powerful responses to Trump’s frivolous and sloppy indictments. They made it clear they will fight—and they will win.We’ve seen over and over again that when people stand up to Donald Trump, they win. When people fold when Trump makes threats, they end up worse off. This is an important lesson the American people are understanding more and more now—and it’s causing Trump to lose it.One of the things I hope the public can learn from MeidasTouch is how to fight back powerfully and fearlessly against this regime. I want everyone to recognize their power to stand up for themselves and each other in this moment. When we stand up together, we will win.I expect the days ahead to be tough. I expect Trump to go after us, attack us, and try to shut us down. I know it won’t be easy, but I am confident in a future where we restore democracy. I am confident this network and this community will continue to grow and expand our lead over Fox and all cable news.More On U.S. James, Comey IndictmentsHopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, AG Letitia James’ Powerful Response To Trump: “I am not fearful – I am fearless,” Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 9, 2025. Late this afternoon the Trump regime indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James (NYT gift link). I don’t often send two emails in a day but her video response was so powerful that I wanted to make sure everyone got to see it. It is above.Here is what I posted on Bluesky, a sentiment that builds on my recent post, Every Democrat Must Now Join The Fight Again Trump’s Escalating, Dangerous, Traiterous Authoritarianism: Note how aggressive Leader Schumer’s statement was this afternoon: “This is what tyranny looks like. President Trump is using the Justice Department as his personal attack dog, targeting Attorney General Tish James for the ‘crime’ of prosecuting him for fraud—and winning.”One U.S. Attorney already refused this case. So, Trump hand-picked an unqualified hack that would go after another political enemy. This isn’t justice. It’s revenge. And it should horrify every American who believes no one is above the law. The Bulwark Morning Shots,Opinion: The Insidious Effort To Rationalize Trump’s Lawfare, William Kristol, right, and Andrew Egger, Oct. 10, 2025. This is not a president justified in going after those who went after him. It’s a person making a mockery of our justice system.Donald Trump and Greg Abbott’s deployment of Texas National Guardsmen to Chicago has hit a legal wall—for now. A federal judge in Illinois handed down an order Thursday night temporarily blocking the deployment, saying she had seen “no credible evidence that there is a danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois.”How the president will respond remains to be seen. An appeal is all but certain, but Trump has also contemplated more extreme measures: If judges kept getting in his way, he said this week, he might just be forced to invoke the Insurrection Act. What a fun weekend activity, anticipating this! The Bulwark,Opinion: One Size Fits All, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 10, 2025. One of the most insidious things about Donald Trump’s decade-long turn atop our politics is the way it has seared our political conscience. For years, it has been a cliché to call his various awful behaviors and decisions “shocking, but not surprising.” These days, however, we seem to be losing some of our inability even to feel the shock.You could see this in some of the early reactions last night to the news of Letitia James’s indictment on two counts of mortgage fraud.The New York attorney general has been near the top of Trump’s enemies list for a while, and literally nobody—at least that I can dig up—seems to be trying to argue that this indictment isn’t an act of naked political retribution. (To be fair, arguing this would be difficult after Trump removed all doubt last month by accidentally putting a post out in public that he had meant to send as a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding James’s prosecution.)Instead, the Republican line—parroted by some who should really know better—is that this is a justified act of retribution, in some sort of street-justice sense. Or if not justified, at least understandable, from Trump’s point of view: They tried to get him, now he’s trying to get them. Most charitably, they say, it is an unfortunate tit-for-tat that can’t go on indefinitely—but also a situation in which Trump is just one bad actor in a cast of many.An editorial from the new-look, more Trump-forgiving Washington Post editorial board this week cast the current moment along those lines. “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked,” it mourned. Those who were trying to hold Trump accountable had “show[n] little restraint” in their investigations—a big part of why he was now “showing still less restraint” while hitting back. It’s unfortunate that he lashed out at you like that—but maybe you shouldn’t have made him so mad.We should be clear about this. There is no comparison between the acts Letitia James took as attorney general of New York to hit Trump’s companies and the ones he is now taking to hit “back” at her. The difference between them is not the difference between a lesser act of political malice and a greater one. (Although it is worth noting the massive difference of scale here: While James’s civil suit accused Trump’s companies of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars off a years-long practice of misrepresenting properties, the indictment against James accuses her of filing a misleading loan application and coming out ahead less than $20,000.) It’s the difference between the application of law and the application of raw power.When people accuse James of “lawfare,” or of pursuing a “politicized” civil fraud case against Trump, they mean that she pursued that case with a zeal they believe she would not have shown against another target. Could be! But her fundamental case, as the New York Times noted last month, was not unreasonable. It was rooted in sworn testimony Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, right, had made before Congress that Trump habitually inflated the value of his properties to get favorable treatment in loans.She won her civil case against Trump at trial. This year, an appeals court vacated the financial penalty the initial judge had handed down, but did not vacate Trump’s civil liability. Trump had his day to argue in court that James’s investigations into him were vindictive and politically motivated—and the courts threw that argument out.Now consider Trump. As he staffed out his administration with lickspittles and cronies, he didn’t just instruct them to look into James to see what they could rustle up. Instead, he twisted the entire federal government into a shape designed to produce the criminal indictment he demanded.The roots of the mortgage-fraud claim into James weren’t anything he came by honestly: They were the results of a fishing expedition carried out by Bill Pulte, who has used the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which he directs, as a databank to plumb for information on a host of Trump enemies. When that pretext didn’t prove compelling enough to the first Trump-appointed U.S. prosecutor with jurisdiction, the president canned that prosecutor and moved on to someone he was sure would give him the result he wanted: his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. Halligan, sure enough, has now done so.Just how unjust a campaign of retribution this will turn out to be remains to be seen. It’s possible, of course, that Pulte’s muckraking turned up actual wrongdoing on James’s part—though James vigorously denies this and Halligan’s non-compromised predecessor seemed to agree. We’ll get to find out, as James will still geta trial—no matter how much Trump, who already says he knows her to be “guilty as hell,” might want to skip ahead.Still, it’s important to be lucid about where we are. This isn’t Trump escalating a fight James started. It’s Trump being Trump the only way he knows how: smashing, smashing, and smashing until the last irritating opponent is gone from his sight.Civil Discourse,What You Need To Know About The Tish James Indictment, Joyce Vance, right, Oct. 10, 2025. A recording from Joyce Vance and Preet Bharara’s live video.This morning, my former U.S. Attorney colleague, and current podcast co-host, Preet Bharara, and I dug into the federal indictment of New York Attorney General Tish James. It’s five pages long and you can read it here. James is charged, in a barebones indictment, with bank fraud and making false statements.James’ indictment had long been rumored. The expectation was that it would involve a second home she had purchased. But when the indictment came, it was a different house and a different allegation. Preet and I explain the details and outline the weaknesses of the indictment in our chat, which you can watch above or click to review the transcript. Emptywheel, Analysis: The Nativists Are Getting Restless: How the Rhythm of the Comey Prosecution May Backfire, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 10, 2025. Donald Trump indicted Jim Comey (and Tish James, and probably John Bolton next) not just because he is wracked by a compulsion to humiliate the people who have the temerity to suggest the justice system should apply to him, too.His fascist project also requires him to completely replace rule of law with corruption, as part of a tool to enforce loyalty.But as he betrayed in the Truth Social post to Pam Bondi that he accidentally posted publicly, he also did so because his rubes are growing impatient.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.Donald Trump has sold his rubes on a promise of “justice:” that those he has demonized will be branded criminals not just in Trump’s propaganda, but by the legal system as well. The nativists were getting restless that he had yet to deliver and so Trump was under pressure and that’s part of why he pressured Bondi in turn.It’s not just Trump’s pathologies that demanded these indictments; it’s also the impatience of a very dangerous mob.With the impatience of Trump’s mob in mind, I want to look at what the Comey arraignment suggests the rhythm of this particular prosecution will go.EDVA’s rocket docketEDVA (DOJ’s Eastern District of Virginia) has what’s called a “rocket docket,” an expectation that cases go to trial as quickly as possible and that the trial be as short as possible. On its face, a rocket docket could disrupt Trump’s need to feed his rubes, because it would hasten the moment when the whole thing is exposed as a fraud.But it also poses a problem because the professionals who will take over this prosecution from Lindsey Halligan — Raleigh AUSAs Tyler Lemons (who took the lead at the arraignment) and Gabriel Diaz — only filed their notices of appearance on October 7, the day before arraignment, and whenPatrick Fitzgeraldreached out to them, they were completely unprepared to describe even the most basic aspects of the charges against Comey.Unsurprisingly, the first thing Judge Michael Nachmanoff asked — after Fitzgerald entered a plea of not guilty for Comey — was to ask what date speedy trial would require a trial, which both Fitzgerald and Nachmanoff agreed would work out to be December 17.WhenNachmanoff, right, asked if the case could go to trial by then, Fitzgerald skipped a step, immediately describing that he had sent a letter to prosecutors laying out his theory of defense and a two-phased set of motions he planned to file. He described the first — a Selective and Vindictive prosecution challenge and a challenge to Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s appointment — to be submitted on October 20.As Fitzgerald described, “our view is that this prosecution was brought at the direction of President Trump to silence a constant critic of him and, “we think [Halligan’s appointment] is an unlawful appointment.”He was less sure about what he would file ten days later, on October 30, but suggested a Bronston literal truth defense motion (the basis for which Anthony Trenga threw out one charge against Igor Danchenko in this same district), a grand jury abuse motion, and an outrageous government conduct motion.Selling a Lemons CIPA dodgeLemons used Fitzgerald’s explanation that he would like to exclude 31 days of time from Speedy Trial to insinuate Fitzgerald had suggested Comey needed time to prepare for trial, only to then confess he was not prepared to prosecute the case. “Part of it is obviously honoring the defense’s request for the later trial date and understanding and wanting them to be — have the time adequate to prepare for trial, but also in — it’s no discredit to Mr. Fitzgerald. He’s not — and we’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well.” But he also pointed to “a large amount of discovery which also includes classified information” for the request for more time.Let me interrupt and note that the most recent ABC piece disclosing concerns the EDVA prosecutors had about the case included the amount of information the government would have to share with Comey.Prosecutors further expressed concerns about the department’s ability to take the case to trial quickly due to problems identifying all the relevant materials that would need to be handed over to Comey’s lawyers, sources said.As described, this is not about classified information (though I don’t doubt there’s a fair amount of materials on the SVR files believed to be at the heart of Dan Richman’s involvement). So it seems likely that Lemons is leaning on classified information as a way to stall.Nevertheless, my sense is this is when things began to get a bit tense in the hearing, not least because it made it important for Fitzgerald to put on the record how unprepared the prosecution team was, but also because it raised the hackles of an EDVA judge about an interloper coming in and refusing to comply with rocket docket considerations.Fitzgerald used it as an invitation to repeat that prosecutors had not yet told him who the people described in the indictment were (a complaint he made in different form at least three times).But — as a guy who has presided over some of the most difficult CIPA processes in history — he also scolded prosecutors for putting the cart before the horse, charging before making sure spooks would be willing to declassify intelligence to make a criminal case (not coincidentally, something John Durham did too).We would have thought in the normal course when the government brings a case, they address the classified information issues ahead of time, coordinate within the national security section, and have a plan. And, frankly, we feel like in this case, the cart may have been put before the horse, and my client would not like to wait around unnecessarily while they go through things we think that should have been done before.For his part, Nachmanoff used the CIPA excuse as an opportunity to order prosecutors to get Fitzgerald clearance as quickly as possible and to conduct the fastest CIPA process in history. “Either it’s not relevant to the case or it can be declassified or we will go through the fastest CIPA process you have ever seen in your lives.”Donald Trump’s clearance tantrumsThere are two surprises that may arise out of this focus on CIPA, even ignoring Nachmanoff’s impatience with it.Nachmanoff only described getting Fitzgerald clearance (he noted that Jessica Carmichael, the only attorney of the five present who was currently practicing in EDVA, “has had a number of national security cases in this district in the last few months”). He did not mention Comey getting clearance.That said, it is customary in CIPA cases to give a defendant clearance if he had clearance to access the materials at issue in a case during the period of the alleged crime — that’s the standard adopted, for example, by Aileen Cannon in the stolen documents case.If Comey wanted access to this material — and there’s good reason to argue he should — then it might create a conflict between prosecutors (including Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer) and Trump, because one of the areas where a purportedly unreviewable Presidential authority has come under challenge is in legal cases, where the government has tried to moot a legal case by denying someone clearance.That is, this trial might force Trump to agree to give Comey clearance, something he has stripped from all his adversaries.But Comey might have reason not to pursue it: because of the even more abusive case Jack Eckenrode is attempting to build in WDVA.Jack Eckenrode, WDVA, and John Durham’s discovery woesLast week, one of the FBI agents purged by Kash Patel, Michael Feinberg, described that one of two FBI agents on this case was, “John Durham’s factotum and enforcer,” which via this link he confirmed to mean Jack Eckenrode.The significance of Eckenrode’s role in this case has received far too little attention. As late as Scooter Libby’s indictment, Eckenrode was a key investigator on Fitzgerald’s CIA Leak case team. But then, as multiple people got leaked information about Karl Rove being imminently indicted, he wasn’t anymore. He and Fitzgerald (and Comey, as the link above notes) go way back, but there’s also a decent chance that Fitzgerald has reasons to know that Eckenrode leaked details of that earlier investigation to pressure him to expand the charges.And, as Feinberg noted, Eckenrode was Durham’s right hand man, which makes Durham’s testimony (also reported by ABC) pretty awkward.John Durham, left, the former special counsel who spent nearly four years examining the origins of the FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.Federal prosecutors in Virginia met remotely with Durham in August to understand the findings of his investigation, according to sources familiar with the meeting, and his conclusions raise the prospect that Durham — who was once elevated by Trump and other Republicans believing he would prosecute high-level officials involved with the investigation of the president’s 2016 campaign — could now become a key figure aiding Comey’s defense.But Eckenrode is also, per the NYT, the lead investigator in an investigation in WDVA premised on what seems to be a theory that FBI agents hid documents in a burn bag to protect people like Comey.And that suggests a certain logic to the charges as originally packaged (which Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer fucked up and caused to be released). Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, coached by Eckenrode, first tried to get the grand jury to approve three charges:• One false statement charge claiming Comey lied when he couldn’t remember what Durham and Eckenrode, with the collusion of Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe, falsely packaged up into a “Clinton Plan” to frame Donald Trump (this is the one the grand jury rejected)• Another false statement charge claiming Comey lied when he answered (he didn’t really) that he had not authorized anyone to speak to the press anonymously for him, which at some point meant Dan Richman sharing information about SVR documents suggesting that Loretta Lynch was helping Hillary dodge the email investigation• An obstruction charge arising out of those lies (and now, the single charged lie)That is, the original theory of the case (and unless the new prosecutors pull a wild headfake to try to salvage the case, still the theory) was directly relevant to the WDVA case. The idea being, you “prove” in EDVA that Jim Comey was lying in 2020 about his knowledge of multiple SVR documents, which you then use to build a case in WDVA that the FBI was conspiring to protect an effort in 2016 to focus on Trump to the exclusion of Hillary.This is a direct replay of the strategy that Durham (who debunked the current charges) adopted (working with Eckenrode) in 2021, when he attempted to hang conspiracies around two thin false statement cases against Michael Sussmann, right, and Igor Danchenko. You use the false statement to prove a motive for the conspiracy.You also use one case — as Durham did with privilege challenges in the Sussmann case to obtain records that might have been pertinent to the Igor Danchenko case if they had said what his fervant fever dreams imagined they might — to attempt to obtain evidence for the larger case.What’s worth knowing, though, is how classification stymied Durham’s case but also — thus far — protected his collusion with Russian spies.First, in 2020 (literally leading up to the Jim Comey testimony for which he has been charged), Ratcliffe and Kash “declassified” a bunch of documents in a misleading way to substantiate their “Clinton Plan” fabrication, pretty much reversing the meaning of the documents. That then formed the backbone of the Durham investigation.But Durham only shared still-classified SVR documents with a few subjects of the investigation, like Julianne Smith. He showed targets, like Peter Strzok, the misleadingly classified documents (indeed, that’s what the question to Comey they wanted to charge would have been based on). There was a CIPA process with Sussmann, but I’m convinced they didn’t give him adequate substitutions, because otherwise he would have argued that they were framing him with fabricated documents.The important detail is that Durham tried to coerce testimony from targets, undoubtedly including Comey, that would have required granting them clearance for such testimony. Witnesses could and some did avoid testifying by refusing to accept clearance — the same thing that the US Attorney in Philadelphia is using with a credulous Marc Caputo to excuse his inability to charge John Brennan.Of course, to the extent that prosecutors who know none of this background have been dragged into this at the last minute, they may be forced to provide Fitzgerald, at least, with the proof that Eckenrode is still chasing decade old Russian disinformation. They’re just getting their hands around the discovery as well, Lemons explained.They may in fact hand Fitzgerald evidence that Eckenrode committed the crime he wants to frame Jim Comey of doing.Lindsey Halligan won’t say who she representsThere were two other details of from the arraignment that didn’t get enough attention, in my opinion.First, here’s how the introductions went down. Lemons, the AUSA taking the lead, spoke first, greeting Judge Nachmanoff and describing his client in the standard manner. “Good morning, Your Honor. Tyler Lemons for the United States government.”Lindsey, left, the Insurance Lawyer, went next. Not only did she not greet the judge, but … she didn’t tell us who she represents. “Lindsey Halligan,” was all she said.After Gabriel Diaz introduced himself in the normal fashion (greeting, then describing that he represents the US), Fitzgerald gave the answer that made all the press reports (probably by design): “Good morning, Your Honor. Pat Fitzgerald, and it’s the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter.”Carmichael, the only one currently practicing in EDVA, also gave the standard answer. “Good morning, Your Honor. Jessica Carmichael for Mr. Comey.”Given that the only times Lindsey the Insurance lawyer has represented anyone in federal court before, she introduced herself as representing Donald Trump, perhaps it was just safer for Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer to say as little as possible.More interesting, however, is that Nachmanoff was not playing dumb to the problems with Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s presence. After Fitzgerald described his plan to challenge Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s appointment, Nachmanoff described — having already checked — what the procedure would be. “[A]ny motion to disqualify Ms. Halligan will be heard by an out-of-district judge,” Nachmanoff explained. “That is the process that has been followed in New Jersey and Nevada, and the Court will follow that process here, which means that a request will be made to Chief Judge Diaz of the Fourth Circuit to appoint an out-of-circuit judge only to address that issue.”He came prepared for this issue.As Nachmanoff moved onto a discovery order, Fitzgerald pointed to a piece of discovery he wants right away. “[W]e would like to see the appointment papers forthwith. We don’t want to be shooting at the wrong target” on the disqualification motion. Fitzgerald, who has had all manner of DOJ appointments in his day (once, on Jim Comey’s orders) noted “that most appointment papers for United States attorneys are a page or two, we would ask if we could have that forthwith” so that they could start drafting their motion.In multiple cases when the Trump Administration tries something funny (as with the Illinois invasion, in which DOD fucked up the authorizing paperwork at least three times), they often don’t have their paperwork in order.Which is to say, even before the reports out today that Lindsey didn’t consult with ODAG on public integrity concerns about indicting Tish James, DOJ may not have their ducks in a row.Even as it is, Trump’s indictments of Comey and James have only worked within the narrow bubble of his frothers. In the wider world, they have focused increasing attention on his corruption. But by putting two prosecutors with absolutely no understanding of this background, to say nothing of the real ethical hazards involved in this case, they made it much easier for Fitzgerald to flip the table, to appear as if he is the one doing the prosecution, not them. Emptywheel,Analysis: Next Up, Tish James, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 9, 2025. Tish James was indicted on two counts by Trump’s personal lawyer.The indictment of Tish James on bank fraud and lying to a financial institution ishere. Once again, Lindsey Halligan alone signed it.Hervideo statement, which focuses on Trump’s fraud, is very good.Jim Acosta Show,Prosecutors Just Realized Something Terrifying About Comey’s Case, Oct. 9, 2025. Ex-DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer says the government’s prosecution of former FBI director James Comey is already in serious trouble. The biggest threat? It has nothing to do with the evidence against Comey—and everything to do with a decision Trump made before charges were even filed.The Real Michael Cohen,Opinion: The Sword Turns On The Hand, Michael Cohen, right, Oct. 10, 2025. Letitia James’s indictment isn’t about skill, evidence, or brilliance. It’s about a system built to favor the government; and now turning on the very people who once controlled it.The indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James has sparked predictable outrage. Democrats denounce it as political revenge. Republicans call it long-overdue accountability. Legal pundits step onto television sets and recite their resumes; “former federal prosecutor,” “former DOJ official”, as if those titles alone prove their credibility. But the truth most avoid saying out loud is simple: once the government decides to prosecute, the game is already rigged.James now faces charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution, accused of misrepresenting a Virginia property to secure favorable mortgage terms. She has called the charges baseless and politically motivated, pointing to President Trump’s repeated demands for her indictment. Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, notes that career prosecutors had already declined to move forward, doubting the case could be won at trial.But history shows this objection doesn’t carry much weight. Federal conviction rates hover around 98 percent. That is not proof of prosecutorial genius; it’s proof of an uneven playing field. The government enjoys overwhelming advantages in resources, procedure, and leverage. Cases don’t have to be airtight; they simply have to be pursued.This is why the fixation on Lindsey Halligan’s resume misses the point. Halligan, a Trump attorney turned acting U.S. attorney, lacks prosecutorial experience. Critics mock her as unqualified, suggesting that without years inside the DOJ she couldn’t possibly bring down James or former FBI Director James Comey. But that critique is hollow. These so-called “career prosecutors” are not untouchable masterminds; they are beneficiaries of a system designed to favor them. Halligan’s success in securing indictments only underscores the truth insiders already know: the government’s power, not individual brilliance, is what wins cases.Grand juries require only probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That bar is extraordinarily low. Even in Comey’s case, where 14 out of 23 jurors voted to indict, critics admitted such dissent was troubling. Yet the indictment went forward anyway, because once the machinery of prosecution begins to turn, stopping it is nearly impossible.The response to James’s indictment has exposed deep hypocrisy. When she campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump, many cheered. When she pursued his businesses and secured a massive civil judgment; later tossed on appeal, she was applauded for using the law to bring down a political foe. Now that the same tactics are aimed at her, the outcry is deafening. The cycle is not unprecedented; it is the inevitable result of turning the law into a political weapon.At this point, I know exactly what some will say about me for writing this. Why am I highlighting flaws in the prosecution of Trump’s enemies? Am I secretly on his payroll? A double agent? No. I’m not. I am someone who went through the system myself. I know it better than most because I, too, was politically targeted. My point is not partisan. I am merely stating facts; whether they fit your opinion or not.And the fact is this: prosecutors, whether Democrat or Republican, whether career veterans or political appointees, wield a system stacked in their favor. They don’t need to be brilliant to win. They don’t need to be fair. They just need to decide that you are the target.That is why dismissing Halligan as “inexperienced” is a distraction. It is comforting to believe only seasoned prosecutors can bend the law to their will. The uncomfortable reality is that anyone sitting in that chair; backed by the weight of federal power, has the ability to upend a person’s life. That is not about skill; it is about control.So when James’s defenders insist these charges will collapse because the case is weak, they misunderstand how the system works. Weak cases succeed all the time because the government controls the rules, the resources, and the narrative. And once that machinery is turned against you, the likelihood of walking away unscathed is slim.This isn’t about James, Comey, or Trump alone. It’s about a justice system that has grown so unbalanced that prosecutions have become a political tool, wielded with impunity. Those who once celebrated that imbalance are now discovering what happens when the weapon is turned back on them.The irony is brutal. The machine they once fed is now devouring them. America may be a country of laws, but without justice, those laws are nothing more than tools; and when the government wants a win, it always finds a way to get it. Lawfare, Three Thoughts on the Comey Arraignment, Benjamin Wittes, right, Oct. 9-10, 2025. I’ve never seen an arraignment hearing quite like this one.Today, I read the transcript of James Comey’s arraignment—even as the world moved on to the next abuse.I was not present for yesterday’s opening hearing in the Comey case, having been out of town. And while I was familiar with the press coverage of the arraignment, including the excellent coverage by Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Roger Parloff, I was keen to read the raw transcript itself to see what I could glean from the specific words spoken in court about the direction of the case.Today I got even further behind in my efforts to keep up with the Justice Department’s ongoing abuse of the criminal process and targeting of its political foes.Barely had I finished reading the transcript than this afternoon brought an indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James—a subject to which I will no doubt return after I have read the relevant documents.In the meantime, I have three observations about yesterday’s transcript, before The Situation shifts from Comey to James—and thence to whomever the next indictee might prove to be.The first is that there is a notable gap between prosecution and defense lawyers who showed up to yesterday’s hearing in what we might call pride of service. On the prosecution side, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia could not find a single lawyer who had worked for the office prior to late September to stand up in court and say, “My name is X and I represent the United States.”Not one.The acting U.S. attorney, of course, had been fired because he wouldn’t bring this case. And no career official from the office was at the prosecution table either. Instead, there were two assistant United States attorneys from North Carolina, whose familiarity with the case was so limited that they stressed they were only just starting to get their hands around it and its discovery.On the other side, by contrast, Comey’s lead defense counsel introduced himself as follows: “Your Honor. Pat Fitzgerald, and it’s the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter.”This is a bit of an inversion of the normal understanding of the roles of criminal lawyers. Federal prosecutors typically feel a certain honor and pride in representing the United States in court—believing that their cases represent attempts to do justice. Defense counsel, by contrast, generally think of themselves as representing a check on the justice system’s coercive power in general. But they often don’t take particular pride in their specific individual representations as embodying justice—much less that representing a particular accused miscreant is the honor of their lives. There are exceptions, of course, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case in which the prosecution was so evidently ashamed of its case and the defense so visibly proud to represent someone accused of a crime.Fitzgerald is, of course, a smart lawyer, and he was—I assume—making this point intentionally. But the point is also undoubtedly sincere. And it works rhetorically because it is so intuitively right. Fitzgerald is a famed federal prosecutor—one who has prosecuted mobsters, politicians, and White House officials on behalf of the United States—saying that the singular honor of his entire career is representing a defendant against prosecution by the United States, even as the government is having trouble finding lawyers to show up in court on its behalf.The second point is a related one, and it concerns preparation. There is something embarrassing about the government indicting a case and then showing up in court completely unprepared to litigate it. Yet in a brief hearing, the government did not merely put forward new lawyers from a different state who had clearly been assigned to the matter only a day or two earlier, these lawyers declared they had not yet discerned the scope of their discovery obligations, anticipated that there might be issues with respect to classified material but did not yet know the full scope of those issues, and asked for time to sort things out that are normally sorted out before a case is ever brought.“We’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well,” prosecutor Tyler Lemons said, as though the prosecution hadn’t had five years to figure out what documents it might need to produce if it brought this case.The defense too, acknowledged that it was also unprepared—but for a very different reason.Fitzgerald stated he still lacked the most basic information about what the indictment alleges Comey is supposed to have done. The people about whom Comey is alleged to have lied to Congress are still unnamed, he noted. “We haven’t received a single piece of paper of discovery to date. We still haven’t been told who PERSON 3 and PERSON 1 are. We don’t know the nature of the charges . . . “Despite his professed unpreparedness, Fitzgerald was able to sketch out a speedy briefing schedule, in which the defense will file its motions to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution and challenging the legality of the appointment of Lindsey Halligan in less than two weeks and then, while the government is responding to those, prepare a second tranche of motions to file in November: “We’re a little less certain of precisely what motions [these] would be, but there might be a Bronston literal truth defense motion. There may be a grand jury abuse motion, outrageous government conduct motion, but those motions would be addressed to the indictment,” he said.It is fairly normal to see cases in which at arraignment the defense has not gotten its act together yet while the prosecution has its ducks neatly lined up. Indictments, after all, sometimes take defendants by surprise. Defendants don’t always have their legal teams set up yet.The opposite situation—-one in which the prosecution can’t even give a coherent account of its discovery process or a sense of the role classified material might play in the case, while the defense can lay out a roadmap to trial—I have never seen before.My third observation is that the reason for both of the first two points is the same and unsubtle: Because the government is behaving shamefully and proceeding with a rushed criminal case based on compound untruths, it neither has put itself in a position to behave responsibly—by having discovery ready and the like—nor does it have access to attorneys of the sort who know the case they have brought when it comes time to move it forward in court.But expecting that sort of thing is apparently passé. Today the Eastern District of Virginia is already on to Letitia James for a crime she also didn’t commit.Emptywheel,Analysis: Next Up, Tish James, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 9, 2025. Tish James was indicted on two counts by Trump’s personal lawyer.The indictment of Tish James on bank fraud and lying to a financial institution ishere. Once again, Lindsey Halligan alone signed it.Hervideo statement, which focuses on Trump’s fraud, is very good.U.S. Media, Culture Wars, Education, ReligionMediaite, ‘We’re Now a Conservative Opinion Page,’ Declares Washington Post Columnist, Charlie Nash, Oct. 10, 2025. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen boasted on Thursday that the newspaper was “now a conservative opinion page,” after receiving complaints over an article titled, “Yes, Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”After Thiessen’s article went viral on social media, Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz noted that it “was written by @marcthiessen who is a (welcome) outlier at the Washington Post.”Thiessen responded, “Thanks Mark. But not such an outlier any more! We’re now a conservative opinion page.”Thiessen’s article was warmly received by President Donald Trump, who wrote in a Truth Social post, “Thank you Washington Post. Wow!!!”Washington Post columnist David Ignatius also praised Trump’s Gaza peace plan on MSNBC, Thursday, declaring, “Joe Biden could never do that. And Donald Trump was able to do it.”For more than a year, the Washington Post has received criticism from staffers and readers alike over its apparent shift in identity.In February, Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would now be dedicated to the “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”Hours after making the announcement, Bezos dined with President Donald Trump.Months prior, during the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, the newspaper announced it was returning to its “roots of not endorsing presidential candidates” – having previously endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008.Several members of the Washington Post editorial board resigned over the news, with the newspaper’s opinion editor resigning just a few months later. Since then, the newspaper has appeared to shift into more of a conservative direction.In March, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the Washington Post for “finally learning.” In July, veteran Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson wrote a scathing resignation letter, accusing the newspaper of “killing” and censoring his articles for being “too opinionated.”New York Times,How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland, Anna Griffin and Aaron West, Oct. 10, 2025. President Trump and his administration are amplifying the voices of pro-White House podcasters and streamers eager to ratify the president’s description of Oregon’s largest city as a “hellscape.”In the fight over deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., Democratic leaders in the city and state have pleaded with President Trump and the courts to trust law enforcement records, both local and federal, that describe the demonstrations as small and comparatively calm.But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape” — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.On Thursday, the repercussions of those dueling versions of reality became clear as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit questioned a district court’s finding that the protests in Portland were likely too minor to justify the National Guard deployment. The appeals court judges instead cited federal reports of demonstrators spitting on federal officers and shining flashlights in their eyes, behavior that has been captured, amplified and sometimes even prompted by pro-Trump personalities eager to counter local police.“The Portland Police Chief did an interview today attacking independent journalists for exposing the violent terrorists that he allows to run the city,” Benny Johnson, a popular pro-Trump podcaster, wrote Tuesday on social media after accompanying Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in Oregon. “He’s humiliated and knows Portland is under siege.”To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. The portrayals of a city on fire have angered protesters.And sometimes, left-wing activists have risen to the bait, leading to scuffles and injuries conservative streamers then promote on the internet. One right-wing commentator, Katie Daviscourt, said she received a black eye when a demonstrator hit her with a flag pole.“Certainly over the last 10 days, the energy level has gone up, the amount of conflicting points of view have increased greatly,” Chief Bob Day of the Portland Police Bureau said at a news media briefing Tuesday. “And this has created an environment that’s equally, if not more, challenging for us.”Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action.Mr. Tardio, 41, said he was not sure which side the people involved were supporting.“In the beginning it looked like people on the right are the ones instigating, but in the following evenings it looked like people on the left,” he said. “People are absorbing information on social media quicker than reality.” Nobody can keep up, he added. New York Times,M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment, Vimal Patel, Oct. 10, 2025. The Trump administration offered nine universities benefits in exchange for signing an agreement to protect conservative voices, among other things. M.I.T. was the first to refuse.M.I.T. became the first university to reject an agreement that would trade support for the Trump administration’s higher education agenda in exchange for favorable treatment.The proposal, called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” was sent to nine universities and would require colleges to cap international student enrollment, freeze tuition for five years, adhere to definitions of gender and prohibit anything that would “belittle” conservative ideas.In a letter on Friday to the Trump administration, M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, wrote that the university has already freely met or exceeded many of the standards outlined in the proposal, but that she disagrees with other requirements it demands, including those that would restrict free expression.“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Dr. Kornbluth wrote.A White House spokeswoman, Liz Huston, said in a statement that “any university that refuses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education isn’t serving its students or their parents — they’re bowing to radical, left-wing bureaucrats.”“The best science can’t thrive in institutions that have abandoned merit, free inquiry, and the pursuit of truth,” she added. “President Trump encourages universities to join us in restoring academic excellence and common sense policies.”The White House has said it wants responses from the universities by Oct. 20. The other eight colleges are the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.The compacts have been deeply unpopular among faculty members, who view them as yet another political intrusion into the affairs of academia. They argue that the Trump administration is threatening the independence of American higher education by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding to force top universities to adopt its agenda.At a politically sensitive moment, as schools are trying to avoid being singled out by the administration, most of the universities’ responses have been noncommittal.Editors’ Picks3 Smart Recipes That Will Change the Way You Make MeatballsNegotiating the End of UsCan I Take Batteries on a Plane? What to Know Before You Fly.“Brown’s course of action should and will be informed by the perspectives of our community,” Christina Paxson, its president, said in a message to the community on Friday.Some schools, like the University of Virginia, have turned to the time-tested higher education strategy of delaying controversial decisions by creating a committee.Others expressed what appeared to be concern about the compact but did not shut the door on signing it.“I am deeply committed to Dartmouth’s academic mission and values and will always defend our fierce independence,” Dartmouth’s president, Sian Leah Beilock, wrote last week.“You have often heard me say that higher education is not perfect and that we can do better,” she wrote. “At the same time, we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves.”The University of Pennsylvania’s president hit a similar note.“The long-standing partnership with the federal government in both education and research has yielded tremendous benefits for our nation,” J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s president, said in a message on Sunday.“Penn seeks no special consideration,” he continued. “We strive to be supported based on the excellence of our work, our scholars and students, and the programs and services we provide to our neighbors and to the world.”Perhaps the most enthusiastic response came from the University of Texas at Austin, which is in a state that has aggressively tried to control what professors can teach in the classroom on sensitive topics like gender.The chair of the system’s board, Kevin Eltife, a former Republican state lawmaker, said he was honored that the Austin campus was selected. “We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” Mr. Eltife said in a statement last week.Oct. 9 Lincoln Square Media,The Collapse of Guardrails: America’s Rapid Democratic Erosion, Brian Daitzman, Oct. 9, 2025. In September, subpoenas, indictments, and Supreme Court rulings converged to shield the presidency and target its critics, revealing a constitutional rupture.In September 2025, the constitutional crisis that has been building since Donald Trump’s first run for office in 2015 reached its most dangerous turn. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting sweeping presidential immunity, followed by its 2025 order allowing the executive to withhold billions in congressionally approved foreign aid, converged with high-profile arrests and subpoenas of Trump’s critics. Together, these moves have left a convicted felon president looming above the checks of all three branches of government. The guardrails the framers designed to contain authoritarian impulses are buckling, eroded by a politics of demagoguery and deception — the very danger they warned against in the Federalist Papers.That crisis sharpened on the night of September 26, with a cascade of developments unprecedented in modern American history. The Justice Department issued a subpoena for travel records tied to Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor who once charged Trump. Hours earlier, former FBI director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury for alleged false statements and obstruction of Congress. Court filings revealed that federal agents had seized documents marked “classified” from the office of John Bolton, Trump’s onetime national security adviser turned critic. Rarely, if ever, has a sitting president’s circle of opponents faced such simultaneous legal jeopardy. A rupture in the American experiment, unfolding in real time.The events of the end of September are extraordinary because they have no true analogy in American history.The United States has seen bitter partisan conflict, from Jefferson and Adams to McCarthy and Watergate, but never has the machinery of federal justice moved in concert against multiple perceived political opponents of a sitting president at once. That inversion defines September 2025: prosecutors, investigators, and regulators who previously challenged Donald Trump now face subpoenas, indictments, or removal efforts.This is not coincidence.It is the outcome of a legal and institutional shift that began with the Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States ruling in 2024, which granted presidents broad immunity for official acts. And it is deepened by the Court’s decision just this Friday to allow the administration to withhold nearly $4 billion in foreign aid despite congressional appropriation, eroding Congress’s oldest power: the power of the purse.Together these actions mark not just political conflict but democratic decline. What James Madison described as ambition checking ambition is failing. The scaffolding is giving way. America is watching the collapse of its guardrails not in history books, but in the present tense.The Unprecedented Targeting of a President’s OpponentsThe United States has experienced political vendettas before, but never this: the sitting president’s critics and former accusers facing indictments and subpoenas within the same week. Fani Willis is the elected district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, and in 2023 she indicted Donald Trump and 18 allies under the state’s racketeering statute for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. That case collapsed in 2025 after Georgia’s Supreme Court disqualified her for a conflict of interest tied to a relationship with a deputy prosecutor. On September 26, she received a federal subpoena for her travel records. The timing is stark: the prosecutor of a president is now herself the target of federal inquiry.James Comey’s path is equally emblematic. Appointed FBI director by Barack Obama in 2013 and retained by Trump, he was fired in 2017 after publicly confirming that the Bureau was investigating links between Russia and Trump’s campaign. He later became one of Trump’s most visible critics in print and on television. On September 26, 2025, the Department of Justice indicted him on charges of obstruction and false statement. Supporters of the indictment say it proves no one is above the law. Critics see it as revenge seven years in the making.Trump’s defenders will say this is accountability, not revenge, and Trump himself will argue he is the victim. The public record cuts the other way. During the Biden administration, the president’s son, Hunter Biden, stood trial and was convicted by a jury on three federal gun charges in June 2024. The special counsel probing President Biden’s handling of documents issued a detailed report and recommended no charges, noting cooperation and interviews under oath.By contrast, Trump fires officials who resist him, demands prosecutions of named rivals, and now presides over a Justice Department that indicts his former FBI director while federal agents search the office of a former national security adviser turned critic. The pattern is not symmetrical. One administration subjected its own family to a lawful process and accepted an adverse verdict. The other seeks to criminalize its opponents while insulating the presidency itself.John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, resigned in 2019 after disputes over Iran and Afghanistan and went on to publish a memoir, The Room Where It Happened, that accused Trump of misconduct in office. Court filings now link his office to classified documents. George Soros, the Hungarian-born financier who funds voting access, civil society, and progressive causes, has long been a favorite target of Trump’s allies. Reports indicate prosecutors are being pressed to consider charges against him. And Lisa Cook, an economist confirmed to the Federal Reserve Board in 2022, is under DOJ investigation and a White House filing that seeks her removal. She is the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, and her independence has made her a visible counterweight to Trump’s economic agenda.Each case differs in substance, but together they create a picture without precedent: the machinery of justice trained not on the president but on his political opponents. Hannah Arendt warned that authoritarianism begins when independence is redefined as disloyalty. That redefinition is unfolding now, as the critics of yesterday become the defendants of today.Takeaway: Never before has an American president’s adversaries faced simultaneous prosecution. The inversion marks a constitutional rupture, visible in the present tense.New York Times, Justice Dept. Subpoenas Office of Letitia James, Who Sued Trump for Fraud, Jonah E. Bromwich, Devlin Barrett and Santul Nerkar, Aug. 8, 2025. One of the two subpoenas sent to Ms. James, New York’s attorney general, relates to the civil fraud case she won against President Trump, which led to a half-billion-dollar penalty.The Justice Department has opened an investigation into one of President Trump’s longtime adversaries, Attorney General Letitia James of New York, right, examining whether her office violated his civil rights in its successful fraud suit against him, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.The acting U.S. attorney in Albany sent Ms. James’s office two subpoenas, one of which was related to the civil fraud case, which led to Mr. Trump being penalized more than half a billion dollars.The second subpoena is related to the office’s long-running case against the National Rifle Association, the people said.Ms. James sued the organization in 2020, winning the ouster of its longtime leader, Wayne LaPierre, and sharply diminishing its power.Two of the people familiar with the matter said that the new subpoenas were part of a broader investigation to determine whether the office violated Mr. Trump’s rights or those of others. It is a highly unusual use of a civil rights law more typically used to investigate potential racial, religious or sex discrimination, among other categories.The inquiry also appears to be an extraordinary example of federal intervention in state proceedings and another battle in Mr. Trump’s escalating campaign against his nemeses. Ms. James has been one of Trump’s fiercest opponents since she first ran for attorney general in 2018, and his Justice Department has already opened a separate investigation into her personal real estate transactions.The enmity between Mr. Trump and Ms. James is longstanding. In 2022, she sued him, accusing him of overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. Mr. Trump lost and was penalized with the fine, which has since grown to more than half a billion dollars with interest. The case is on appeal.Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, on Friday called any investigation into Mr. Trump’s fraud case “the most blatant and desperate example of this administration carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign.”“Weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law and a dangerous escalation by this administration,” he said. “If prosecutors carry out this improper tactic and are genuinely interested in the truth, we are ready and waiting with facts and the law.”Geoff Burgan, a spokesman for Ms. James, said: “We stand strongly behind our successful litigation against the Trump Organization and the National Rifle Association, and we will continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights.”Editors’ PicksAn Anonymous Chef’s Memoir Is Steamy, Spicy and Utterly Delectable‘Freakier Friday’ Review: Round and Round, Here We Go AgainBubble Gum Brought to LifeA Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The acting U.S. attorney in Albany, John A. Sarcone III, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The subpoenas appear unrelated to the case involving Ms. James’s personal real-estate transactions. The existence of that investigation was publicly confirmed earlier this year by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, but it is unclear whether or how it has progressed.In addition to Mr. Lowell, who is representing Ms. James as her personal lawyer, Ms. James’s office has retained Steven Banks, formerly of the firm Paul Weiss, to defend its staff members.Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters have argued that his Justice Department should pursue cases against those who investigated or prosecuted him, and suggested one particular civil rights statute would give it grounds to do so.That statute makes using law-enforcement authority to deprive a person of rights a crime. Historically, it has been used to investigate and prosecute police officers or prison guards who mistreat people based on their race, religion, sex, or national origin. The law, however, does not require that motive.Mr. Trump has attacked Ms. James directly for years. In April, he called her a “crook” in a social media post in which he called for her resignation.Mr. Sarcone, a Trump loyalist, is one of several U.S. attorneys the Justice Department has installed using an unusual legal procedure after judges and senators declined to appoint them permanently. He has take a strong stance against immigration and has inserted himself into the national culture war over the issue, railing against former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s policies.In July, after a panel of judges in the Northern District of New York declined to appoint Mr. Sarcone as the U.S. attorney at the end of his interim tenure, the Justice Department appointed him the “special attorney to the attorney general,” a title that has typically been given to officials who lead complex prosecutions, not a U.S. attorney’s office.New York Times,News Analysis: Democratic Alarm Over an Unbound Trump Fuels Shutdown Standoff, Carl Hulse, Oct. 9, 2025. The threat of rising Obamacare premiums has been Democrats’ main focus in the public debate, but the president’s defiance of laws, norms and congressional constraints has helped hold them together in opposition.Democrats in Congress have been relentless about casting the government shutdown clash as a fight over helping Americans pay for health insurance.But there is another, far deeper issue driving the impasse: their outrage about what is happening across the country under a president they regard as lawless and unchecked.While Democrats believe they have a winning political argument in demanding the extension of Obamacare subsidies, they are also motivated by Mr. Trump’s extreme policies and tactics, and his penchant for running roughshod over the legislative branch with scant pushback from congressional Republicans. That is one reason that the shutdown impasse has dragged on, with no immediate move toward resolution and little sign that Democrats’ resolve is flagging.Democrats have watched with increasing alarm as the administration has ignored congressional spending directives, dispatched the military to American cities, ordered government retribution against Mr. Trump’s perceived adversaries and mounted an aggressive immigration roundup that has prompted fierce fights in the courts.Empowering the Trump administration and its perceived abuses by funding the government is an extremely hard pill for Democrats to swallow.“The issue that we are debating,” Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said on the Senate floor on Tuesday, “is not just health care, as enormously important as that is. What we are talking about is whether we are going to allow our country to move toward an authoritarian society, run by a president who is a megalomaniac, who wants more and more power in his hands, who does not respect the rule of law or the Constitution of the United States of America.’’Democrats have good reasons to center the shutdown fight around the extension of pandemic-era Obamacare health insurance subsidies. They fear that millions of Americans could see their coverage costs soar or become unaffordable without quick action by Congress. It is a unifying subject and has strong political resonance. The impact of not intervening would be felt by both Democratic and Republican voters, providing an opening to reach across the aisle for a solution.Global NewsNew York Times,Updates: Israel and Hamas Reach Deal on Hostage and Prisoner Exchange, David E. Sanger, Ephrat Livni, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 8, 2025. President Trump said Israel would pull back troops in the first phase of the agreement, raising hopes that the two-year war in Gaza may be nearer to an end.After months of deadlock, Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement for the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, a long-awaited breakthrough that could point toward an end to the two-year war in Gaza.President Trump, who helped broker the deal, said on social media Wednesday that both sides had agreed to the first phase of his plan, including that Israel would pull back their troops to an agreed-upon line.The details of the deal were unclear, including the specifics of the exchange and the line of Israeli withdrawal. And Israel, in its initial statements, did not mention a troop pullback. Mr. Trump’s announcement came shortly before 7 p.m. in the eastern United States — almost 2 a.m. Thursday in Israel.Qatar, one of the countries helping the negotiations, and Hamas indicated in statements that the agreement would allow for the entry of aid into Gaza.“This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social.In late September, Mr. Trump unveiled a sweeping 20-point plan to end the war and free the remaining hostages. Under that proposal, the hostages would be exchanged for 250 Palestinians prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Gazans jailed by Israel during the war. The hostage release is expected as soon as this weekend and preparations are already underway, an official familiar with the deal said.“All of our hostages will be brought home,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement after Mr. Trump’s announcement, but he offered no other specifics.While Israel and Hamas have now agreed to an exchange, it is still not clear whether the two-year-old war in Gaza will end. Mr. Netanyahu, left, has demanded that Hamas disarm, which the militant group has publicly rejected. No mention was made of Hamas’s arms in statements on the agreement from Hamas, Israel, Mr. Trump, and Qatar.Mr. Netanyahu said he had spoken with Mr. Trump, and that he would convene his government on Thursday to sign off on the agreement, calling it a “great day for Israel.”Hamas in its statement called on Mr. Trump, guarantors to the agreement and others to compel Israel “to fully implement the agreement’s requirements and not allow it to evade or delay.”Dr. Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, said that the agreement “will lead to ending the war, the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and the entry of aid.” The details will be announced later, he added. New York Times, News Analysis: With Mideast Deal, Trump Is on the Brink of a Major Diplomatic Accomplishment, David E. Sanger, Updated Oct. 9, 2025 For President Trump, success in brokering a cease-fire is the ultimate test of his self-described goal as a deal maker and a peacemaker.President Trump is at the brink of the biggest diplomatic accomplishment of his second term — a cessation of the brutal war between Israel and Hamas — and on Wednesday evening he made clear he was eager to fly to the Middle East to preside over a cease-fire and welcome hostages who have spent two long years in underground captivity.For Mr. Trump, success in this venture is the ultimate test of his self-described goal as a deal maker and a peacemaker — and a pathway to the Nobel Peace Prize he has so openly coveted. By chance, the winner for 2025 is scheduled to be announced just hours before he may be departing to take his victory lap in Egypt and Israel.Much could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The “peace” deal Mr. Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started with Israel’s founding in 1948, and has never ended.But if Mr. Trump can hold this deal together, if Hamas gives up its last 20 living hostages this weekend and with them its negotiating leverage, that would be an extraordinary step toward the kind of peace plan Mr. Trump, and his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., have pressed to accomplish, despite many diversions down dark holes. And if Mr. Trump can get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw troops from Gaza City and give up on his plan to take control of the shattered remains of Gaza, if he can stop the carnage that has killed 1,200 people in Israel and more than 60,000 Palestinians, he will have done what many before him tried: outmaneuvered a difficult and now isolated ally.If the peace plan moves forward, Mr. Trump may have as legitimate a claim to that Nobel as the four American presidents who have won the peace prize in the past, though with less bombast and lobbying. (They are Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, who was awarded one decades after he left the White House.)But it is far from clear that the conflict is truly ending. Mr. Trump’s statements, and Mr. Netanyahu’s, referred only to the first step, the hostage-for-prisoner swaps and the withdrawal of Israeli troops to a yet-to-be-described line. Getting to the next stage, where Hamas would have to give up its arms and, even harder, its claim to run Gaza, may prove even more difficult than bringing the living and dead hostages home. Hamas may well balk at the next steps, and so may Mr. Netanyahu, who argues that the job will not be done until every Hamas combatant in the Oct. 7 attacks is hunted down. Any of those could unwind the fragile cease-fire.It is unclear how the United States and its allies will assemble an “technocratic” interim leadership, or make sure the country’s leadership is purged of Hamas sympathies. Israel seems unlikely to leave as long as remnants of Hamas remain, and maybe even after they are gone. No one seems able to explain what role, if any, the Palestinian Authority will play. Lance’s Substack,Opinion: Reality…Trump-Kushner Gaza “Peace Plan” Is The Peace Of The Grave, Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 9, 2025. Two days after the Hamas attack on Israel, I wrote the following linked article in which I stated my strategic view of the war hoping forward. The tragedy of it all hurts my heart.Which Way America?…That is the central issue for us in the Middle East crisis aheadIt was my response to a question from a friend as to whether it was possible the Israelis knew in advance the Hamas attack was coming and deliberately let it unfold in order to have their pretext for a war they wanted anyway. I considered it a plausible theory then and now, but one still unproven. It is oddly appropriate I think to share this archived piece, also in my Facebook memories, on the day that a Gaza cease fire has been announced.On one hand I see the Trump-puffing media coverage of people celebrating it on all sides. On the other, it is important to remember that there is virtually nothing left of Gaza except the impoverished, homeless, injured, sick and hungry survivors living in the rubble who have lost so many of their families.It is not going to be either a durable cease fire or a just peace in any way, because it was the bloody work of two mass murderers whose crimes against their own nations have gone unpunished, and both will use the so-called diplomatic breakthrough to strengthen their own parallel drives for dictatorship.There is no “Marshall Plan” for Gaza. There is a “Las Vegas/Atlantic City/Riviera Plan” for Gaza, which does not include more than a small number of the people who currently live there. The majority will be forcibly deported. Maybe a few surviving doctors and teachers can look forward to being croupiers dealing blackjack or working for pennies as waitstaff in luxury hotel/bordellos for the super rich, a life stripped of any dignity or honor.Most people reading this understand these realities, and will reflect poignantly on the undeniable tragedy of Joe Biden’s decisions which contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss, as well as the awful and unnecessary loss of life and war damage, but still will greet this announcement with a sense of relief. “Maybe the killing will stop…maybe they’ll get food into Gaza…at least the hostages are free,” many people are thinking.But we must know that this will end badly for two reasons. The Palestinian people, as opposed to the Hamas leadership, had no part in crafting this agreement, and therefore will have no homeland through which to rebuild and reconstruct their lives or choose their own destinies. The war crime of mass expulsions from Israel and the territories, (which is the policy of Netanyahu’s bloody religious fanatics) will continue and expand with Trump’s blessings, including in the West Bank.Secondly, the two men who created this “Peace Plan” are deranged killers who are accountable to nobody, not the UN, the Europeans, the Gulf nations, or even their own voters. There is no institution which has the power to make them honor anything promised, as if keeping promises was ever at all part of their resumes. Those who want to celebrate this deal cannot be faulted, because there is nothing more awful than war. However I’m not relieved in the least.My thoughts center around the million and one things which are wrong about it. It’s an agreement based upon lies has no prospect of enduring, and incredulously is being seen as a great accomplishment by the most evil and mentally sick president in US history, and likewise makes a hero out of the most corrupt anti-democratic bloody-handed Prime Minister in Israeli history. For the Palestinians of Gaza, it represents nothing more than the “peace of the grave,” and a money-making grift by its architects.The US, under both Biden (not withstanding his support for the two-state solution) and Trump along with Israel since October 9th, two years ago, have succeeded in creating at least three future generations of Palestinian children whose lives will be dedicated to avenging their murdered families, which by the way is the reason behind the deliberate strategy of the Netanyahu cabinet to starve and kill as many children as they can, while they can. Just read the quotes of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and the others in the cabinet. <They are saying this out loud.>This “peace” has zero chance of taking hold if for that reason alone, because the “deal” pushed through has not an ounce of goodwill for them to build upon. If we need proof of that, just look at how the Israelis have treated aid workers, medical personal, the flotillas of food relief, and even Greta Thunberg a Nobel nominee, in their attempts to help the people of Gaza. Then tell me again why you think this cease fire can lead to a peace deal.There is little or nothing in the Trump “20 point plan” that will be carried out because it isn’t real. Trump announced at Charlie Kirk’s funeral that he hates all Democrats, roughly half of the American population. We know his history of racism. You know how Netanyahu turned his war with Hamas into a mass reprisals campaign against civilians, mostly women and children. How do you think Trump and his cabinet feel about Palestinian Arabs? Why would Bibi honor any agreement allowing Palestinian autonomy, development or freedom in the future? You tell me.New York Times,10 Months Later, Russia Admits Deadly Downing of Azerbaijani Plane, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Oct. 9, 2025. President Vladimir Putin’s rare acknowledgment of a Russian military mistake came as relations have deteriorated between the two former Soviet states.President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday acknowledged Russia’s responsibility for the deadly downing of an Azerbaijani jet late last year, trying to heal a rift between the two former Soviet nations over the Kremlin’s monthslong deflection of blame.Thirty-eight people were killed on Christmas Day when an Embraer 190 operated by Azerbaijan Airlines crashed on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The plane, carrying 62 passengers and five crew members, was en route from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to Grozny, the capital of the Russian region of Chechnya.Evidence quickly emerged that the jet had been shot down by Russian aerial defense systems that were targeting Ukrainian drones. Russian officials denied that Moscow had been involved, enraging Azerbaijani officials and citizens.On Dec. 28, Mr. Putin offered a rare public apology to Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani president, for what he called a “tragic incident,” but the Russian leader stopped short of taking responsibility.The two leaders met for the first time since the crash during a meeting on Thursday in Tajikistan of regional leaders. Mr. Putin reiterated his apology and publicly admitted for the first time that Russia had caused the disaster, saying that two of its air-defense missiles had detonated near the jet after Ukrainian drones entered Russian airspace near Grozny.New York Times,Colombia’s President Says Boat Bombed by U.S. Was Carrying Colombians, Julie Turkewitz and Robert Jimison, Oct. 9, 2025 (print ed.). The Trump administration has said that it is attacking boats and killing their occupants because they are smuggling drugs from Venezuela to the United States.President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said on Wednesday that his government believed one of the boats recently bombed by the United States in its campaign against alleged drug traffickers had been carrying Colombian citizens.“A new war zone has opened up: the Caribbean,” Mr. Petro wrote on X. “Signs show that the last boat bombed was Colombian, with Colombian citizens inside. I hope their families come forward and file a complaint.”Mr. Petro did not provide further details.The U.S. military has launched at least four lethal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean since early September, killing 21 people. The Trump administration has characterized its military buildup in the Caribbean Sea as targeting Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, whom the administration has accused of leading a terrorist organization that is flooding the United States with drugs.This is the first time another country has claimed its citizens were killed in the attacks.Most cocaine in the region originates in Colombia, according to the United Nations, while fentanyl, which causes far more overdose deaths, is produced in Mexico. Legal analysts have called the attacks on the boats illegal. And Mr. Maduro has claimed that the real goal of the campaign appears to be his ouster.Two U.S. officials, who were not authorized to discuss the sensitive matter publicly, also said that Colombians were aboard at least one of the boats recently destroyed by the United States.Mr. Petro, a leftist leader who is nearing the end of his four-year term, has been a vocal critic of President Trump’s military campaign in the region.Mr. Trump has said the people killed in recent attacks were drug traffickers, but has provided no evidence and has not given a clear legal basis to the public for the attacks. In the case of the first two boats, the Trump administration identified those killed as Venezuelans. It has not identified the nationalities of those killed in the other two attacks.U.S. Justice System and National SecurityThe Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Takes Judges for Fools, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 9, 2025. Rejecting unwarranted deference means preserving judicial review.Donald Trump and his flunkies usually tell us exactly what he is up to. Judges considering the risk and result of his handiwork should take note.FBI Director Kash Patel went to the trouble of publishing an enemies list, filled with people he refers to as “government gangsters.”Trump has never allowed doubt about his determination to seek revenge against his foes. Ever since James Comey refused to bend the knee to Trump, or New York Attorney General Tish James went after Trump’s phony real estate evaluations, or then-congressman and now Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.) managed the first impeachment trial, or Jack Smith prosecuted him for Jan. 6 and other alleged crimes, Trump has vilified his enemies and vowed to pursue “retribution” through the justice system.So when—no surprise!—Comey is indicted (and others investigated) and Trump celebrates it with the vigor of a playground bully, no reasonable person can doubt this is a vindictive prosecution.Likewise, after Trump has demonized blue cities for years, propounded a false and dystopian vision of war zones, and sent in ICE forces (who inevitably provoke violence) to brutalize and terrorize nonwhites, no honest observer could accept as valid the pretext he advances (rebellion, invasion, or inability to enforce federal laws) for deployment of our National Guard. When Trump publicly admits his nefarious motives (e.g., using the shutdown to fire Democrats, labeling his political opponents “terrorists”), judges should not ignore his explicit animus nor accept at face value the benign explanations that government lawyers concoct in court. Judges have a choice: Allow Trump to take them as fools, or look at the facts including his own admissions when assessing his power grabs?Lower courts are increasingly determining that accepting Trump’s disingenuous rationalization amounts to dereliction of their judicial duties. In the Alien Enemies Act cases, courts repeatedly rejected his preposterous assertion that we are engaged in a war with or facing invasion from another country, as the statute requires.Likewise, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw indicated he had reason to doubt that the Trump regime has a legitimate criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In allowing Abrego Garcia’s attorneys discovery to make out a case of vindictive prosecution, he effectively demanded to look under the hood to see if the government was on the up-and-up.(Spoiler: It’s not.)In a similar vein, U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut in Oregon rejected Trump’s preposterous claim that Portland was “war ravaged.” She acknowledged that while the president is entitled to “a great level of deference… [that] is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground.” Instead, judges must review whether the president’s factual determination is within the “range of honest judgment,” she explained. But when his determination lacks any “colorable basis,” courts must act. That’s why Trump could not prevail on assertions “simply untethered to the facts.”In this abnormal presidency, which compulsively lies and attacks courts, judges should follow these examples. The normal presumption of regularity afforded presidents and the wide berth granted on national security (which applies to foreign policy, not domestic policing) should not apply when, as Just Security demonstrates, the president has racked up a shocking record of deceit. It documents 15 cases in which the Trump regime did not comply with court orders, 35 cases where there was ample reason for “Court distrust of government information and representations,” and 50 cases in which the government’s actions were held to be “arbitrary and capricious.” Surely, that record justifies the presumption of illegality.Trump blows up whenever judges cross him, daring them to ignore facts as well as the law. “They are projecting this notion that no judges should be able to intervene or stop something that the president believes is good policy, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told me this week. “It is the most absurd argument I could ever come up with because, of course, that is exactly what the judiciary’s role is…to interpret what the law is, what the law allows for and doesn’t allow for.” Judges must not accept the president’s absurd stance.Especially when Trump routinely and publicly contradicts representations that government lawyers make in court, judges should deny whatever deference other presidents have enjoyed. Some simple rules should be applied based on the regime’s record over the last 10 months:When Trump’s public statements contradict lawyers’ self-serving representations in court, judges should doubt the latter and order discovery.Trump’s executive utterances attacking private individuals and groups’ First Amendment rights of speech and association should create a presumption that government actions (e.g., tax, regulatory, criminal) targeting them are retaliatory, and hence, invalid. The government should have the burden to rebut these attempts.When government lawyers evade or violate court orders or misrepresent facts, judges should make findings of contempt, sanction them, and make referrals to state bars.While lower court judges nominated by presidents of both parties (including Trump) have increasingly adopted such approaches, the MAGA Supreme Court majority still facilitates Trump’s bad faith maneuvers. In abusing the shadow docket and overruling lower courts’ detailed fact-finding, the MAGA justices give Trump leeway to lie, encourage even more outrageous conduct, and incentivize him to hurl more invectives toward the judiciary. The deference offered should be to the lower courts as finders of fact.Unless it wants to forfeit any judicial role in checking the president, the MAGA majority must support lower courts’ independent fact-finding role. Its cockeyed view of injunctive relief, which assumes the president is irreparably injured whenever he does not get to do what he wants—while no weight is afforded to his victims—amounts to declaring that only his desires matter.Such a position is a recipe for dictatorship. When cases reach the merits, the MAGA justices will have to decide: Rubber stamp whatever Trump does (i.e. bend to a despot), or exercise independent judgment? If the MAGA majority does not end its pattern of constitutional dereliction, a future president and Congress will need to rescue and revise our system of checks and balances (e.g., expand the Supreme Court, limit its appellate jurisdiction).Unlike Trump’s dictatorial assertions, courts have an obligation to seek the truth, not just buy into his fantasies. The rule of law’s survival depends on it. New York Times,The Army’s Race to Catch Up in a World of Deadly Drones, Greg Jaffe, Oct. 9, 2025. The rapid proliferation of drones in places like Ukraine has set off a growing sense of alarm inside the U.S. Army.The Guardian,US anti-fascism expert blocked from flying to Spain at airport, Edward Helmore, Oct. 9, 2025. Rutgers University professor who published book on antifa was informed at boarding gate that his trip was cancelledA Rutgers University professor who taught a course on anti-fascism was blocked from leaving the US for Spain on Wednesday night, according to media reports, hours after Donald Trump hosted a White House roundtable highlighting the impact of antifa – or “anti-fascist” – far-left activists.Mark Bray, an historian who published the 2017 book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, and has taught courses on anti-fascism at the New Jersey university, was attempting to board a plane at Newark airport bound for Europe when he was informed at the boarding gate that the reservations for him and his family had been cancelled.The professor, nicknamed “Dr Antifa” by a group of students, had said he was moving to Europe after receiving death threats. Turning Point USA activists have claimed he is a “financier” for the leftwing movement.“‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,” Bray posted on Bluesky social media. “We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”A petition calling for his removal from the university had been launched in the weeks following the assassination of the Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Bray’s home address was revealed on social media.One threat included a vow to kill him in front of his students, according to the Washington Post. The threats led to Bray’s decision to relocate to Spain with his wife and two children and to continue to teach his students remotely.“Since my family and I do not feel safe in our home at the moment, we are moving for the year to Europe,” Bray said in an email to students on Sunday. “Truly I am so bummed about not being able to spend time with you all in the classroom.”Bray told the New York Times earlier on Wednesday that “my role in this is as a professor. I’ve never been part of an antifa group, and I’m not currently.” But he added that “there’s an effort underway to paint me as someone who is doing the things that I’ve researched, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”Bray told the outlet that the family were rebooked for Thursday evening but were in the dark about why the earlier booking had been cancelled. “I may sound conspiratorial, but I don’t think it is a coincidence,” he said. “We’re at a hotel and we’re just going to try again.”After Kirk’s assassination, the rightwing influencer Jack Posobiec called Bray a “domestic terrorist professor” on X. The Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA then circulated a petition that accused the professor of being an “outspoken, well-known antifa member” and called for his dismissal.The Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA has said it does not support harassment or doxing, but Bray is on a list of academics the group identifies as advancing left-leaning classroom propaganda.“Do you want to become a socialist? If so, make sure to pay this professor a visit!!!! All jokes aside help us report this professor who has ties to Antifa which now is designated as a domestic terrorist organization,” the Rutgers chapter posted on Instagram several days ago.In a statement, Rutgers said it did not comment on personnel or student conduct matters.“Rutgers University is committed to providing a secure environment – to learn, teach, work and research – where all members of our community can share their opinions without fear of intimidation or harassment,” it added.Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 8, 2025 [National Guard vs. No Crisis], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 9, 2025. Yesterday, journalists observed members of the Texas National Guard at a U.S. Army Reserve Center in Elwood, Illinois, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) southwest of Chicago.This morning, the Defense Department announced the federal activation of about 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and about 300 from the Illinois National Guard, saying they would be protecting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other federal agents “who are performing federal functions, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”The statement said the National Guard soldiers “are under federal command and control in a Title 10 status.” The section of the legal code to which the announcement pointed was the one permitting the president to call into federal service members of the National Guard whenever the U.S. is invaded or in danger of invasion by a foreign nation, there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government, or the president cannot execute the laws of the United States with the power of regular law enforcement.It is this power under Title 10 that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller yesterday claimed was “plenary,” or absolute. The idea that exceptions to the rule of law reveal who is really in charge of the government was central to the political philosophy of German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazis and whose work is increasingly popular among the radical right in the U.S. these days. Since taking office in January, Trump has declared at least eight national emergencies that the administration has used to justify the use of emergency powers.As J.V. Last of The Bulwark laid out clearly last night, there is no crisis in Chicago that makes it necessary for the administration to send in National Guard troops. Last points out that any instability in Chicago has been caused by the administration’s surge of federal agents into the city, where they shot and killed Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González; raided and ransacked an apartment building, leaving residents—including U.S. citizens and children—bound outside for hours; shot an unarmed woman, Marimar Martinez; and aimed a weapon at a resident who was simply recording what the agent was doing, In each case, the government initially insisted the federal agents either were under attack or were rounding up “the worst of the worst,” but subsequent information has showed the federal agents were the aggressors in each situation.Federal agents have held journalists, who are now suing ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for the use of “extreme force” against them, and pummeled them with tear gas and pepper spray. As Last notes, local police chief Thomas Mills has testified that the “use of chemical agents by federal agents at the ICE facility in Broadview has often been arbitrary and indiscriminate. At times it is used when the crowd is as small as ten people.”Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker warned that the administration is deliberately trying to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”As Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center explained earlier this year, the Insurrection Act brings together a number of laws Congress passed between 1792 and 1871. They make up sections 251 through 255 in Title 10 of the United States Code. Together, they suspend the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the U.S. military from taking part in civilian law enforcement.The Insurrection Act permits the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”Courtney Kube, Katherine Doyle, Carol E. Lee, and Garrett Haake of NBC News report today that White House officials, led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, have been having increasingly serious discussions about having Trump invoke the act.This morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice [sic] Officers! Governor Pritzker also!”But Pritzker is standing up to the administration.“I will not back down,” he posted. “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”“His masked agents already are grabbing people off the street. Separating children from their parents. Creating fear. Taking people for ‘how they look.’ Making people feel they need to carry citizenship papers. Invading our state with military troops. Sending in war helicopters in the middle of the night. Arresting elected officials asking questions. We must all stand up and speak out.”In an interview with MSNBC senior political correspondent Jacob Soboroff, Pritzker noted that Trump, who is a convicted felon, has a lot of nerve calling for Pritzker’s arrest. “[T]his guy’s unhinged. He’s insecure, he’s a wannabe dictator.” Pritzker said directly to Trump: “If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me…. We’ve done nothing wrong here and…it’s Donald Trump that is breaching the Constitution, breaking the law.”Illinois has sued to stop the administration from sending federalized National Guard troops from any state to Illinois, “because it is unconstitutional,” Pritzker said. “[I]t’s important to recognize that the Trump administration doesn’t seem to respect any laws in the United States. They just do what they want to do, and they’ll keep doing it unless someone stops them. Here in Illinois, we’re stopping it. We’re doing everything that we can to push back.”The administration is engaging in “a show of force,” Pritzker said, because it “wants to militarize major cities across the United States, especially blue cities in blue states, because he wants us to get used to the idea of military on the streets” before the 2026 elections. “I believe that he’s going to post people outside of ballot boxes and polling places. And if he needs to in order to control those elections, he’ll assume control of the ballot boxes” and let the administration count the results. Pritzker said we will have free and fair elections in 2026, “if we all stand up and speak out.”Today the White House tried harder than ever to push the idea that the country is consumed by violence from the “Radical Left.” This afternoon a press release from the White House claimed that “[f]or years, an Antifa-led hellfire has turned Portland into a wasteland of firebombs, beatings, and brazen attacks on federal officers and property—yet the Fake News remains in shameful denial about the Radical Left’s reign of terror.” In fact, before Trump ordered troops into the city, federal agents described the small protests at the ICE facility as “low energy,” consisting of people standing in front of vehicles, raising a middle finger, and playing loud music.To push the administration’s narrative, Trump held an “Antifa Roundtable” at the White House this afternoon. There, far-right influencers tried to make the case that “antifa” is real and has harassed them, although as The Guardian noted, many of those influencers feed their media channels by confronting protesters and filming the responses they’ve provoked. The press release claimed that “terrorists” have “laid siege” to the ICE office in Portland, Oregon, and at the meeting, Trump claimed that “paid anarchists” want to “destroy our country.” Bizarrely, he claimed that “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”Antifa is a term used by the far right to define anyone who does not support MAGA: it means “antifascist.” During the meeting, influencer Jack Posobiec—a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory—warned that “Antifa” went back all the way to Germany’s Weimar Republic. As Holly Baxter of The Independent pointed out, “it is absolutely true that there were anti-fascist protesters in the Weimar Republic. If you’ll remember, those were the people taking issue with the early versions of the Nazis.”Lincoln Square Media,Opinion: Chicago Is the Frontline in the Battle for American Freedom, Edwin Eisendrath and Susan Demas, Oct. 9, 2025. Trump’s Open to Invoking the Insurrection Act,Trump’s militarized response to dissent has turned American cities into test zones for authoritarian rule. Our resistance is peaceful, but it is not weak. We will not stop until Donald Trump gets his masked battle-armed thugs off our streets.Edwin EisendrathOperation Midway Blitz, a name that conjures Chicago Bears football, is the Trump Administration’s cynical branding of what can only be described as escalating government violence by ICE and other federal agents in Chicago. One man is already dead. Many others have been injured. Homes have been ransacked; American citizens detained.Every good person should condemn this unprovoked and cruel attack on an American city. And every American should cheer on the people of Chicago who are now the front line in the battle for American freedom.Federal troops, in an excessive show of force now routinely show up for photo ops at our tourist attractions, and for battle in our neighborhoods. They come with armored vehicles, boats, drones, Black Hawk and conventional helicopters, tactical body armor, pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, snipers and overwatch teams, flashbang grenades, as well as conventional sidearms and rifles. They come prepared for war.On the night of September 29 to 30, using military helicopters, and tactical gear, ICE and FBI agents stormed an apartment building in the South Shore Neighborhood. According to the Chicago Sun Times:Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.Today, ICE handcuffed a Chicago alderman and forcibly removed her from a hospital where she went to check on a man who was injured during an ICE action. Because Chicagoans are paying attention, the interaction was caught on video. According to Block Club Chicago,A video of the Friday afternoon incident shows Fuentes at the hospital, asking federal agents if they had a signed warrant and telling the agents a man — who they had detained — has constitutional rights. Fuentes is not seen touching the agents, one of whom tells her he will arrest her if she does not leave.Fuentes again asks the agents if they have a warrant, and an agent grabs Fuentes, spins her around and handcuffs her hands.Last week, ICE agents tear gassed a neighborhood street. A couple was walking their two-year-old home from school when they were overcome by the gas.Meanwhile we have increasing evidence that ICE is trying to create photo ops to support two lies — that Chicago has been subdued, and that beleaguered law enforcement are fighting off an insurrection. (For the latter, to see the real thing, Google Jan 6th.)Last week, ICE agents “patrolled” the swankiest part of the Chicago River. For those unfamiliar with geography, the Chicago River is not the Rio Grande. No immigrant has to cross it to get into America. Maybe a Russian Oligarch on the run has a yacht that might cruise the part of the river. Most immigrants do not. The river is not on route map of migrants or dangerous gangs. On St. Patrick’s Day, we dye it green. It flows in front of Trump Tower. It is a great spot for photos.Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showed to look fashionably tough for folks on X, and to complain that the bad people of Chicago (well, of neighboring Broadview) wouldn’t let her use the bathroom.Even the conservative Chicago Tribune reports:Federal agents confronted hundreds of protesters for the fourth week straight outside the Broadview U.S. Immigration and Customs processing center today, an exchange that at times had the look of a publicity stunt as masked men in military fatigues hung from the sides of an armored truck and waved to a jeering crowd as the media and local police officers looked on.This massive deployment of government force is emphatically not about immigration, not about gangs, not about violent crime. It is entirely about intimidation. In 2024, the last year of the Biden Administration, ICE deported 271,484 people. That’s more than a quarter-million deportations. All without a federal military invasion of American cities. All without the social media crowd-bating.The ugly truth is that Donald Trump’s go-to as our president is coercion. He promised to destroy higher education unless universities gave up their independence. Many did. He promised to withhold needed approvals from media companies unless they put government censors in their newsrooms. CBS folded. He strong-armed US Steel and Intel, two major American companies to give him equity in their businesses.Now he wants to coerce a major American city to change its character and bow down. He sent in his troops armed as our soldiers were for urban warfare in Fallujah. They are breaking into apartment buildings; they are tear-gassing neighborhood streets. One person is dead. Others have been hospitalized.Americans love our freedom. And Chicago is the most American city. We will not bow down. We will not be broken. Out fight is America’s fight. Our resistance is peaceful, but it is not weak. We will not stop until Donald Trump gets his masked battle-armed thugs off our streets.Live InterviewsTrump’s Open to Invoking the Insurrection Act | LIVE with Edwin Eisendrath & Susan DemasSusan J. Demas and Edwin Eisendrath Oct 7More On U.S. Politics, GovernanceNew York Times,Trump Administration: Trump Fires Black Officials From an Overwhelmingly White Administration, Elisabeth Bumiller and Erica L. Green, Oct. 9, 2025 (print ed.). Separately, in the administration’s first 200 days, only two out of 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the most senior jobs in government were Black.Robert E. Primus, the first Black board chairman of the federal regulator responsible for approving railroad mergers, at first thought there was something wrong with his work phone. When he couldn’t unlock it he switched to his personal phone, only to learn that President Trump had fired him by email, effective immediately.“I didn’t see it coming at all,” Mr. Primus, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. In January, the Trump administration had put a Republican in his place as the chairman of the Surface Transportation Board, which Mr. Primus saw as the president’s prerogative. But he had been appointed to the independent board by Mr. Trump in his first term and expected to remain on it, as had been the longstanding practice.Instead, he heard a White House spokesman say the day after his firing in August that he did not “align” with the president’s agenda. Mr. Primus, a longtime congressional staff member and former lobbyist on transportation and national security matters, was reminded, he said, of Mr. Trump’s widely condemned comment during the 2024 campaign that immigrants were taking “Black jobs.”“Maybe he felt that this job was not intended for Blacks,” said Mr. Primus, 55. He acknowledged he was speculating, he said, but “it’s legitimate speculation. Because if you look across the board, there is a pattern.”Mr. Primus is part of a series of firings of Black officials from high-profile positions in an overwhelmingly white administration that has banished all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. And while there are no statistics on firings by race, an examination of the people Mr. Trump is appointing to fill those and other jobs shows a stark trend.Of the president’s 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the administration’s most senior leadership roles in its first 200 days, ending on Aug. 7, only two, or 2 percent — Scott Turner, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Earl G. Matthews, the Defense Department’s general counsel — are Black. New York Times,In the Trump Administration, Officials Juggle Multiple Roles, Tim Balk and Ashley Cai, Updated Oct. 9, 2025. President Trump has put top administration officials in charge of multiple federal agencies and offices — an approach that has little precedent.One administration official is leading a government-funded cultural institution in Washington as he conducts diplomatic talks with foreign countries. Another is in charge of two agencies, each with multibillion-dollar budgets and thousands of employees. And eight months into President Trump’s second term, the number of top administration officials with multiple titles has continued to increase.As Mr. Trump dismantles parts of the government, remakes institutions and takes on perceived enemies, he has often put his allies in charge of multiple federal agencies and offices — an approach that has little precedent.Here is a look at cabinet members and other top government officials who hold more than one job in the Trump administration:Cabinet-level officials with more than one jobMarco Rubio, right
- Secretary of state
- Acting national archivist
- Acting national security adviser
Mr. Rubio, a former senator from Florida, is one of two cabinet officials who hold three jobs. And he once held four.The reasons for the expansion of Mr. Rubio’s portfolio have varied. He initially took over the U.S. Agency for International Development as part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to dismantle it. He became the chief national security adviser when Michael Waltz was reassigned to be U.N. ambassador after a Signal group chat scandal. And he took over as archivist after Mr. Trump pushed out the agency’s administrator.In August, Mr. Rubio gave up one of his titles, handing the reins of U.S.A.I.D. to Russell T. Vought. Few cabinet officials have amassed so much power in so many areas, although Mr. Rubio’s status is not unprecedented: Henry Kissinger was secretary of state and national security adviser in the Nixon and Ford administrations.New York Times,JB Pritzker Has Had it With Democrats Who Won’t Stand Up to Trump, Reid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer, Oct. 9, 2025 (print ed.). The Illinois governor, a potential presidential candidate, is fighting the presence of National Guard troops and the activities of ICE agents in Chicago.When President Trump ordered the National Guard to Chicago last week, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois became the latest Democrat to bear the brunt of managing an aggressive federal government.He has concluded it must be combated with a national campaign.Aside from instructing his attorney general to file a lawsuit to block troops from other states coming to Illinois, Mr. Pritzker has few formal options to resist what he described this week as an “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government.”Instead, he is using his city to issue a call to action for the nation, positioning Chicago as a harbinger of the threat that he believes Mr. Trump poses and himself as a chief antagonist to a president who has already threatened to jail him.At a time when Democrats are searching for leadership, Mr. Pritzker is trying to seize the moment to demonstrate it — to fuel opposition to Mr. Trump across the nation, and, perhaps, his future presidential ambitions.“This is exactly the moment for people to stand up. And do I see enough people doing it? No, I don’t,” Mr. Pritzker said at a forum in Minnesota on Tuesday, as national guardsmen from Texas awaited deployment in Chicago. “It shouldn’t be that there are Democrats that are afraid, because you know what? We’re the targets. We need to be strong, we need to fight back.”Eight months into the second Trump administration, various Democratic playbooks are emerging on how to handle unwanted federal troops and agents who descend on America’s blue cities.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California acted with righteous anger, filing lawsuits and appearing on as many media platforms as would have him.Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., who had fewer options in the federal city, welcomed federal efforts to help combat crime, despite outrage from other elected officials in the city. It is now commonplace in the nation’s capital to see troops from Ohio or Georgia performing gardening tasks or, in one instance last week, collecting foul balls from a youth baseball practice.Mr. Pritzker is taking the path of fierce, uncompromising resistance. At the forum on Tuesday, the Minnesota Star Tribune’s North Star Summit, he said Mr. Trump was “out of his mind and has dementia.The exposure can give these officials a major political advantage as they position themselves as leaders of a party desperate for direction, said William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff whose brother and father served as Chicago’s mayor.“It’s a gift handed to all of them that want national exposure,” Mr. Daley said. “Without this going on, he’d be a governor running a state, but there wouldn’t be a lot of reason to have the visibility. He’d have to go looking for crowds at a fish fry in Iowa.”Democratic allies and rivals alike say Mr. Pritzker is in an impossible position with few good options. In addition to the prospect of National Guard troops on city streets, he opposes the middle-of-the-night raids and streetside abductions by Mr. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents but has no real tools to block them. Yet he feels compelled to raise alarms as loudly as he can.The substance of Mr. Pritzker’s effort to oppose Mr. Trump and, in his words, protect the people of Illinois against the federal government has resulted in the sort of rhetoric once unthinkable by an American elected official. At a news conference on Monday in Chicago, he urged residents to use their phones to record video of any activity from federal agents and said he had directed the Illinois State Police to keep people who are protesting “safe from ICE.”The governor went even further Tuesday in Minneapolis, saying that Mr. Trump’s ultimate goal is to acculturate Americans to seeing military officials patrolling big cities so the president can eventually use those troops to intimidate voters in Democratic jurisdictions in next year’s midterm elections.“He wants us all in big cities to get used to the idea that it’s OK to have military on the streets,” he said. “You’re going to see soldiers outside your polling place. That’s going to intimidate a lot of people, and especially it’s going to intimidate people who are not Republicans.”He added: “We know what they’re looking for is an excuse to say that there’s fraud in the election in 2026. That is the real purpose.”His remarks prompted a bitter joke from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who joined Mr. Pritzker onstage at Tuesday’s event. He said the two men had a bet over which of them would be arrested first.“I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag,” Mr. Pritzker said.Indeed, just 15 hours later Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that Mr. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers.”Mr. Pritzker replied, on MSNBC: “Come and get me.”Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, called Mr. Pritzker “an incompetent slob.”“Pritzker would rather attack the president than actually work towards solutions for Chicago’s out-of-control crime,” Ms. Jackson said. “Pritzker has blood on his hands.”Mr. Pritzker has for months lamented a lack of urgency from his fellow Democrats about opposing Mr. Trump. The turn in the national spotlight is affording Mr. Pritzker a tryout of sorts as the party’s leading messenger and spokesman for the opposition at a moment when Mr. Trump has ordered troops sent not only to Chicago but also to Portland, Ore., and Memphis, Tenn., with promises of more cities to come.With the federal government shut down and congressional Democrats increasingly viewed as feckless by their own partisans, it is Mr. Pritzker who is embarking on a national effort that may well dovetail into a formal presidential campaign.Among the Democratic chattering class, already in the early stages of measuring candidates for the party’s next presidential primary, his actions — along with Mr. Newsom’s — are being viewed as a high-profile test of leadership and political dexterity.The two men are frequently mentioned as leading candidates in a long list of potential 2028 contenders.Neera Tanden, the president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress, a leading Democratic think tank, said Democratic voters were looking for candidates who are willing to position themselves as fighters against Mr. Trump.“Governor Pritzker is doing that in spades,” she said. “He’s demonstrated a clarity about what is happening.”While Mr. Pritzker dodged questions about his intentions beyond seeking re-election to a third term in 2026, his Democratic allies are less coy. Mr. Walz joked about visiting him at the White House.“He looks like a leader,” said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who is running for the Senate against a rival endorsed by Mr. Pritzker. “He looks like somebody who is trying to responsibly handle a very dangerous situation.”In Chicago, Mr. Pritzker is broadly popular, but his sharp elbows and penchant for the cameras can rankle his fellow Democratic officials. Several, following the rule of not speaking if they are unable to say anything nice, refused to say anything on the record about Mr. Pritzker.Representative Jesús G. García, known as Chuy, who represents a largely Hispanic district that includes the largest concentration of Mexican Americans in the Midwest, said he had in recent days received calls from all over the country praising Mr. Pritzker’s actions and statements in response to Mr. Trump.“The governor has done an outstanding job at pointing out that the immigrant community is a very vital part of our state,” Mr. García said. “He’s done everything at his disposal to protect the community, to instill a sense of confidence and purpose that what’s going on is wrong.”New York Times,Judge to Hear Arguments on Whether Guard Troops Near Chicago Can Stay, Mitch Smith, Oct. 9, 2025. As local anxiety builds, Illinois officials say the deployment of Guard troops violates state sovereignty, while the White House says the troops’ presence is needed.Immigration officers have been out in force around Chicago for weeks, arresting hundreds of people. Protesters have marched repeatedly, clashing at times with federal agents. And in recent days, President Trump has sent National Guard troops to Illinois and suggested that top Democrats there should be jailed.Against that tense backdrop, a federal judge will hear arguments on Thursday about whether to block the deployment of the Guard, which Illinois officials have called a violation of state sovereignty and the Trump administration has defended as necessary for safety.The judge, April M. Perry, a Biden appointee, heard a first round of arguments on the issue on Monday but declined to issue an immediate ruling. In the days since, National Guard troops from Texas and Illinois have mobilized in the region, with some staging at an Army Reserve facility about 50 miles southwest of Chicago.The deployment in Illinois over the objection of Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, follows efforts by the Trump administration to send troops into two other Democratic-led states, California and Oregon, without the support of state officials.Last weekend, a federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the president’s deployment of troops into Portland. A federal appellate panel is scheduled to consider the Trump administration’s appeal of the Oregon ruling on Thursday at the same time as the hearing in Judge Perry’s Illinois courtroom.The move to use the Guard in the Chicago area comes weeks into an Illinois immigration enforcement campaign that has infuriated state and local officials and left residents on edge. President Trump has long spoken out about crime in Chicago, describing the city in harsh terms and criticizing state and local laws that limit coordination with immigration agents. On Wednesday, the president posted on social media that he believed Mr. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago, both Democrats, “should be in jail” for what he described as “failing to protect ICE Officers!”The governor has described the plan to deploy troops as an “invasion” and accused the president of upending constitutional norms. The mayor has said the president “wants to terrorize people and keep us in fear.” In their lawsuit seeking to block the Guard deployment, lawyers for the state and city said the deployment “reflects an unconstitutional attempt to infringe on Illinois’s power.”The Trump administration has defended the deployment as well within the president’s authority. Republican attorneys general from 18 states noted in a court filing that protesters in Illinois have sometimes clashed with federal agents. They told the judge that mobilizing the Guard in response was appropriate.“President Trump’s deployment of a small number of National Guard members to defend against this lawlessness is responsible, constitutional and authorized by statute,” the brief from the Republican attorneys general said.In court on Monday, Judge Perry peppered lawyers for the Trump administration with questions about the planned deployment. She wanted to know where in Illinois the troops could be posted and when they would arrive on the streets. At multiple points she suggested, but did not demand, that the administration hold off on sending troops into the streets until she could more fully weigh the lawsuit.“If I were the government, I might strongly consider taking a pause on this until Thursday,” said Judge Perry, who could rule on state and local officials’ request to temporarily block the deployment during the Thursday hearing or at any point afterward.At one point on Monday, when lawyers for the Trump administration asked for a week to respond to the lawsuit, Judge Perry asked if they would be “willing to hold off a week before deploying them here.”“I am not able to represent that we will do that,” said Eric Hamilton, a lawyer for the federal government.The lawsuit has placed an intense spotlight on Judge Perry, who was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in November, in the waning days of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency.Judge Perry, a former corporate lawyer and federal prosecutor, had previously been nominated to be the top federal prosecutor in Chicago by Mr. Biden. That nomination was derailed by JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio and now the vice president.Mr. Vance said on the Senate floor that his objection to the nomination of Ms. Perry and others was “not specific to the qualifications or the particular individuals” but rather based on his concern that the Justice Department had been politicized by the Biden administration. Ms. Perry was later nominated by Mr. Biden and confirmed by the Senate for the judgeship. New York Times, Librarian Fired in Books Dispute to Receive $700,000 Settlement, Adeel Hassan, Oct. 9, 2025. County officials in Wyoming fired Terri Lesley, a library director, after she refused to purge children and young adult books that contained sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes.A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from a library’s children and young adult sections was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday.Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit in April for defamation and the violation of her civil rights against the county, its board of commissioners, the library board and individual members of both government boards.The lawsuit accused them of violating her First Amendment right to free speech, and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way. She had worked for the local library system since 1996 and directed the system for about 11 years.Ms. Lesley found herself in the middle of a dispute in 2021 over which books belonged on the county library’s shelves — a debate that has been playing out across communities and school boards, as so-called book bans have surged in the United States.In June that year, the library highlighted L.G.B.T.Q. books to mark Pride Month.Many of those books had been on the shelves in the children’s or young adult’s sections for years before Ms. Lesley heard any complaints, she said.Some people behind the challenges took issue with the placement of the books. One resident told the county library board that the L.G.B.T.Q. books should be moved to the library’s adult section to protect the emotional, physical and mental health of children, as reported by the Gillette News Record.But Ms. Lesley resisted the calls to move or remove the books.Campbell County is among the most conservative areas in a very conservative state, but hundreds of people showed up at a special library board meeting when Ms. Lesley was fired, most of them in support of her, the Gillette News Record reported at the time. There were also a few dozen residents who showed support for the board.After the news of the settlement, Ms. Lesley’s lawyer, Iris Halpern, said, “We care fundamentally about our constitutional rights and we fundamentally care about our neighbors, even if they’re different than us, and want them to have equal access to our public institutions.”A county official said that when Ms. Lesley brought suit, a claim was filed with Campbell County’s insurance company. While the county did not comment on the settlement, a lawyer for the insurance company said that the county had settled “early,” before an expensive federal trial. “Nobody won or lost,” the lawyer said in an emailed statement. The lawyer emphasized that there was no admission of fault and that this was the “least inconvenient manner” to end the suit.Books with gay and lesbian themes have been a flashpoint in schools and public libraries for years. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that parents with religious objections at a public school district in Maryland could opt their children out of classroom instruction about books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes.Book challenges and removals soared around 2021, fanned by a network of conservative groups that spread lists of book titles they considered objectionable on social media.States and local governments have been banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to data from the American Library Association and PEN America, the free speech organization.The restrictions have become so “rampant and common” on books in public schools that in some states, like Florida and Utah, they are now considered a “routine and expected part of school operations,” according to a PEN America report issued last week. A separate lawsuit filed by Ms. Lesley that accuses three members of a family of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress will continue.New York Times, Katie Porter Goes Viral for ‘Unhappy’ TV Interview in California Governor’s Race, Laurel Rosenhall, Oct. 9, 2025 (print ed.). The former Democratic congresswoman, known for her own grilling of executives on Capitol Hill, threatened to abandon an interview after she was asked several follow-up questions.Things had been looking up for Katie Porter’s bid to become the next governor of California.In July, Kamala Harris decided not to run in next year’s contest, opening the door for candidates with less name recognition. And Ms. Porter, a former congresswoman known for her sharp tongue on Capitol Hill, has been the top-polling Democrat in a large field hoping to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom of California when he leaves office.But late Tuesday, Ms. Porter went viral for the wrong reasons after a video of her exchange with a local television journalist became a must-see clip for the political set. In the three-minute video, she dismissively rejected a question that suggested she needed to reach out to Republicans and threatened to abandon the interview after she was frustrated with several follow-ups.Rivals from both parties seized on the interview to mix it up in what’s been, until now, a very sleepy race.Fellow Democratic candidates said Ms. Porter “thinks she’s already won,” “can’t answer basic questions” and that the governor’s race is “no place for temper tantrums.” One opponent called on her to drop out of the race.Megyn Kelly, the conservative commentator, called it “the most entertaining, unifying thing since tiger king!”By Wednesday afternoon, a video of the exchange posted by an Axios reporter had racked up two million views on X, far more than the original segment probably would have attracted.It all started when Julie Watts, a CBS News reporter in Sacramento, asked Ms. Porter about Mr. Newsom’s plan to gerrymander congressional districts to help Democrats flip House seats and thwart President Trump in the second half of his term. Ms. Porter said she supported the measure.Ms. Watts then asked what Ms. Porter would say to the “40 percent of California voters, who you’ll need in order to win, who voted for Trump?”“How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” Ms. Porter said, leaning forward and furrowing her brow. She then turned her head, seeming to look at someone off camera, and laughed dismissively.The two went back and forth over whether she needed to appeal to Republicans, and Ms. Porter said, “I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?”After another 40 seconds of sparring, Ms. Porter said she wanted to end the interview because Ms. Watts was asking too many follow-up questions.She gestured as if she was going to remove her microphone, but did not, telling Ms. Watts, “I don’t want to have an unhappy experience with you, and I don’t want this all on camera.”The exchange amounted to a self-inflicted wound — and perhaps some comeuppance — for a candidate known for her own tough questioning of executives on Capitol Hill. In those cases, Ms. Porter often went viral on social media for making her witnesses squirm.Her campaign spokesman, Nathan Click, pointed out that Ms. Porter answered questions from Ms. Watts for another 20 minutes after the viral exchange. A CBS spokesperson said on Wednesday that Ms. Porter stayed for the full interview.On Wednesday, Politico published a video from 2021 in which Ms. Porter used an expletive as she yelled at a staff member who stepped into her shot as she recorded an interview with a Biden administration official. The aide was trying to correct something that Ms. Porter had said.After the video surfaced, Ms. Porter issued a statement suggesting that the exchange was an example of how she has held herself and her staff to a high standard.“That was especially true as a member of Congress,” the statement said. “I have sought to be more intentional in showing gratitude to my staff for their important work.”The 2026 California governor’s race, so far, has been defined more by what has not happened than what has. For months, the biggest question was whether Ms. Harris would run for the state’s top office after she lost the presidential election to Mr. Trump last year.Two experienced Democrats — Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor, and Toni Atkins, a former legislative leader — dropped out of the race after polling in the single digits for nearly a year.With few candidates gaining traction, supporters of Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, have begun a whisper campaign urging him to run.“I am weighing it,” Mr. Padilla recently told The New York Times in a conversation for The Interview podcast.Meanwhile, candidates running against Ms. Porter saw an opportunity to make the most of her gaffe.Betty Yee, a former state controller, called on Ms. Porter to drop out of the race.Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, released a three-minute television ad on Wednesday afternoon that consisted almost entirely of Ms. Porter’s exchange with Ms. Watts. Mr. Villaraigosa’s campaign said the ad would air on Sacramento television stations starting on Thursday.In the final seconds of the commercial, he says, “I approve this ad because we need leaders who will solve hard problems and answer simple questions.”New York Times,Harvard Seeks Assurances as Talks Restart in Washington, Michael C. Bender, Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Blinder, Oct. 9, 2025. University leaders are wary of a new proposal from the Trump administration to impose far-reaching changes in higher education.As talks between Harvard University and the Trump administration resume on Thursday in Washington over the president’s far-reaching effort to bring the nation’s oldest university to heel, the school’s new negotiator, the billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, must navigate a fresh challenge over the government’s multiplying demands on higher education.Last week, President Trump made a surprise announcement that Harvard and the government were near an agreement that would allow the university to continue to receive billions in research funds. But a day later, his administration sent letters to nine universities that asked campus leaders to embrace a plan that would align the Trump administration’s political agenda with preferred access to federal research dollars.Harvard officials have since discussed internally the possibility of seeking additional assurances from the administration that the university will not be subject to further demands once an agreement has been signed, according to two people briefed on the matter.Administration officials have said the letters to campuses were attempts to solicit feedback, not ultimatums. Still, the requests concerned Harvard leaders because three of the schools had either agreed to deals with the administration or were in negotiations.The White House has wielded investigations and funding cuts to try to compel Harvard to adopt more conservative values, including stricter definitions of gender, deeper government access to student admissions data and more rigorous codes for student conduct.For leaders at Harvard, the abrupt introduction of last week’s proposal to other schools underscored one of their most pressing questions about the value of hammering out a deal with the Trump White House. Why spend the extraordinary amount of time, money and political capital required for an agreement with Mr. Trump, some have asked, if his administration will return months later seeking more?U.S. Health CareLincoln Square Media,The Coming Health Care Disaster: Drs. Farhan Bhatti & Christopher Ford Speak Out, Susan J. Demas, Oct. 9, 2025. Our health care system is in crisis with Medicaid cuts, ACA subsidies expiring, rural hospitals closing, scientific research cuts, and rampant information from HHS Secretary RFK Jr.Health Care is in crisis with Medicaid cuts, ACA subsidies expiring, rural hospitals closing, scientific research cuts, and rampant information from HHS Secretary RFK Jr.Millions risk losing coverage as federal ACA subsidies expire, pushing families toward unaffordable premiums and ER-only care.Rural hospitals face collapse, threatening access and livelihoods while states like Michigan scramble to backfill lost federal funding.Trump’s HHS, led by RFK Jr., is dismantling evidence-based medicine, turning public health into partisan ideology.Doctors urge patients to trust science and local clinicians over misinformation—and to remember that elections decide who lives with care.Dr. Chris Ford, an emergency physician from Wisconsin, called the situation “the difference between life and death.” For 24 million Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act’s tax credits, the GOP’s refusal to renew them will mean skyrocketing premiums and lost coverage. Ford described a future already arriving in his ER — patients choosing between rent and medication, parents delaying care until it’s too late, and rural residents driving hours for basic treatment. “These effects will hit the people who can least afford them,” he warned.In Michigan, Dr. Farhan Bhatti sees that fear daily. In addition to being state lead for the Committee to Protect Health Care, his clinic also serves the working poor —families doing everything right yet priced out of the system. While Michigan Democrats safeguarded Medicaid funding in their state budget, Bhatti noted that most states won’t or can’t follow suit. His message was blunt: Empathy and evidence must return to leadership, or “we just keep going backwards.”The conversation took an even darker turn with Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services. Bhatti described a “hyperpartisan” assault on science, from gutting vaccine oversight to dismantling the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that sets national screening standards. Ford added that physicians now find themselves countering misinformation from the very institutions meant to protect public health. “We have to speak louder than those using disinformation at the highest levels,” he said.Both doctors ended on the same truth: Medicine can’t survive without trust. Bhatti put it plainly — facts still matter, and patients can still rely on their doctors, regardless of politics. “When I say a treatment is safe, they listen — even if President Trump says otherwise.” For these physicians, the path forward isn’t just advocacy; it’s restoring the human connection that keeps democracy, and medicine, alive.New York Times,E.R. Told Him. Days Later, He Was Dead, Lisa Miller, Updated Oct. 9, 2025. Sam Terblanche was just 20 years old. Can a busy E.R. handle the hardest cases?On Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, Sam Terblanche, a junior at Columbia University, went to a soccer match at Yankee Stadium. On the subway ride there, he told friends he felt lousy. On Sunday, he went to the emergency room complaining of headache and chills. On Monday, sicker, he went again. On both visits, Sam was discharged with a reassuring prognosis: “Acute viral syndrome.”Listen to this article with reporter commentarySam updated his parents by text as he was leaving the hospital on Monday night. “Just a bad virus, will have to advil, vomit, and hydrate it out,” he wrote.“Ugh,” his father responded, “Good news re no major known problem (I guess).”On Thursday, Sept. 21, Sam’s father, Villiers Terblanche, received a call from a Columbia dean. “When he said ‘I’ve got sad news,’ I knew something bad happened,” Terblanche recalled in a deposition. He had the call on speaker phone in the family’s living room. “It became really chaotic for a few minutes because Louise” — Sam’s mother — “was screaming with the most piercing primal scream I’ve heard in my life and Ben” — Sam’s younger brother — “lost it.”Two years after Sam’s death, his father (who is known as “VT”), still can’t understand how his 20-year-old son could have sought help at the Mount Sinai Morningside emergency department twice in 24 hours then died alone in his dorm room two days later.Terblanche met with the chief medical officer, Tracy Breen (who has since become the hospital’s president), two months after Sam died. He made a recording of the meeting and handed it over as part of pretrial discovery. In a well-lit room, seated at a conference table, Breen explained that after an internal review, Mount Sinai Morningside had concluded that it was “comfortable, satisfied, whatever totally non-helpful word we use” with its decision to discharge Sam from the E.R. It was a “gut punch,” Terblanche told me.Breen conceded that Sam’s death was an emergency provider’s “worst nightmare” and would likely prompt staff to “wonder and feel, like ‘Did I get it wrong?’” At the same time, she informed Terblanche that the details of the review were off limits to him — “confidential and internal.”Terblanche has been a lawyer his whole professional life, and he sees that meeting as a turning point. How can an executive acknowledge that the best doctors sometimes err while also insisting, without providing evidence, that the hospital was blameless? From that moment, he realized that if he wanted answers, he would have to fight. In August 2024, he sued Mount Sinai Morningside and five doctors who work there for medical malpractice and wrongful death. In a statement, Mount Sinai expressed sympathy for the Terblanche family but declined to comment on Sam’s case.“Any patient loss profoundly affects not only families, but also the care teams who dedicate themselves to providing the highest quality care,” the statement said.‘Moving the Meat’Legal proceedings in Terblanche v. Mount Sinai Morningside will linger on the narrow legal definition of “standard of care.” But the case of Sam Terblanche underscores looming questions for everyone who uses emergency rooms: Can we expect emergency physicians, imperfect people treating idiosyncratic patients, to perform almost flawlessly in a system that is stretched to the limit? And when care is flawed, where is the line between adequate and failing — and who, beyond judges and juries, makes that call? There were 155 million visits to emergency rooms in 2022, up from 130 million in 2018, and that number is expected to increase as President Trump’s Medicaid cuts take effect. A third of Americans have no primary care physician, up from a quarter 10 years ago.Jeffrey Epstein Scandals and CoverupsAn apparently deceased Jeffrey Epstein is removed from his cell by emergency workers.CBS News, Investigation: In cell where Jeffrey Epstein died, a scene of disarray that never underwent thorough inspection, experts said, Daniel Ruetenik (a producer with CBS News’ Investigative Unit), Oct. 9, 2025. The federal investigation into the death of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was marred by significant lapses, experts told CBS News, including the failure by investigators to interview potential witnesses, properly preserve certain evidence and run basic forensic tests.Nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown New York City, in what was later ruled a suicide, according to court documents. One of those officers was the only person to attest to seeing Epstein hanging by a bedsheet from his bunk.And details pulled from 90 photos of the cell and other evidence collected in the hours after Epstein’s death — but before FBI agents arrived to process the scene — appear to show a succession of basic oversights, ranging from an absence of evidence markers to items being moved, experts told CBS News.inv-scene-009.jpgThe cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Jeffrey Epstein’s body was found on August 10, 2019 was a scene of disarray. 60 Minutes”The FBI literally has all of the best tools. I mean, spared no expense. They have every tool you can imagine. And they used none of it as far as we can tell,” forensic analyst Nick Barreiro said after reviewing the photos, many of which have never been published. “How are there not way more people pointing out the absurdity of this?”The images were previously obtained by 60 Minutes. After the recent release of surveillance video from the night Epstein died, which appeared to show details that contradicted official reports, CBS News reviewed them and other documents with several forensic experts.The results of the federal investigation were made public in 2023, four years after Epstein’s death, in a report by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General. It concluded that the financier, who entered a guilty plea in 2008 on state-level charges of procuring a child for prostitution, died by suicide. That matched the findings shared by Attorney General William Barr, who told Congress in August he had no doubts that Epstein had taken his own life. But lingering questions, raised by individuals including Epstein’s lawyers and brother, have fueled continued speculation and suspicion.”I do not believe he died by suicide, no,” Epstein’s co-defendant, Ghislaine Maxwell, said this summer during her interview in August with the Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.Epstein’s brother, Mark, told “60 Minutes” in 2020 that, in his view, the evidence he has seen to date points more to murder than suicide. Five years later, he still questions the investigation.”This was never properly investigated as a proper homicide, it was never investigated,” Mark Epstein told CBS News recently.Nothing about the CBS News review into the investigation of Epstein’s death suggests foul play. But the review found that the federal probe did not follow typical investigative procedures into a suspicious death.”Evidence photography 101″Epstein’s body was discovered at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2019 by corrections officer Michael Thomas when he arrived at his cell to deliver breakfast. Thomas said he found the accused felon in a near-seated position, suspended from the top of the bunk by a homemade noose, with his legs straight out and his buttocks approximately 1 inch to 1 and a half inches off the floor, according to the inspector general’s report. Internal corrections department memos obtained exclusively by CBS News described him as “cold,” with “no palpable pulses.”The first FBI agents arrived at the cell more than seven hours later, at 1:35 p.m., according to the 2023 report. But when they arrived, photos show they found a disorganized, rifled-through clutter. Crucially, Epstein’s lifeless body had already been removed from the cell, eliminating a critical source of information investigators would need to determine how and when he died, forensic pathologist Michael Baden said.”The fact that he was moved diminishes the ability to determine how long he was dead before he was found,” Baden said.Emergency medical technicians wrote in their report on the incident, which was obtained by CBS News, that the staff they interacted with could not say when Epstein was last seen alive or describe how he “was found in [the] jail cell other than to say ‘we found him on the ground.'”Inside the cell, piles of linens had been strewn about, mattresses were squeezed into a corner on the floor near his bunk bed and Epstein’s personal items were rearranged or moved, photos from the scene show. Experts who reviewed photos of the scene for CBS News said there were also inconsistencies between the investigators’ official reports and what the images show.inv-scene-045.jpgJeffrey Epstein’s personal belongings and medications were lined up on the top cell of his bunk after his body was found at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10, 2019. 60 Minutes”In those photographs, it was obvious that things were moved around,” said former New York Police Department detective Herman Weisberg, who is now managing director of Sage Intelligence. “It definitely appeared to me that the scene was, for lack of a better term, staged a bit.”Epstein’s medications, a special mask for treating sleep apnea, and at least one piece of fabric tied into a noose appeared in different places over the course of 90 minutes, when a photographer from the medical examiner’s office was documenting the scene.Weisberg and other experts emphasized that, regardless of whether Epstein’s death was a suicide, the cell should have been treated as a crime scene using standard investigatory practices.”It almost appears to me that whoever was investigating this just took it at face value that it was a suicide with no foul play whatsoever, suspected,” Weisberg said. “But in a situation as high-profile as this, I would always, as an investigator, consider that there might be foul play.”While some experts questioned federal investigators’ treatment of the scene, forensic pathologist Judy Melinek, who used to work at the New York City Medical Examiner’s office, said her former employer appears to have handled the case by the book.”It’s just people doing what they normally do for any other case,” Melinek said. “The majority of [cases] if you weren’t such a high profile decedent, the scrutiny would not apply. This is how they treat every other jail death of somebody who is not high profile.”The sequence of evidence photos starts with a picture of the stairs leading up to Epstein’s cellblock, Tier L. Underlying data from the photo shows it was taken at 9:34 a.m. — three hours after Epstein’s body was found, and four hours before federal investigators arrived.Time went by even as the nation’s top law enforcement officer sought a rapid investigation.”I was obviously covering it very quickly and wanted to rule out anything other than suicide,” Barr told Congress in August, adding that “within an hour, or minutes of finding out about it, I directed the [inspector general] to have people in New York go to the scene and conduct an investigation.”On the back wall, a surveillance camera is visible. It was streaming, but was not recording. This was due to a hard-drive malfunction that had previously been identified but not fixed, according to a Justice Department report.Next is a blurry image of the door to Epstein’s cell, number 220. Running underneath the door was a cable that provided power to a CPAP machine. Epstein had initially been assigned to a cell in a different tier, but he was moved to cell 220 for easier access to an outlet, according to Bureau of Prisons records.The jail’s computer systems were never updated to note that move, according to investigators. A source close to the investigation told CBS News that corrections staff rarely updated internal inmate moves, instead preferring to call out their names while in the tiers.Two documents on the door are shown in images after Epstein’s death. One was a printout with Epstein’s personal details and a booking photo. Above that was the ID card for Epstein’s former roommate, Efrain Reyes.Cells typically hold two inmates, and following a suspected suicide attempt two weeks earlier, Epstein was mandated by correction officials to have a cellmate. The day before Epstein’s death, however, Reyes was transferred out of the detention center. Investigators eventually concluded that Reyes’ move allowed Epstein the solitude needed to kill himself.From the first photo to the last, it is clear the scene in the cell was chaotic — so much so that investigators never conclusively determined which strip of bedsheet was around Epstein’s neck when he died. inv-scene-018-2.jpgLinens and mattresses piled in the cell where Jeffrey Epstein’s body was found on August 10, 2019, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan. 60 MinutesPhotos of the bed also raise questions. One shows an orange string hanging from a bar. This picture was included in a 2023 report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, alongside a description of how Epstein was found, suggesting investigators believed that was what he had used to hang himself.If that was the case, and the room hadn’t been disturbed before the photographer arrived, Epstein’s rear would have come to rest on a mattress, instead of hovering over the floor — complicating investigators’ explanation of how he hanged himself.Some of the evidence was not photographed in Epstein’s cell, but instead appeared to be in an entirely different room — one with floor tiles distinct from the bare concrete of Epstein’s cell. These pictures show a defibrillator and another strip of orange cloth tied into a noose-like shape. It is visibly different from the one shown hanging from Epstein’s bed frame. inv-scene-021.jpgAn orange noose-like string and a defibrillator found in what appeared to be an entirely different room than the cell where Jeffrey Epstein’s body was found on August 10, 2019. 60 MinutesThere is no indication in official reports where this noose was found, or which of several knotted strips of bed linen may have been removed from around Epstein’s neck. A rendering of this noose was included in Epstein’s official autopsy. But the Justice Department later revealed in its 2023 report that “the noose depicted is not the ligature Epstein used to kill himself.”By the time FBI agents arrived, it was clear their work would be scrutinized by the top brass inside the Justice Department.”After the suicide, I told the headquarters to make sure that they flooded the zone,” Barr told Congress in an August deposition.There is no indication in any official report that an FBI crime scene investigators, officially known as an Evidence Response Team, ever ran fingerprints or DNA tests on anything found in the cell.Epstein’s autopsy report indicates medical examiners collected fingernail clippings, and swabs from his neck and hands. Epstein’s brother Mark told CBS News that he still hasn’t received any information about the results of DNA tests, if they were carried out, and Barr said in his deposition that he couldn’t remember if they had been done.A 2024 report by Department of Justice researchers warned that investigators risk missing an important “opportunity” to gather evidence “if DNA is not collected at the scene as needed or at the time of examination.” They advised that “body swabs should be considered both at the scene and during autopsy.”Weisberg said investigators left too many stones unturned, missing the opportunity to close the case in a way that would feel conclusive to the public.”In the back of any good investigator’s mind, he’s preparing this to be scrutinized by counsel. In this case, you’re preparing it to be scrutinized by a lot of desktop detectives … so you better have all of your facts straight,” Weisberg said.The FBI “inspected the cell and retrieved what [they] believed to be relevant to its investigation into the cause of Epstein’s death, which included one torn sheet, miscellaneous papers, and an MP3 player,” inspector general investigators wrote in the 2023 report. inv-scene-010.jpgHeadphones belonging to Jeffrey Epstein were found in a Metropolitan Correctional Center cell on August 10, 2019. 60 MinutesForensic analyst Barreiro said he considered the agency’s treatment of the scene to be striking.”Some really shoddy work here, if you can even call it that,” Barreiro said. “I mean there’s an absence of work here.”One basic procedure, which Barreiro referred to as “evidence photography 101,” is photographing scenes in a progression that goes from a wide shot to close-ups, with markers identifying evidence.”There’s no evidence markers in any of these photographs. Like, how do you keep track once you get the stuff back to the crime lab? This is essentially useless,” said Barreiro, a former police detective and an FBI-trained member of the Digital Imaging and Video Recovery Team.InterviewsFederal investigators questioned 54 people before issuing their final report, including three inmates who had been housed on Epstein’s tier, as well as jail staff, administrators, contractors and his brother. However, several other witnesses or their representatives told CBS News they were not interviewed. That included many other inmates housed in Epstein’s tier the night of his death, at least one staffer who arrived at Epstein’s cell shortly after his body was found and nearly all of the visitors he saw in the days leading up to his death.Two witnesses who did provide eyewitness accounts, with their lawyers present, were in the cell directly across from Epstein’s the night he died. One described seeing Thomas, the first corrections officer on scene, enter Epstein’s cell and begin performing CPR, only to emerge holding a rope and a defibrillator. The other said he saw Thomas enter and shake Epstein. He said Thomas tried to pick Epstein up, but fell over. He then began giving chest compressions, the inmate said.The accounts, which appear in the official report, do not explain what is seen in photos of the jail tier — their cell windows covered by papers that could have obscured any view outside.It’s not clear if the cell window was papered over in the time after Epstein’s death but before the first photos were snapped. The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.Attempts to reach Thomas were unsuccessful. A lawyer for his former coworker, Tova Noel, said she would not comment. The former officers agreed to be interviewed by investigators in 2021, as part of a deal that saw prosecutors drop charges of falsifying records related to mandatory checks on Epstein and other inmates, after falling asleep on the job.Other staffers with first-hand knowledge of the scene and other events were never contacted by federal investigators, according to interviews with CBS News.Investigators also decided not to interview some of Epstein’s visitors, several sources told CBS News. The inmate spent the bulk of his daylight hours with a large, rotating cast of attorneys — including on the day before his death. The younger lawyers were there not only to provide counsel , but also “to basically hold his hand” and “babysit,” according to one source. They kept Epstein company, chatting with him about life, politics, literature and any other topic that came to his mind.”You’d think if the investigation was a priority, they’d want to take a run at the younger people who were working for him,” one source told CBS News. “Nothing.” 60min-path-evidence-004-1.pngEvidence bags displaying the words “Epstein bedding” and “Epstein clothing” are seen after Jeffrey Epstein’s body was found on August 10, 2019. 60 MinutesOne lawyer who visited Epstein nine days before his death was David Schoen. He said Epstein told him he was actively planning to fight the criminal charges levied against him.”And this is why I’ve said, that in my view — I don’t have anything to base it on other than anecdotal — I don’t think he committed suicide, because he was very engaged in the idea of fighting the case,” Schoen said. “He hired me. And to kill himself nine days later wouldn’t have made a lot of sense.”While many who were close to Epstein have publicly questioned that he died by suicide, Barr has said it was — and remains — the most logical conclusion. The alternative would’ve been too complicated, Barr said in his August deposition.”This would’ve required coordination from probably two dozen people, maybe, within the prison. And all these people were in different groups,” Barr said. “You know, the people who were repairing the cameras, the people who, you know, were responsible for opening and closing the door, the people who were responsible for putting in a new cellmate, things like that.”Vicky Ward Investigates,“Jeffrey Epstein Must Have Gone To Sleep Every Night, Laughing To Himself…,”Vicky Ward, Oct. 9, 2025. How He Made Fools Of The Plutocracy: Zev Shalev and I Analyze The Latest News Around The Epstein FilesYesterday evening, Zev Shalev and I caught up on James Comey’s arraignment and the latest news and analysis around the Epstein files and the stalling of Congress to release them. You can watch our conversation above. And read Zev’s fascinating analysis of our chat here.Tuesday October 21st is the date that Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, is published. So standby, for my analysis of that in a live video chat at Wednesday 5pm on October 22nd.U.S. Consumers, Jobs, EconomyPopular Information,Accountability Journalism: Lawsuit alleges Prime Day is a fraud, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 9, 2025. The federal class action lawsuit has been ignored by major media outlets, which continue to promote Prime Day deals.In July, Popular Information published an exposé about Amazon’s Prime Day, demonstrating how the retailer deploys deceptive tactics to exaggerate its markdowns and create a false sense of urgency. The piece demonstrated how many featured products are available at similar or lower prices at other times.For example, on July 8, the Ninja Air Fryer Pro XL was on sale for $119.99, which Amazon said is a 33% discount off the list price of $179.99. But the online tool Camel Camel Camel revealed that the air fryer had never been listed at $179.99 until just before Prime Day, and had been available for $119.99 or less every month since last November. The air fryer was available for $119.99 at Macy’s, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Wayfair.In late September, two customers filed a federal class-action lawsuit in Washington State against Amazon, citing the same practices reported in Popular Information. The complaint alleges that Amazon “is rife with fake sales and misleading ‘percent off’ claims.” The plaintiffs claim that many products featured on Prime Day “were never sold, for the last 90 days if not longer, at the stricken through Fake Prior Amazon Price.” According to the lawsuit, Amazon’s conduct amounts to “fraudulent advertising” and “violates Washington’s consumer protection laws, which prohibit ‘unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices.’”The filing of the class action lawsuit has received no coverage in the mainstream media. CNN, NBC News, the New York Times, Fox News, USA Today, and Marketwatch ignored the story. And yet, over the last few days, all of those outlets published one or more articles promoting Prime Day sales to their readers, this time as part of October’s Prime Deal Days.The deals offered during this sale are similarly dubious. For example, a Dyson cordless vacuum is being advertised as 37% off its list price of $629.99. But the vacuum had never been sold on Amazon for $629.99 until September. It’s available on Amazon nearly every month for less than $500. Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays last year, the same vacuum was available on Amazon for $349.99. Although the actual savings to consumers may be minimal, Prime Days have proven extremely successful in generating billions of additional sales for Amazon. This creates pressure on Amazon’s labor force, which already works at a breakneck pace, to push even faster. A 2024 report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee found that 45% of Amazon warehouse employees were injured during a recent Prime Day.When media outlets create lists of featured deals, they include links to the product on Amazon. If a reader clicks the link and makes a purchase, the media outlets receive a cut. This has become a big business. In 2024, Wirecutter, the New York Times’ shopping recommendation site, reportedly drove $1 billion in gross merchandise sales. In the second quarter of 2025, the New York Times reported $70.5 million in affiliate sales revenue, mainly from Wirecutter referrals to Amazon and other retailers.While this arrangement is nearly ubiquitous, it may be incompatible with rigorous coverage of Amazon’s business practices.The Prime Day lawsuit was filed days before Amazon paid a $2.5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle allegations that it tricked customers. The settlement resolved allegations “that Amazon enrolled millions of consumers in Prime subscriptions without their consent, and knowingly made it difficult for consumers to cancel.” These practices are known as “dark patterns.”Specifically, the FTC alleged that “Amazon created confusing and deceptive user interfaces to lead consumers to enroll in Prime without their knowledge.” The FTC said it had obtained documents in preparation for a trial showing “Amazon executives and employees knowingly discussed these unlawful enrollment and cancellation issues.”As part of the settlement, Amazon will also have to end certain practices. For example, it can no longer require consumers to click a button saying, “No, I don’t want free shipping,” to opt out of Prime enrollment. $1.5 billion of the settlement will go to consumers “impacted by unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation.”Oct. 8 New York Times,Updates: Comey Will Seek to Dismiss Case as Vindictive Prosecution, Glenn Thrush, Oct. 8, 2025. The former F.B.I. director pleaded not guilty during a hearing in federal court. He requested a jury trial, which was set for Jan. 5, and clarity on the two charges against him.James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director reviled by President Trump and targeted as part of his retribution campaign, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday morning in federal court in Alexandria, Va.The judge overseeing the hearing set a trial date for Jan. 5. But Mr. Comey’s lead lawyer, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said he intended to file motions to dismiss the case before then, including one accusing the government of vindictive and selective prosecution based on Mr. Trump’s public demand that Comey be prosecuted.Mr. Fitzgerald, a former federal prosecutor, also said the Justice Department’s rush to charge Mr. Comey had left his defense team unclear about the specifics of the counts he is facing. Mr. Comey was indicted last month in a two-page filing that offered almost no details on the accusations.“We still have not been told who Person 3 and Person 1 are,” Mr. Fitzgerald said, referring to the indictment. He later added: “We still haven’t been told precisely what is in count 1 or count 2.”Mr. Comey faces one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove.Here’s what else to know:
- Routine proceeding: Mr. Comey’s plea and request for a jury trial were entered in a brief appearance before Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff. Judge Nachmanoff said he was “a little skeptical” about prosecutors’ insinuations that the case was complex enough to require extra time. “This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case,” he said.
- Bitter history: The case against Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, is the most significant legal action taken against people Mr. Trump has publicly targeted. His indictment came shortly after the president all but commanded his attorney general to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
- Rocky path: The case against Mr. Comey proceeded over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. The prosecutor who ultimately handled it was Lindsey Halligan, a White House lawyer hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to support an indictment.
- The defense: Mr. Comey’s defense is being led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was himself once a prominent federal law enforcement official. As a federal prosecutor in New York and then Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald played major roles in several important terrorism cases and successfully prosecuted two former governors of Illinois, George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, in corruption cases.
- President’s impact: Vindictive prosecution motions are notoriously difficult to win, but Mr. Trump’s voluble vitriol and his repeated attacks on his former F.B.I. director could provide Mr. Comey’s defense with an avenue to protect him.
The district judge presiding in the case, Michael Nachmanoff, projected an air of polite impatience with the prosecution in Comey’s arraignment hearing, and said he was “skeptical” of the government’s claim that there would be significant classified evidence introduced. He made it clear he did not want to drag the proceedings along.Charlie Savage, Legal policy reporter: There has been discussion among legal commentators about whether the Trump’s administration’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney was invalid, in which case the indictment she obtained could be thrown out.The issue is that when there is a vacancy in the position, the attorney general is able install someone as an “interim” U.S. attorney for 120 days, but after that expires, the law says a federal court can decide who next serves as interim.The U.S. attorney who was removed for refusing to bring a case against Comey based on the available evidence, Erik Siebert, had already served a 120-day term as an attorney general appointment. The question is whether the Trump administration had the authority to make a second interim appointment. New York Times,How Trump Is Using the Justice Department to Target His Enemies, Alan Feuer and Lily Boyce, Oct. 8, 2025. From the moment Donald J. Trump began his campaign to return to the White House, he has expressed a clear desire to seek vengeance against his enemies.He has complained relentlessly about the multiple cases filed against him during the Biden administration and has used them as a justification for seeking retribution, arguing that the Justice Department was “weaponized” against him under his predecessor.In power, Mr. Trump has now weaponized the department to his own ends, critics say, in a more direct manner than any president since the Nixon era. His calls for prosecutors to file criminal charges against his adversaries have eroded the Justice Department’s decadeslong tradition of independence from the White House and threatened the rule of law.The Justice Department, now led by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyers, has fired dozens of career prosecutors, many of whom had worked on cases involving Mr. Trump. And the president and his allies have targeted or pushed out several U.S. attorneys as he seeks quick movement on cases involving a number of his foes.Each of the targets Mr. Trump has pursued through the Justice Department has denied wrongdoing, in statements or through lawyers. Here is a look at them:
- James Comey, Former FBI Director
- Open Society Foundations: Global grant network founded by George Soros
- Fani Willis: District attorney Fulton County, Ga.
- John O. Brennan: Former C.I.A. director
- Adam B. Schiff, Senator, Democrat of California
- Letitia James. Attorney general of New York
New York Times,3 Key Takeaways From the Bondi Hearing, Devlin Barrett, Updated Oct. 8, 2025. The session before a Senate panel featured more fireworks than facts as Democrats and the attorney general repeatedly clashed.Attorney General Pam Bondi (shown above in an unrelated file photo) spent more than four contentious hours on Tuesday testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she sparred repeatedly with Democrats over her handling of the Justice Department as President Trump erodes its independence and seeks prosecutions of his enemies.Here are three key takeaways from the hearing.Bondi put on a combative, cagey performance.Ms. Bondi spent much of the hearing counterpunching against Democrats, who demanded answers about how she was overseeing a raft of politically sensitive cases, and the firings and resignations of prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who handled such cases. The hearing was far more confrontational than the last time she appeared before the committee in January.Back then, Ms. Bondi pledged to run an independent Justice Department, but Democrats said her tenure in just nine months had shown that to be a hollow promise. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois accused her of leaving “an enormous stain in American history.”When Mr. Durbin challenged the president’s decision to send National Guard troops to Chicago, Ms. Bondi replied, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.”Democrats also repeatedly asked about the decision by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department to drop an investigation of the White House border czar, Tom Homan, who has denied committing any crimes.In September 2024, Mr. Homan accepted a Cava bag with $50,000 cash in it, as part of an undercover F.B.I. investigation in which agents posed as businessmen seeking federal contracts, according to people familiar with the matter, who said there was an audio recording of the interaction.Ms. Bondi refused to say at the hearing whether Mr. Homan kept the $50,000.“Clearly, you’re a failed lawyer,” she told Senator Adam B. Schiff of California, himself a target of an investigation Mr. Trump has pushed for, when he pressed her on the Homan inquiry.Mr. Schiff pressed further: Would she support the release of the recording?“Will you apologize to Donald Trump?” she shot back.The Real Michael Cohen,Opinion: Bondi Torches Justice For Trump, Michael Cohen, right, Oct. 8, 2025. Pam Bondi didn’t testify; she detonated. Oversight collapsed into insults, lies, and theater, while Republicans clapped like seals and democracy sank one more rung into the abyss.If you want a snapshot of just how divided this country is, look no further than yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Picture it: America’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Pam Bondi, parked at the witness table, smirking like she was auditioning for Fox News primetime, stonewalling basic questions, hurling personal insults, and thumbing through a manila folder of pre-scripted attacks like it’s amateur night at a high school debate team. Half the room applauded her every word like she was performing at a MAGA rally. The other half sat dumbstruck, wondering how we’re supposed to run a democracy when a congressional oversight hearing devolves into a WWE smackdown event.This is where we are. The Attorney General of the United States; our supposed guardian of the law, calls senators “liars,” “failed lawyers,” and “antifa sympathizers” rather than answering questions about bribery investigations, the Epstein files, and corruption at the heart of her own Justice Department. And what do Republicans do? They treat it like an audition for America’s Got Partisan Talent. Standing ovation, roses on the stage, praise for her “courage” to “stand up to the radical left.” Someone hit the golden buzzer and let the confetti fly. I mean, you’d think she just cured cancer instead of refusing to answer questions about whether her office covered up for Jeffrey Epstein and Tom Homan.And here’s the kicker: Bondi, right, leaned into it. She relished it. She played the role she was cast in; a political bodyguard for President Trump. Every insult she lobbed wasn’t spontaneous; it was rehearsed, written on paper, tucked neatly in her folder. Transparency? Accountability? Forget it. This wasn’t an oversight hearing; it was a political theater production, and the audience was already divided down the middle before the curtain went up.When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse asked about Epstein’s ties to Trump and whether photos existed of Trump with young women, Bondi’s response wasn’t denial or clarification. It was attack, counterattack, and projection. She accused Whitehouse of taking money from Epstein’s confidants; no evidence, no proof, just a smear. That’s how Bondi operates. Don’t answer. Don’t explain. Attack, distract, and deflect. It’s Trump’s playbook, and she’s running it with laser sharp precision.What makes it alarming isn’t just her behavior; it’s the reaction. Republicans cheered her like she’d landed a knockout punch on the deep state. Democrats, meanwhile, walked out of the room warning that the nation’s top law enforcement agency has become nothing more than a presidential protection racket. Both sides can’t even agree on the basic job description of an Attorney General. Half the country thinks she’s saving the republic, the other half thinks she’s burning it to the ground.And, let’s not sugarcoat it: Pam Bondi is Donald Trump’s newest Roy Cohn. A loyalist who believes her mission is not justice, but vengeance. She’s not at the DOJ to enforce the law; she’s there to weaponize it on Trump’s behalf and to shield him and his cronies from possible consequences. And yesterday, she showed just how far she’ll go. Calling a senator “antifa” for daring to ask about bribery? That’s not governance. That’s propaganda with a government paycheck or a CAVA bag filled with cash.I sat in enough rooms with Donald Trump to recognize the strategy. He doesn’t hire people to run agencies; he hires them to run interference. To protect him. To punch his enemies in the face; and as hard as possible. Bondi’s Senate testimony wasn’t just combative; it was a masterclass in sycophancy. Her refusal to release the Epstein files is no accident. Her hostility toward oversight isn’t personal. It’s the job. Her job.And the result? A hearing that was supposed to be about accountability turned into a circus of finger-pointing and grandstanding. For the average American watching at home; if they could stomach more than five minutes, it confirmed what they already fear: government doesn’t work. Not because the system is broken beyond repair, but because the people running it no longer believe in the system at all.We are now at a place where truth doesn’t matter, rules don’t matter, and even congressional oversight; the most basic function of checks and balances, has turned into performance art for social media soundbites. Pam Bondi’s defenders will clip her one-liners and slap them on Truth Social, instagram and TikTok with fire emojis. Her critics will write op-eds calling her the most partisan AG in modern history. And the rest of us? We’re left staring into the abyss of a country so fractured that we can’t even hold a functional hearing about the most serious corruption scandals in our government. Seriously, if we can’t even agree that child sex trafficking and rape demands accountability, then we are truly screwed as a country.So, here’s the truth: when oversight hearings become arenas for insults instead of answers, democracy loses. When the Attorney General carries a folder of pre-planned slurs and insults instead of evidence, the law loses. And when one half of the country cheers it on like a football game, the people lose.Pam Bondi didn’t just fail to answer for her conduct yesterday; she put on display exactly what the Trump era has done to our institutions. It has turned them into stages for division, into megaphones for lies, into shields for corruption.The real tragedy here? Half of America is actually applauding. More On U.S. Governance, Politics New York Times,Trump’s H-1B Visa Fee Could Strain Universities and Schools, Madeleine Ngo, Oct. 8, 2025. Higher education leaders and public-school superintendents say they depend on skilled foreign workers to fill critical roles.President Trump’s $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas will have major consequences for tech companies and financial firms. But the effects of the new fee will also ripple across the education system and show up in classrooms across the country.Higher education leaders and public-school superintendents say the steep fee will hurt schools that depend on foreign workers to fill critical teaching roles. Some university and college presidents said it would impede their ability to hire faculty members through the visa program, which allows educated foreign citizens to work in “specialty occupations.” Others said their school districts could not afford the fee, making it harder for them to find math and special education teachers.The change is yet another blow to colleges and universities that have been squeezed by the Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on higher education. Federal officials have frozen billions in research funds, demanded hefty payments from top schools, intensified vetting of student visas and pursued civil rights investigations into dozens of universities.Administration officials say the H-1B visa program lets employers sideline American workers and suppress their wages. They have argued that the new fee will help counter that by encouraging employers to prioritize hiring domestic workers.But some education leaders said they worried the change would make institutions less competitive and restrict their ability to hire the best candidates.“It’s not as if this is done on a whim because we’re trying to replace American workers,” said Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “It is done based on what the Trump administration is calling for — on merit and who’s the most qualified.”Dr. Pasquerella said many schools depended on the visas to fill positions in the STEM and medical fields. She said she was particularly concerned that the pipeline for foreign physicians would be further constrained.Although she said that not all STEM fields faced worker shortages, there was still a need in areas like nuclear engineering and material science. She said the new fee would also hurt universities’ ability to innovate and make advancements in fields like artificial intelligence because “global collaboration is being undermined.”Tech companies are among the biggest users of H-1B visas. The professional, scientific and technical services sector accounted for nearly half of all approved petitions for H-1B workers in the 2024 fiscal year, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Educational services made up about 7 percent, a smaller but sizable amount.Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland and the University of Pennsylvania are among the institutions that have had the most H-1B visas approved in recent years.Some university leaders said the policy change would impede their ability to hire as many employees who need skilled-worker visas.“It will depend upon the subject-area expertise,” said Dr. Jeffrey P. Gold, the president of the University of Nebraska system. “But if we had to absorb this cost, it will definitely reduce our ability to hire individuals with H-1B visas.”About 500 employees in the system currently have H-1B visas, Dr. Gold said. Although that is a small number compared with the university’s total work force of roughly 16,000, many of those workers fill important positions in the technology and precision agriculture field, he said. Some also work as physicians or professors at the university’s medical center.The new fee could result in leaving some positions unfilled, cutting expenses in other areas or passing on higher costs to students, Dr. Gold said. Although the university always prioritizes hiring domestic workers, he said, it can be difficult to find enough qualified workers to fill certain roles. New York Times,Senate Confirms ‘Sharpiegate’ Meteorologist to Lead NOAA, Scott Dance, Oct. 8, 2025 (print ed.). Neil Jacobs was found to have violated NOAA’s code of ethics after an investigation into an incident that centered on an altered hurricane forecast map in 2019.The Senate on Tuesday evening confirmed a new leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, installing Neil Jacobs, the acting director during the hurricane forecasting controversy of the first Trump administration known as “Sharpiegate.”Senators voted, 51-46, to confirm a bloc of nominees that also included U.S. attorneys and foreign ambassadors.Dr. Jacobs, an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist who has stressed a strong desire to improve the accuracy of U.S. weather forecasting models, is generally respected across NOAA, which oversees much of the federal climate research that the administration has targeted for deep cuts.At the same time, he has faced criticism and rebuke for his tenure during President Trump’s first term.Dr. Jacobs was found to have violated NOAA’s code of ethics in 2020 after an investigation into an incident that centered on an altered hurricane forecast map President Trump presented in the Oval Office in 2019. The investigation found he had bowed to political pressure in releasing a statement critical of National Weather Service forecasters in Alabama, who had stressed on social media that Hurricane Dorian was not expected to affect that state, despite warnings to the contrary from Mr. Trump.During a confirmation hearing in July, he told senators he would not handle such a situation the same way again.At the same hearing, he said he stood by the Trump administration’s proposals to dismantle much of NOAA’s climate science enterprise, while also diverging from Mr. Trump’s statements that climate change is a “hoax,” a position the president recently stressed in an address to the United Nations General Assembly.Mr. Jacobs told senators in July he believed human activity bore some responsibility for the rapid warming of the planet over recent decades, something the vast majority of earth scientists agree upon.More U.S. PoliticsNew York Times,Texas’ Blue-State Deployments Shred Relations Between Governors, J. David Goodman, Oct. 8, 2025. State leaders have prided themselves on finding bipartisan consensus, but President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops from Texas to Illinois has ripped the veneer off that image.The deployment of Texas National Guard troops to Illinois at the behest of President Trump has divided the nation’s governors, severing the bonds between state leaders who have long portrayed themselves as above the partisan fray.The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, along with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, both Democrats, have threatened to leave the once-chummy National Governors Association, a group formed more than 100 years ago and dedicated to finding areas of bipartisan agreement even in fractious political times.Instead, Democratic governors are accusing Republicans, especially Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, of a betrayal, even an “invasion” of their states.“Greg Abbott is a tool of Donald Trump, he’s his lackey,” said Mr. Pritzker in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC this week.Mr. Abbott returned fire, calling Mr. Pritzker “clueless.”Such animus would once have been considered unusual or out of bounds for governors, who generally have seen themselves as pragmatic politicians, required to balance budgets and find solutions for their states, regardless of party. The governors have hosted “disagree better” road shows in between twice-annual meetings and White House galas marked by bonhomie.But the deployment of about 200 troops from Texas to the Chicago area, and the threatened movement of Texas troops to Portland, Ore., have ruptured such comity.“The president wants to call up National Guard troops in a way that we don’t believe is lawful,” Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, a Democrat, said in an interview. “That should concern every governor, Republican or Democrat.”Democratic governors pleaded with Mr. Abbott to rebuff the president’s troop request. The Texan in turn castigated his Democratic colleagues as weak on crime and illegal immigration.Editors’ PicksPumpkin Is Not a Spice36 Hours in Busan, South Korea6 Tree Houses You Can Rent for Glamour With a Rustic VibeFor Mr. Pritzker and Mr. Abbott, the rift over Texas troops is only the latest in an ongoing and bitter public feud that has not been a model of respectful debate.The Contrarian,Opinion: Stephen Miller is the Poster Boy for the Rabid MAGA Movement, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 8, 2025. The more voters see of him, the more repulsed they’ll be.If Donald Trump is concerned about inciting violence he should muzzle his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. Miller has regularly exploded when the courts rule against Trump. He bizarrely threatened to suspend habeas corpus.Miller also let on that federal forces would, apparently in violation of posse comitatus, go out on arrests. He recently screeched at Memphis police officers that they were “unleashed.” John Oliver wise-cracked after Miller’s rant, “I’ve got to looks like he still has a soft spot on his skull?!?”No other president would permit an underling to flaunt his racist rhetoric, display blatant animus toward a cross-section of Americans, and peddle his xenophobic, violent schemes. But Trump—until now—has gobbled up all the hate and lies Miller has dished out. (Whether intended or not, his violent-infused demagoguery at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, according to some observers, bore a frightful similarity to Joseph Goebbels’s “The Storm Is Coming” speech.)This week, condemnation of Miller finally seemed to break through. As more attention focuses on his unhinged rants, he risks making himself—like Elon Musk—a toxic figure without the loyal fan base his boss enjoys. While Trump is desperately trying to make the case that the left is to blame for violence (statistically false), one wonders how long he will let Miller stomp all over his messaging.SubscribedEvents in South Carolina over the weekend set off another round of anti-Miller criticism. South Carolina Judge Diane Goodstei recently ruled against the Trump regime in a voting rights case, triggering vile condemnation.The Daily Beast reported:On Sept. 5, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee, posted on X that the DOJ “would not stand” for Goodstein’s ruling.“This [DOJ’s] Civil Rights will not stand for a state court judge’s hasty nullification of our federal voting laws,” Dhillon wrote. “I will allow nothing to stand in the way of our mandate to maintain clean voter rolls.”What followed was a barrage of threatening replies, some calling for Goodstein’s disbarment, others suggesting imprisonment—or worse.As we have seen, after adverse rulings Trump routinely explodes with vile insults and threats, triggering death threats and abuse. (Even the all-too-accommodating Chief Justice John Roberts publicly scolded Trump for threatening to impeach judges who ruled against him.)On Saturday, Goodstein’s home went up in flames. On the same day as the blaze, Miller “posted on X that ‘left-wing terrorism’ is being ‘shielded by far-left Democrat judges,’” in a message viewed more than 6.8 million times.Goodstein was not home when the blaze broke out, but family members were. Her husband had to be hospitalized for “sustained serious injuries when he leapt from the burning structure after assisting family members in their evacuation.” Her son was also hospitalized with serious injuries. No motive has been determined, and as of this writing it is not clear if the fire was intentionally set.Trump has said nothing about the incident. Miller, when challenged by Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) for his vituperative language against judges, refused to condemn the attack and predictably insulted Goldman instead.His lack of respect for the rule of law was illustrated on Monday, when Miller went ballistic after two adverse rulings against Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional attempt to deploy national guard to Portland. “A district court judge has no conceivable authority, whatsoever, to restrict the President and Commander-in-Chief from dispatching members of the US military to defend federal lives and property,” he whined on X. “[The] judicial ruling is one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen — and is yet the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the 2024 election by fiat.” Later, Miller seemed to hint that the regime would not follow the ruling in other jurisdictionsWhen confronted with issues for which he has no rational answer that will fly outside MAGA circles, Miller goes berserk. Asked on CNN on Monday if ICE is racially profiling, he blew up, unleashed a stream of venom against immigrants rather than answer the question:That is the, it’s such a — oh, what a dumb question. The illegal aliens who are here are taking jobs away from Blacks. They’re taking jobs away from whites. They’re taking jobs away from Latinos. They’re taking their health benefits away. They’re taking their school slots away. And of course, in many cases, they’re committing heinous crimes. We cannot have a system of law in this country that privileges illegal aliens over American citizens. And that’s what they’re doing. You know it. And I know it.If that is indicative of the dearth of intellect and maturity in this administration, it is little wonder it loses so frequently in court.Miller’s knee-jerk, irrational response to ordinary, obvious questions is especially problematic given the power he holds. “[A]all of the immigration policy, all of the militarization, not only of ICE, but of our National Guard and our cities is being driven by Stephen Miller, who is out of control. I don’t know where all of his anger and vitriol and hatred comes from, but it’s really deep-seated,” Rep. Goldman observed in our interview yesterday. “And if he has a deep-seated hatred for immigrants, which he has demonstrated over the years, then he’s not interested in operating under the rule of law, following due process.”Unlike any other White House deputy chief of staff in memory, Miller seems to be the chief policy maker in the White House. Trump often seems to be following Miller’s lead (as he did when falsely maintaining that he had won 9-0 at the Supreme Court on an Alien Enemies Act case). Put differently, whatever Miller barks usually becomes what passes for “policy.”It remains to be seen whether Trump or other MAGA Republicans will sour on Miller, or the extent he makes it more difficult to vilify Democrats. (The public may notice Miller seems to be the one determined to incite violence in cities and gin up the mob anger against judges.) Given that his statements prove so damaging that it hampers the government in court, he risks (as Musk did) falling out of favor.In any event, Democrats would be wise to make this snarling, racist, and unhinged character the face of the MAGA party. (Which shouldn’t be too challenging, given the advantage of being true.) California Gov. Gavin Newson, who won in the legal faceoff that blocked California’s guard deployment in Oregon, has started trolling Miller, cracking that he is acting as an “armchair warrior.” Whether mocking his hysterical ranks or dissecting his racial rants, Democrats are wise to keep the focus on the most rabid person in the administration (where the competition is stiff).Even Trump voters who are reluctant to admit they were snookered in 2024 may be persuaded that Miller, and hence this White House, is out of control. Since MAGA Republicans aren’t about to restore sanity, calm, and competence, voters may well decide to hand the reins in the House and the Senate to the only sober adults around: the Democrats.Politico,Sen. Josh Hawley falsely says FBI ‘tapped’ senators’ phones during Jack Smith probe, Kyle Cheney, Oct. 8, 2025 (print ed.). The Missouri Republican referenced FBI documents which revealed the time and duration of calls made and received by lawmakers.Sen. Josh Hawley falsely claimed Tuesday that newly disclosed records revealed that the FBI “tapped” the phones of eight sitting U.S. senators during special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.Hawley was describing an FBI document, publicly released Monday by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, that referenced a “preliminary toll analysis” of nine lawmakers. Grassley underscored that the records revealed a subset of calls made and received by those lawmakers and did not reveal the content of those calls — only the time and duration.Attorney General Pam Bondi, during her Tuesday testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, did not correct Hawley’s characterization of the records. Bondi said she had spoken with FBI Director Kash Patel “at length” about the records and could not discuss the details “for very good reason.”It’s unclear why the FBI reviewed the phone records of the particular set of senators included on the list. Though some, like Hawley, were deeply engaged in efforts to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election, others appeared less involved. New York Times,Trump Takes Aim at Illinois Governor and Chicago Mayor, Luke Broadwater, Oct. 8, 2025. In an early morning Truth Social post, the president said Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should be jailed, accusing them of failing to protect ICE officers.President Trump said on Wednesday that Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should be jailed, escalating his campaign of retribution against those he sees as his political foes.Both Mr. Pritzker and Mr. Johnson are Democrats who have opposed Mr. Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to the Chicago area and have criticized the aggressive way in which the Trump administration has carried out immigration raids. Mr. Johnson has signed an executive order to establish “ICE-free zones” in Chicago to prevent federal agents from staging operations.“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Pritzker said in social media posts that they would not pull back. “This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested,” Mr. Johnson said. “I’m not going anywhere.”And Mr. Pritzker said: “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”The threat to jail Democratic officials who fight against Mr. Trump’s actions comes as the president has taken myriad steps to harm those who oppose him.He has pulled protective details from members of his first administration who face death threats from Iran. He has revoked or threatened to revoke the security clearances of President Biden, members of his administration and dozens of others. His administration has taken steps to target members of the media seen as unfriendly, taken the hatchet to entire agencies perceived as too liberal and fired or investigated government workers deemed disloyal. Democratic candidate Mindy O’Neall (left) defeated Republican incumbent David Pruhs (right) in the Fairbanks mayoral election.Newsweek,Republican Ousted By Democrat in Shock Election Defeat, Khaleda Rahman and Shane Croucher, Oct. 8, 2025. Alaska’s City of Fairbanks Mayor David Pruhs, a Republican, conceded to Mindy O’Neall, a Democrat, in the mayoral election on Tuesday night.According to unofficial election night results made available by the city of Fairbanks, O’Neall received 1,808 votes (54 percent) and Pruhs received 1,528 votes (45.7 percent).The ballot in mayoral elections in Fairbanks does not list party affiliations next to candidates’ names, but Republicans have held the role in Fairbanks for nearly a decade.Pruhs, a conservative backed by local Republicans, was elected mayor in 2022. O’Neall, the presiding officer of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly, was endorsed by the Alaska Democratic Party.Democrats flipping the seat comes as the party hopes to compete in statewide contests for the Senate and House in 2026. The state has only elected one Democratic senator since 1981 and only one Democratic House member since 1973. President Donald Trump easily won the state by double digits in 2016, 2020 and 2024.Democratic candidate Mindy O’Neall (left) defeated Republican incumbent David Pruhs (right) in the Fairbanks mayoral election.What To KnowPruhs conceded the race to O’Neall on Tuesday night as he trailed by more than 250 votes.“The race is over. Mindy O’Neall won. A few votes yet to be counted, but I’m down by 250 votes. The voters have spoken,” he told Alaska’s News Source.Pruhs blamed low voter turnout and O’Neall having the support of the state Democratic Party for his defeat. “It was a perfect storm for her to take the seat, and she did that. So congratulations to Mindy O’Neall,” he said.Lance’s Substack, Commentary: Another Question From A Friend On The 25th Amendment…”How Do We Make This Happen?” Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 8, 2025. This is the most frequently asked question since I took up the issue of Trump’s dementia full bore. I’m happy to keep the dialogue going for the benefit of us all.”I think we have to take a mass political organizing approach on this. Phone calls and emails to Congress and lobbying are not going to force a group of paralyzed bodies to get up and run the triathlalon.We need to create the loudest possible commotion through a sustained in-depth campaign asserting his physical and mental incompetence to hold office. People everywhere should see and hear about this everyday. We will focus on mass outreach to broad layers of the population and make it our leading edge. If we do the work in the right way, Trump will actually force his own removal, because everything he does to impose his agenda, to expand and hold onto power, will serve to prove our case that he is indeed incompetent.We are close to seeing ICE and their armed far-right “Rittenhouses” carrying out Kent State-style massacres in our cities. Have no illusions, these Nazis are wired for it, and they will be paid bonuses by Stephen Miller based upon their body count. There will be bloodshed and retaliation and it won’t be easily contained once it starts. At the point where the oligarchs who installed him realize they have a totally out of control Frankenstein’s monster on their hands which threatens their existence as well, they might just pass the word down from their seats atop Olympus and order their lackeys to start the constitutional process. After all, this unstable idiot has control of the “Football,” the briefcase with the nuclear codes.Vance and his crew as we know are ambitious, so I’m reasonably certain they are waiting in the wings for the go signal. They knew he was demented and sick before the campaign started last year and had to have planned for this.The disadvantage for Vance and his team is that once Trump is out the door, that breaks the hypnotic grip on many, but not all of his followers. The illusions of power, god-sent destiny, his seeming invincibility, especially after the two attempts on his life, all fly out the door with him. People will kill and die for Trump because they are fanatics, but not for his successor, the Yale Law-educated closeted Nazi drag queen and couch-humping eyeliner-wearing husband and father to brownskinned “Indians.” My hope is that because they see him as a flake, the base will “flake off.” I can speak with authority on how cults gradually fall apart when the leader dies.The impetus to remove him from office has to start with the people, from the bottom up. However, the decision to remove him ultimately will come from the top.Our main problem is a conceptual block which I see as generational. We live in the information age in which we have an over-reliance on technology. We often will run into a problem and tend to look for a technical solution, when the changes we are looking for first and foremost are subjective and bear upon the popular mindset, and then if possible wrestling control over the mechanics of government or the legal system, not the other way around. There is no App for stopping fascism in the Apple store or Google play. We are not writing a manual for the install of a new operating system on our PC or the presidency. ChatGPT can answer the questions about the formal process that has to occur under the Amendment, but AI can’t tell us how to make a revolution. We have to get our hands dirty to make that happenAs for myself, I’m not content to just remove him from office, rather to destroy what he stands for. As I wrote earlier today in response to another question—[”A national campaign mobilization for it is what we need to get the Democrats off center, strengthen and support those leaders who do want to fight but are being muzzled by the DNC and/or blacked out by the media. It doesn’t matter what we think the chances of success are. Look at our current situation. The things we were so certain would or could work didn’t. So what about it?What is needed is to overcome the fear, cynicism, and pessimism of people who are in hiding or doing very little, who spend too much time and energy being skeptics and looking for objective technical/logistical/numerical reasons to argue “it won’t work” about virtually every proposal made which involves us taking action.”]Our campaign to remove him under the 25th is not directed at him as much as those people who are blindly following a madman. By saying he is demented, we are in effect telling them that they are temporarily out of their minds, and the more insane things he does the more of them will begin to question their own judgment.I am pushing this not because I’m confident Trump could be removed, but to help bring about a paradigm shift in people’s thinking about our entire situation and what new approach is needed to change it. I am resigned to the reality that this fight will not be won inside the DC beltway, and we will be needing much more than our phones to get ourselves properly organized. We need a grand conspiracy. The oligarchy behind Trump and Vance is evil and devious but not suicidal, and I believe we can make them get rid of their own creation. Once we’ve done that, we mobilize to oust the whole regime which will be weakened, with Vance already tagged as an unelectable lame duck.We have to force Trump to do his worst with his back against the wall, the most insane things of which he is capable in order to remove him. Just like Gandhi and Martin Luther King forced their oppressors to do in waging their revolutions, and thereby induced them to defeat themselves. The process itself, in my view, will begin like a tectonic shift which we can’t see and might not feel right away, but it will happen.” Roll Call,Former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. announces comeback bid in Illinois, Mary Ellen McIntire, Oct. 8, 2025. He joins crowded Democratic primary to succeed Senate hopeful Robin Kelly,Former Illinois Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds and served time in federal prison, announced a comeback bid Wednesday, entering the Democratic primary for the 2nd District.He joins a crowded field seeking the seat being vacated by Rep. Robin Kelly, his successor in Congress who is running for Illinois’ open Senate seat.“On my life’s journey, I’ve borne the burden of self-inflicted pain and suffering. I’ve learned that we cannot be born again from our mother’s womb. We must be born again of a new spirit, a new hope,” Jackson said in his campaign launch video.Jackson, in his video, referred to his legendary father, civil rights leader and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, noting that Wednesday was his father’s 84th birthday.“I am responding to a draft movement to enter this race. Like my father before me, I ask for your vote as a vote for a new direction for this district, this party and this nation,” he said.Jackson was first elected to Congress in a 1995 special election and served for 17 years, representing a deep-blue district that included parts of Chicago’s South Side and surrounding suburban areas. The district now stretches further south into more rural territory outside the Chicago area.In his video, he cited his work on the Appropriations Committee bringing federal dollars to his district and said he hoped to return to Congress to do that again.“Give me a chance to finish what I started,” he said.In this March 2010 photo, Jackson takes photos of his father on the south side of the Capitol. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)In Congress, Jackson helped direct federal funds back to Illinois for the Deep Tunnel Project, which was meant to improve flood protection and water quality across Chicagoland. He also sought unsuccessfully to build a third airport in the area.As a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he was a mostly reliable vote for Democratic priorities. Still, in his launch video he said he “did what was right for his district, even if it meant breaking the party line.”Jackson resigned from Congress in November 2012, citing ongoing health issues. He had been largely absent from Capitol Hill in the preceding months while undergoing treatment for bipolar disorder. In February 2013, he pleaded guilty to repeated personal use of campaign funds, totaling roughly $750,000, and was later sentenced to 30 months in prison.Democrats are shaping up for a competitive primary to succeed Kelly in the 2nd District. Candidates in the race include state Sens. Robert Peters and Willie Preston, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner Yumeka Brown, consultant Eric France, youth pastor Jeremy Young and political strategist Adal Regis.A poll conducted earlier this year found Jackson “well-positioned to win a dominant victory” but would need to win over undecided voters, according to Politico.Jackson was once considered a potential successor to former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley but said he would not run after former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich was found guilty of one count of lying to federal agents.With his comeback bid, Jackson will also be hoping to join his brother in Congress — Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson is currently serving his second term representing the neighboring 1st District.Daily Beast, Bondi Accidentally Reveals Her Burn Book for Fiery Epstein Hearing, Ewan Palmer, Oct. 8 2025. WHOOPS. The attorney general chose to lash out rather than answer questions from lawmakers about the late pedophile.Attorney General Pam Bondi inadvertently revealed a prepared list of put-downs she brought to use against senators during a fiery Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.Close-up photos captured by Reuters photographer Jonathan Ernst revealed that Bondi had a folder containing screenshots of social media posts, bullet-pointed clapbacks, and handwritten notes that she could reference whileThe Atlantic Daily,Commentary: The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here, Tom Nichols, Oct. 7-8, 2025. To capture a democratic nation, authoritarians must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military. President Donald Trump and his circle of would-be autocrats have made rapid progress toward seizing these institutions and detaching them from the Constitution and rule of law.The intelligence community has effectively been muzzled, and the nation’s top lawyers and cops are being purged and replaced with loyalist hacks.Only the military remains outside Trump’s grip. Despite the firing of several top officers—and Trump’s threat to fire more—the U.S. armed forces are still led by generals and admirals whose oath is to the Constitution, not the commander in chief. But for how long?Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army.In his first term, Trump regularly violated the sacred American tradition of the military’s political neutrality, but people around him—including retired and active-duty generals such as James Mattis, John Kelly, and Mark Milley—restrained some of his worst impulses.Now no one is left to stop him: The president learned from his first-term struggles and this time has surrounded himself with a Cabinet of sycophants and ideologues rather than advisers, especially those at the Pentagon. He has declared war on Chicago; called Portland, Oregon, a “war zone”; and referred to his political opponents as “the enemy from within.” Trump clearly wants to use military power to exert more control over the American people, and soon, top U.S.-military commanders may have to decide whether they will refuse such orders from the commander in chief. The greatest crisis of American civil-military relations in modern history is now under way.I write these words with great trepidation. When I was a professor at the Naval War College, I gave lectures to American military officers about the sturdiness of civil-military relations in the United States, a remarkable historical achievement that has allowed the most powerful military in the world to serve democracy without being a threat to it.I so revered this system that I went to Moscow just before the fall of the U.S.S.R. and told an audience of Soviet military officers that they should look to the American military as a model for how to disentangle themselves from the Communist Party and Kremlin politics. I regularly reminded both my military students and civilian audiences that they had good reason to have faith in American institutions and the constitutional loyalty of U.S. civilian and military leaders.This new and dangerous moment has arrived for many reasons, including Trump’s antics in front of young soldiers and sailors, through which he has succeeded in pulling many of them into displays of partisan behavior that are both an insult to American civil-military traditions and a violation of military regulations.Senior military leaders should have stepped in to prevent Trump from turning addresses at Fort Bragg and Naval Station Norfolk into political rallies; the silence of the Army and Navy secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, andsome top generals and admirals is appalling. To their credit, those same officers listened impassively as Trump and Hegseth subjected them to political rants during a meeting at Quantico last week. But young enlisted people and their immediate superiors take their cues from the top, and one day of decorum from the high command cannot reverse Trump’s influence on the rank and file.Trump’s rhetoric in his speeches to the military has been awful—he has ridiculed former commanders in chief, castigated sitting elected officials, and told the members of America’s armed forces that other Americans are their enemies. But his actions are worse. In deploying troops to American cities, he has set up a confrontation in which military commanders may soon have to choose between obeying the president and obeying the law.“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Judge Karin Immergut—a conservative Trump appointee—wrote last week when she blocked Trump’s attempt to send troops to Portland. The White House aide Stephen Miller likely foreshadowed Trump’s next moves, including possibly ignoring such rulings, when he lashed out at Immergut’s decision. Miller, a man who hates being called a fascist, made the fascistic accusation that a “large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is being “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”Trump’s attempt to militarize America’s cities is still being tested in court. But he has already issued other orders that are likely illegal. The president has determined—on his own—that he can go to war against “narco-terrorists,” and he has furthermore decided that he can order the military to blow up these suspected drug runners at will. Several boats have been destroyed and many people have been killed, but neither American law nor international law (including agreements signed by the United States) allow the president to declare a fugazy drug war and then direct the summary execution of people who are not in actual hostilities with the United States and who pose no imminent threat to American lives.The Pentagon keeps fulfilling these orders, but reports are already surfacing that some military commanders are trying to figure out if they face legal exposure for acting as Trump’s personal hit squad. Their questions are likely more difficult to answer since Trump and Hegseth fired the top military lawyers who would have helped field such queries. U.S. Government Shutdown & News RoundupLetters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 7, 2025 [No Pay For Furloughed Workers?],Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 8, 2025. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today floated the idea that workers furloughed during a government shutdown are not guaranteed back pay when the shutdown is resolved.Marc Caputo of Axios broke the story of the new OMB memo this morning. Caputo pointed out that in 2019, during the last government shutdown, President Donald Trump signed a law designed to make it clear that furloughed workers would get paid. Caputo notes that the OMB’s new reading of the law is “a major departure from the administration’s own guidance issued…last month.”Two people familiar with the administration’s plans told Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post that officials are hoping the memo will give the Republicans more leverage against Democrats in negotiations over the shutdown.Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that OMB director Russell Vought had threatened mass firings if Democrats refused to go along with the Republicans’ continuing resolution to fund the government, but the machinery for such firings does not appear to be in place. Marshall notes that the government is, in fact, having to rehire many of the employees it fired early in the year. Now Vought is threatening not to pay furloughed workers, but the 2019 law—a law Trump signed—is clear.Polls show that most Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown and that 78% of Americans want to see the premium tax credits—the issue of healthcare costs on which the Democrats are making a stand—extended. That the administration is concerned about the healthcare issue showed in Trump’s statement to reporters yesterday that “we have a negotiation going on right now with the Democrats that could lead to very good things…with regard to health care.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said “Trump’s claim isn’t true—but if he’s finally ready to work with Democrats, we’ll be at the table.”Of the threat to withhold back pay for furloughed employees, a senior White House official told Caputo: “OMB is in charge.”The power being wielded by unelected officials in the Trump administration echoes the conditions of the U.S. government a century ago. In 1920, Republicans won a landslide victory. They put the handsome, back-slapping Warren G. Harding in the White House in what was widely interpreted as the country’s desire to leave the years of World War I behind them and to stop having to listen to President Woodrow Wilson’s preaching at them (one journalist called Wilson a “frozen flame of righteous intelligence”). Old-school Republicans who rejected the party’s early-twentieth-century progressivism won control of Congress.But the victory offered no clear direction for the country. Party leaders had put Harding at the head of the ticket because he was from Ohio, whose loss in 1916 had cost the Republicans the presidency. Harding celebrated his anti-intellectualism and the fact that, even after a world war, he knew nothing about Europe. He told one of his secretaries he couldn’t make heads or tails of fights over taxes, and he was such a terrible speaker that one man commented that his speeches “leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes those meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”Harding could not manage his corrupt appointees, who became known as the “Ohio Gang,” and spent much of his time drinking and playing poker upstairs at the White House. In the absence of a strong president, the power of the government could have flowed to Congress. But congressional Republicans had spent twenty years obstructing the progressive presidents who had been in the White House since 1901: first Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and then Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Republicans in Congress had become skilled at obstruction, but once in power, they split into factions and quarreled among themselves.Into the vacuum stepped administration officers, notably Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. With them at the helm, the government implemented pro-business policies that would turn the government over to businessmen. Eight years later, the conflagration of the Great Crash and the ensuing Great Depression illustrated just how misguided the abdication of elected lawmakers from their duties had been.In the second Trump administration, the president does not seem especially interested in governance. He seems to want to use the government to persecute those he considers his enemies and to protect and enrich himself.Attorney General Pam Bondi encapsulated that approach to the government when she appeared today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She refused to answer questions, instead attacking Democratic senators. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) pointed out that Bondi refused to answer whether she consulted with career ethics lawyers before approving the gift of a $400 million airplane for Trump from Qatar, who asked that Trump’s name be flagged in the Epstein files, whether “border czar” Tom Homan kept the $50,000 bribe he took for promising to steer contracts toward the men who offered the money, whether career prosecutors found insufficient evidence to charge former FBI director James Comey with lying to Congress, how military strikes on boats in the Caribbean are legal, and so on.Many observers noticed something else, though: Bondi refused to answer a specific question about Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked: “There has been public reporting that Jeffrey Epstein showed people photos of President Trump with half-naked young women. Do you know if the FBI found those photographs in their search of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe or premises or otherwise. Have you seen any such thing?”Bondi, who says she has seen the files, would not answer “no.” Instead, she accused Whitehouse of “trying to slander President Trump.”If Trump were not going to use the power of the government for the good of the American people, Republicans in Congress could have picked up the power that he let fall. But they have chosen not to exercise their Constitutional duties, instead going along with what White House officials want. With their abdication, power appears to have flowed to unelected officials, first to billionaire Elon Musk and now to OMB director Russell Vought, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.As the senior White House official told Caputo: “OMB is in charge.”But those officials were not elected and are operating according to deeply unpopular ideologies.Miller has been pushing the idea that those opposed to the administration are engaged in “insurrection” against the United States, and reporters are increasingly questioning Trump about whether he would invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. That law permits a president to override the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the government from using federal troops against U.S. citizens to enforce the law. Trump’s advisors prevented him from invoking the Insurrection Act in his first term, but he seems open to the idea again, falsely suggesting that Democratic cities are, as he described Portland, Oregon, “War ravaged.”Today in an interview with CNN, Miller went further, claiming that the president has “plenary authority,” that is, complete, unchecked power, to use the military to put down an insurrection. Miller stopped talking, oddly, in midsentence after making that claim, leaving this exception to the rule of law his final phrase. The claim that exceptions to the rule of law reveal where true power rests in a society is central to the philosophy of Carl Schmitt, a German political scientist who joined the Nazis.Today, six former surgeons general, appointed by every Democratic and Republican president since George H.W. Bush, took to the pages of the Washington Post to condemn Kennedy’s actions at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Joycelyn Elders, Vivek Murthy, Antonia Novello, and David Satcher wrote that their oaths to care for patients and to protect the health of all Americans compelled them to say that Kennedy’s actions “are endangering the health of the nation.” The consequences of his mismanagement and promoting misinformation, they say, will be “measured in lives lost, disease outbreaks and an erosion of public trust that will take years to rebuild.”Global NewsNew York Times,Carney and Trump: A Collision Avoided, Save for a Nasty Comment or Two, Ian Austen and David E. Sanger, Oct. 8, 2025 (print ed). The Canadian prime minister came to Washington determined to take the heat out of the relationship. He mostly succeeded, at least for now.The Canadian prime minister came to Washington determined to take the heat out of the relationship. He mostly succeeded, at least for now.Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada arrived at the White House on Tuesday with a few clear objectives: to take heat out of his early encounters with President Trump, to avoid references to Canada becoming a 51st state, and to begin talks on steel and aluminum tariffs.In other words, to revert to the old days, when Canada and the United States were the tightest of defense and intelligence allies, and somehow managed to keep their disputes over everything from dairy products to softwood lumber to automobiles on a separate track.He partly succeeded. Mr. Trump did not muse again about how Canada would be much better off as part of the United States, though he alluded to the thought when he discussed how to eliminate auto tariffs. Mr. Trump did muse about how the two countries were in “natural conflict,” and described Mr. Carney, a former central bank chief for England and Canada, as a “nice man” who could be “very nasty.”Nonetheless, even Mr. Trump appeared to recognize that he had a lot of repair work to do. Seeming to acknowledge that his reputation north of the border is toxic, he told reporters that “the people of Canada will love us again,” even if some American-imposed tariffs remained in place — which he insisted they would.At the end of a meeting and a working lunch, Canadian officials insisted they were happy with the changed tenor of the meeting, and said they now expected to make progress on steel, aluminum and energy levies, which range up to 50 percent. While they left with nothing concrete, beyond a commitment to negotiate, it was the change in tone, rather than tariff rates, that they had most sought.More On Comey CaseThe Real Michael Cohen and Dean Bludell Podcast,Comey Perp walk / Indictment, Michael Cohen, Dean Blundell and Lev Parnas, Oct. 8, 2025. A recording from Michael Cohen and Dean Blundell’s live video.Daily Beast,Trump’s Comey Witch Hunt Hit by Bombshell Prosecution Leak, Ewan Palmer, Oct. 8, 2025. MAJOR PROBLEM. The former FBI director has denied the allegations brought forward by Trump-loyalist prosecutors.Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey found that a key witness in their inquiry would be “problematic” and potentially undermine the entire case, according to a damaging leak.Those investigating President Donald Trump’s nemesis found that testimony from Daniel Richman—a law professor whom prosecutors claim Comey authorized to leak information to the media—would contradict the claims central to the already shaky case, sources said. New York Times,Comey to Appear in Court in Case That Has Roiled Justice Dept., Glenn Thrush, Oct. 8, 2025. The case against James B. Comey, above, the former F.B.I. director, was deemed too thin by a previous federal prosecutor, who quit under pressure from President Trump.The proceedings at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday morning will have the superficial trappings of any other arraignment: The accused will stand before a judge, hear the charges against him and sign the paperwork.But the initial court appearance of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on charges of lying to Congress five years ago will be a highly unusual event with potentially enormous political and legal implications.The indictment of Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, represented the most significant legal action taken against those President Trump has publicly targeted for retribution.The case was presented to a grand jury on Sept. 25 — over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia — by Lindsey Halligan, a White House official hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.It came shortly after the president all but commanded Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.“Nothing is being done,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”Mr. Comey faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove — if his lawyers do not succeed in getting the charges quickly dismissed.“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” Mr. Comey said in a video released hours after he was charged.“We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” added Mr. Comey, who has assembled a formidable defense team, including Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago known for prosecuting major terrorism and corruption cases.The arraignment was originally scheduled for Thursday, but the chief judge of the district court moved it up a day, citing logistical and security concerns.The visuals of vengeance are of great importance to Mr. Trump, who rose to national prominence as a reality television star who often watched his broadcasts with the sound off to better judge how he looked.An agent in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office was suspended after he refused to organize an escort of uniformed law enforcement officials to walk Mr. Comey into the courthouse before the media, according to people with knowledge of the move who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.It remains unclear how that would have worked. Thus far, Mr. Comey has only been issued a summons to appear in court, although arrests are not unheard-of in such cases.In 2022, Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser, was taken into custody and handcuffed as he boarded an airplane in Washington, an action criticized as overly aggressive by the judge in his case.Ms. Halligan, who narrowly secured a two-count indictment after a shaky solo appearance before the grand jury, has had a hard time getting anyone in her new office to help her with the case, according to current and former prosecutors in the office.Two prosecutors who work in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, gave official notice on Tuesday that they had been assigned to the case, according to court records.The case has cast a corrosive pall over the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most important federal prosecutor’s offices in the nation.Erik S. Siebert, the district’s former U.S. attorney, came under pressure from Mr. Trump after telling his superiors in the Justice Department that there was not enough evidence against Mr. Comey or, in a separate potential case, Ms. James. Mr. Siebert quit on Sept. 19, hours after the president called for his ouster.Since then, Trump Justice Department appointees have fired without cause two top career prosecutors who also objected to the Comey indictment. Many other officials in the Eastern District of Virginia have applied for jobs on the outside or have written memos justifying their actions in case they have to contest personnel actions or sue the department.The bare-bones, two-page indictment against Mr. Comey was signed only by Ms. Halligan, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who had been serving as a midlevel lawyer in the office of the White House staff secretary.Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also tried to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge, which was rejected.Mr. Comey is not the first former head of the F.B.I. to face criminal charges. In 1978, a former acting head of the bureau during Watergate, L. Patrick Gray, was indicted on charges of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans.Prosecutors said he authorized agents to break into homes without warrants, in a hunt for fugitive members of Weather Underground, the violent far-left group.The charges against Mr. Gray were dropped two years later.More On Law, Courts, CrimeDaily Beast,ChatGPT Outs Florida Man Accused of Starting Palisades Fire, Ethan Cotler, AI EVIDENCE. Oct. 8, 2025. The AI-generated images of a burning city are expected to serve as key evidence linking him to LA’s most destructive wildfire. Newsmax,Man, 29, Arrested for ‘Malicious Destruction’ for ’25 Palisades Fire, Authorities in California charged a 29-year-old man with “malicious destruction’ for allegedly starting a deadly fire that erupted into the most destructive blaze in Los Angeles history and destroyed much of the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood, officials announced Wednesday.Federal law enforcement officials accused 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht of lighting a fire on New Year’s Day that was initially extinguished by fire crews, but continued to smolder underground before reigniting during high winds, acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said during a news conference.Rinderknecht was arrested Tuesday in Florida, where he moved after the fire, and is due to appear in court Wednesday. He faces charges including malicious destruction by means of a fire. Aisha Nash, the federal public defender assigned to represent Rinderknecht, has not responded to Associated Press requests for comment.Rinderknecht fled the scene of the original fire, but returned to the same trail to watch it burn, Essayli said. Theodore Bunker ✉“He left as soon as he saw the fire trucks were headed to the location. He turned around and went back up there. And he took some video and, and watched them fight the fire,” Essayli saidRinderknecht also made several 911 calls to report the fire, according to a criminal complaint.During an interview Jan. 24, Rinderknecht told investigators where the fire began, information not yet public and that he would not have known if he hadn’t witnessed it, the complaint said.He lied about his location, claiming he was near the bottom of the hiking trail, Essayli said.The suspect was visibly anxious during that interview, according to the complaint. His efforts to call 911 and his question to ChatGPT about a cigarette lighting a fire indicated he “wanted to preserve evidence of himself trying to assist in the suppression of the fire and he wanted to create evidence regarding a more innocent explanation for the cause of the fire,” the complaint said.Investigators determined the Jan. 1 fire was intentionally lit, likely by a lighter taken to vegetation or paper, according to the criminal complaint. They excluded other possibilities, including fireworks, lightning and power lines. Authorities also looked into whether a cigarette may have caused the fire, but concluded that was not the cause, the complaint says.Investigators found a “barbecue-style” lighter inside the glove compartment of Rinderknecht’s car on Jan. 24. It appeared to be the same lighter as one that was in his apartment on Dec. 31, based on a photo on his phone. He admitted to bringing a lighter with him when he walked up the hill.The blaze, which erupted on Jan. 7, killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes and buildings in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy coastal neighborhood of LA. The fire ripped through hillside neighborhoods, destroying mansions with spectacular views of the ocean and downtown LA.Investigators still haven’t determined the cause of a second blaze called the Eaton Fire, which broke out the same day in the community of Altadena and killed 18 people.Both fires burned for days, reducing block after block of entire neighborhoods to gray and black debris.An outside review released in September found that a lack of resources and outdated policies for sending emergency alerts led to delayed evacuation warnings.The report commissioned by Los Angeles County supervisors said a series of weaknesses, including “outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities,” hampered the county’s response.Oct. 7New York Times,Trump Threatens to Use Emergency Powers to Bypass Courts and Deploy Troops, Staff Reports, Oct. 7, 2025 (print ed.). The president said he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act to send National Guard units to Chicago and Portland, Ore., over local objections. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois called the mobilization “an unconstitutional invasion.”Here’s the latest.
- A federal judge on Monday declined to block the deployment of National Guard units to Illinois, a mobilization that the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, labeled an “unconstitutional invasion” by the federal government, as President Trump threatened to assume emergency powers to bypass court battles and send in the troops.
- The outcome of the court hearing in Illinois, which allows the Trump-ordered deployment to move ahead for now, came as a military official said 200 troops from the Texas National Guard were set to fly to the Chicago area late Monday. The troops are expected to begin operating on the ground no sooner than Wednesday, the official said. A similar effort to deploy Texas troops in Portland, Ore., has been blocked by a judge for now.
- As the legal battles intensified, both sides engaged in an increasingly caustic war of words, with administration officials accusing protesters in Portland of engaging in insurrection, and officials in Chicago accusing federal forces of attacking demonstrators without provocation.
Mr. Trump said on Monday that he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy troops despite any court orders to the contrary. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he said, adding, “I’d do that if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”Governor Pritzker said that Illinois officials would use every lever at their disposal to fight the administration. “Their plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power,” he warned in an afternoon news conference.Here’s what else to know:
- Oregon appeal: The Trump administration asked an appeals court to let it send troops from California or Texas to Portland (above), despite a federal judge’s order late Sunday blocking deployments from any state to the city. The judge was appointed by Mr. Trump. It was unclear how quickly an appeal might be heard. Read more ›
- Chicago hearing: Judge April M. Perry of Federal District Court in Northern Illinois, a Biden appointee, pressed Trump administration lawyers for more information about National Guard assignments in the, describing herself as “very troubled by the lack of answers.” She said she needed time to review the case before issuing any orders, setting a hearing for Thursday.
- Local pushback: Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago said he would establish “ICE-free zones” to prevent federal agents from staging operations without a warrant. And officials in Broadview, Ill., issued an executive order restricting protests at a federal immigration facility to daytime hours, saying it was in response to federal agents “needlessly deploying tear gas, pepper spray, mace and rubber bullets.” Tensions have flared across the region. Read more ›
- “Like a war zone”: President Trump on Monday again described Chicago as a crime-ridden “war zone.” And in a legal filing, his administration depicted Portland as a hotbed of violence and chaos, with protests against immigration enforcement efforts there posing “a sufficient impediment to the execution of federal laws and danger of a rebellion.” Conditions on the ground in both cities do not match those descriptions. Read more ›
The Hartman Report,Commentary: Is ICE Today’s Klan?Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 7, 2025. From concealed identities to sanctioned violence, the echoes between ICE raids and Klan terror are too loud to ignore.Masked, armed law enforcement agents who regularly violate the law and strip people of their constitutional rights is nothing new in America. They have, in fact, a long and well-documented history, including states — after years of abuse by masked men — passing laws specifically to prevent them from concealing their identities when performing lawenforcement operations.In this era, we call them Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents; during the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries they called themselves the Klu Klux Klan. They often operated with the blessing of both federal and state governments, often deputized and given badges and guns, and “enforced the law” while wearing their famous white hoods to conceal their individual identities.ICE operates today with a level of anonymity, impunity, and intimidation that closely parallels the Ku Klux Klan’s tactics as masked, semi-official enforcers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities, and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.Because their violence and brutality so often broke the law, the Klan’s hoods prevented victims from identifying them; this allowed them to operate with near-complete impunity, knowing that individually they’d never be held to account.To this day, we generally only know the names of their public leaders or of those who’d taken over regular law enforcement bureaus, like the five Klan members who murdered three voting registration/civil rights workers in Mississippi back in 1964.Operating under the authority of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office, Edgar Ray Killen, a local Ku Klux Klan organizer, planned and orchestrated the murders; Cecil Ray Price, a Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff and Klansman, arrested the three men on a fabricated speeding charge; Alton Wayne Roberts was the Klansman who shot and killed Schwerner and Goodman; Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s Klan, ordered the killings; James Jordan was the Klansman who confessed to shooting Chaney.Today — to avoid the accountability that Killen, Price, Roberts, Bowers, and Jordan faced — ICE agents routinely conduct operations while masked, concealing faces and badge numbers. This is framed as a “safety” measure, but it’s pretty clear that the real motive is to shield agents from accountability, mirroring practices by the Klan, who wore hoods to intimidate, avoid arrest, and facilitate mob violence without risk of personal consequence.The Klan’s power was rooted in violence without accountability. And the mask was its shield. When historians write about the so-called “Second Klan” of the 1920s, they point out its members’ obsession with law and order and masked morality enforcement.Some jurisdictions openly deputized them to “assist” in enforcing segregation laws and even liquor laws — principally raiding Black-owned speakeasies — during Prohibition. In Indiana and Oregon, the Klan effectively ran the entire state’s politics.Eventually, states had enough and outlawed Klan members from wearing their hoods or kerchiefs, even when executing the law. New York, a “free state,” was an early adopter; in 1845 the state made it a crime for a law enforcement officer or anybody else to appear “disguised and armed.”An Indiana version of that law was overturned by an Indiana Federal District judge who found that forcing Klan members to remove their hoods could subject them to harassment and impinge on their “right to anonymity when past harassment makes it likely that disclosing the members’ [identities] would impact the group’s ability to pursue its collective efforts at advocacy.” It’s Tom Homan’s and Kristi Noem’s argument today.The question isn’t whether ICE agents today share the Klan’s ideology. Some may not, although recruiting pitches seem directed toward those sympathetic. The question, instead, is whether our government has once again created a Klan-like system in which anonymous armed men can break into homes, detain people, and abuse families without being individually answerable to the law.That is what the hood and mask have always symbolized in America: they mean rightwing thugs can do whatever they want and walk away untouched, no matter how heinous their crimes.We’re told that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. But when armed officers of the government hide their identities from the public they claim to serve, they’re telling us exactly what to fear.History has already written the first draft of this story once before. We’d be fools to let it play out again. Emergency Triad via The Bulwark:The Chicago Rubicon and What Comes Next, Jonathan V. Last, Oct. 8, 2025. We aren’t at the worst-case scenario yet. But if you squint, you can see it looming out there, just over the horizon. I’ve had my eye on the situation in Chicago all day and tonight Texas National Guard troops arrived on Illinois soil, in defiance of the wishes of the Illinois governor and the Illinois National Guard’s adjutant general.This moment has elevated the crisis so that it is no longer just a conflict between the federal government and a state, but between two states. We now have armed soldiers from the state of Texas eagerly volunteered by their governor to impose the president’s will on the citizens of Illinois.I don’t want to be alarmist, but this is an emergency. It is incumbent on us to name the thing we are seeing and be unflinching as we describe it.That’s not a lot of power; but it’s the only power we have in this moment.Today President Trump’s military invasion of Chicago crossed another Rubicon. He not only activated and took command of the Illinois National Guard, but just in case the hometown troops are not willing to do his bidding, he has shipped in National Guard troops from a politically reliable territory.We should be exceedingly clear:There is no crisis in Chicago that requires the National Guard. To the extent that there is civil instability in Chicago it has been caused by Trump’s surge of federal agents into the city and their lawless assault on the citizens of Chicago.Specificity is required:September 12: ICE agents shoot and kill Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park. ICE claimed that González was shot after he “seriously injured” an ICE agent. But bodycam footage shows the same agent immediately after the encounter describing his injuries as “nothing major.”September 30: Some 300 federal agents raid an apartment building in the dead of night. Some rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter positioned over the building. They ransack apartments and detain not only children but several U.S. citizens, including one Rodrick Johnson, who spoke with Block Club Chicago:
- Rodrick Johnson, who lives in the building and is a U.S. citizen, said he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents kicked in his door. He was stuffed inside a van with his neighbors for what felt like several hours until agents told them the building was clear, he said.
- “They didn’t tell me why I was being detained,” Johnson said. “They left people’s doors open, firearms, money, whatever, right there in the open.”
- October 4: CPB agents shoot an unarmed woman, Marimar Martinez. They claim that she provoked them by ramming their vehicle with her car. Martinez’s lawyer tells the Chicago Sun-Times that there is bodycam footage that shows an agent turning left into Martinez’s vehicle, after which an agent says, “Do something, bitch.” The agent then gets out of the vehicle and shoots Martinez.
- October 7: A masked federal agent is caught on camera aiming a weapon at a resident who is reportedly doing nothing more than documenting his activity. This act is reported by Chicago Tribune reporter Laura N. Rodríguez Presa:
- From a Guardian story about the ongoing clashes:
- There have also been arrests of local officials and candidates for office who were protesting, including Illinois’ ninth congressional district Kat Abughazaleh, who went viral with a video of an Ice agent slamming her to the ground, Daniel Biss, the Evanston mayor, and a city alderman who were aggressively arrested while trying to advocate in a hospital setting. . . .
- Reverend David Black of the First Presbyterian church of Chicago, said that he was pelted with about seven or eight “pepper exploding pellets” that hit his head, face, torso, arms and legs, while in a position of prayer. . . .
- Local journalists have been detained or attacked by federal agents as well. Over the weekend, Steve Held, Unraveled Press co-founder and reporter, was detained by agents while covering a protest outside of the facility. A Chicago-Sun Times reporter was also tear-gassed and pelted with “rubber projectiles”, according to the outlet.
- On Sunday morning, CBS Chicago News reporter Asal Rezaei, was attacked by an Ice agent who shot a pepper ball into her car from about 50ft away and was exposed to chemicals on her face. She said in a social media post that after the incident, she was “puking for two hours”.
In addition to protesters and journalists, legal observers, often delineated in the Chicago-land area by their bright neon green hats that read “legal observer” were also attacked in recent weeks by Ice agents.Don’t take the word of journalists for it. Here is sworn testimony from a local police chief Thomas Mills in Gov. Pritzker’s lawsuit against the Trump administration:According to the sworn statement of the Broadview police chief who witnessed this conduct daily, the “use of chemical agents by federal agents at the ICE facility in Broadview has often been arbitrary and indiscriminate. At times it is used when the crowd is as small as ten people. The deployment of chemical agents is dangerous to the health of both demonstrators and first responders on the scene. In addition, when ICE agents deploy chemical agents, it causes the crowd of protesters to disperse, sometimes running into the road, which is dangerous both for them and for motorists. Broadview police officers have had to attempt to position themselves in a way that directs the crowd to disperse in a safe manner. Over the course of my career in law enforcement, the way in which federal agents have indiscriminately used chemical agents in Broadview is unlike anything I have seen before.”According to a sworn statement by the Broadview Police Chief, the next morning, Saturday, September 27, Bovino and several CBP agents came to the Broadview Police station. They told the Broadview Police that the DHS agents would bring a “shitshow” to Broadview that weekend, including that they would be increasing deployment of chemical arms, such as tear gas and pepper spray.We should say what is going on here in clear and unsentimental terms:The president instructed federal agents to use extralegal violence against both immigrants and citizens in Chicago. When the citizenry of Chicago objected to these violent acts, the president used their First Amendment demonstrations of protest as pretext to deploy the Texas National Guard into the city, so that armed soldiers from Texas could impose the president’s will on the people of Illinois.He is setting not just the federal government against one of the states, but pitting armed soldiers from one state against the citizens of another.Our friend Amanda Carpenter—who is nobody’s idea of a bleeding heart—is alarmed. You should be, too.Trump is dangerously and perversely fusing the roles of the U.S. military and domestic agencies. The U.S. military is trained and equipped to confront foreign adversaries, operating under rules of engagement designed for war. Agencies like DHS and ICE are constrained by the U.S. Constitution and are supposed to protect constitutional rights. What we are seeing now is the worst of both worlds: domestic agents adopting military tactics, and the military itself being drawn into domestic political conflicts. Neither the military nor federal agents are trained or legally intended to perform each other’s roles. . . .In our nation’s history, the extraordinary federal power to override a governor has been a last resort in moments of true crisis, such as when enforcing desegregation in Little Rock or quelling an actual insurrection.But that’s not what’s happening here. The White House is sending troops from Texas to Chicago, not to address a genuine emergency, but to override political opposition. In sending troops from red states to police blue states who object to their presence, the White House is bypassing that structure and overriding the will of the states.The troops being sent to Chicago from the Texas National Guard represent an express end run around Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who stated the deployment is a symbol of “gubernatorial authority being trampled, state sovereignty being ignored, and the constitutional balance between states being attacked.” The United States cannot remain a federalist system when soldiers from one state are sent to police another state against the explicit wishes of its elected leaders and when the justification for it is a lie. . . .Using soldiers to enforce civilian law blurs the line between the police and the military, conditioning Americans to accept armed troops on their streets as normal. It creates loyalty tests for mayors and governors, undermines the nonpolitical standing of our military, and shreds the checks and balances that protect our freedom. This is a hallmark of tyranny, which our Founders recognized clearly when the king’s soldiers patrolled the streets of colonial America, intimidated opponents of the monarchy, and suppressed their speech. Fani Willis, left, is the district attorney for Atlanta-based Fulton County in Georgia. Her office has been probing since 2021 then-President Trump’s claiming beginning in 2020 of election fraud in Georgia and elsewhere. Trump and his allies have failed to win support for their claims from Georgia’s statewide election officials, who are Republican, or from courts.Lev Remembers,Trump’s Revenge Tour continues — Jack Smith and Christopher Wray in His Crosshairs, Lev Parnas, right, Oct. 7-8, 2025. Trump pressures Pam Bondi to indict his enemies and embraces Project 2025, rewrite January 6th, and turn the DOJ into his own reality-show court of vengeance., I’ll never forget October 9th, 2019.That was the day Bill Barr weaponized the Department of Justice — the day I was arrested to be silenced. They wanted to bury the truth, the same truth I’m bringing you now. That date has haunted me ever since — and here we are, on October 9th, 2025, we will watch Donald Trump begin his own revenge tour, turning our justice system into his next season of “Apprentice: The Indictment Tour.”SubscribedJames Comey is expected to be formally arraigned — with Trump demanding nothing less than a public perp walk. This is his theater of vengeance, his way of showing the world that no one who ever stood up to him is safe. And more indictments are coming.I know the names you’ve been hearing for weeks — Adam Schiff, Letitia James, the usual targets of Trump’s anger and blame. But what I’m hearing tonight from my sources is far more serious. Donald Trump has shifted his sights. The focus now is on Christopher Wray and Jack Smith — two men who stand at the center of Trump’s desperate plan to rewrite history.Trump is pressuring Pam Bondi and his loyalists to move aggressively against them.For Wray, it’s about creating a narrative that the FBI — the so-called “Deep State” — orchestrated January 6th from within. Trump wants to erase the truth, to make it seem as though the chaos was an inside job rather than a MAGA-driven insurrection. For Jack Smith, it’s personal — Trump’s ultimate revenge against the man who indicted him on federal charges, the one prosecutor he cannot intimidate or control.Trump’s goal is simple: to rewrite January 6th, to recast himself as the victim instead of the instigator. He wants to frame Wray as the villain, the supposed architect of a conspiracy that never existed. He wants to erase his own fingerprints from history, washing away the blood of that day with a new lie.And make no mistake — what I’m hearing is terrifying, because this is just the beginning. The opening act of Trump’s Revenge Tour has begun. He’s not hiding anymore. He’s turning the justice system upside down, targeting everyone who stood between him and absolute power — and he’s doing it out in the open. And more indictments are coming.As Trump pushes Pam Bondi to do his dirty work, he’s also weaponizing the narrative machine.He’s funding propaganda networks, aligning loyal state National Guards, and turning Project 2025 from a policy blueprint into an active operational playbook.If they succeed in rewriting January 6th, they’ll rewrite all of it — from Charlottesville to Ukraine, from COVID to corruption.We’re watching a movement built on lies mutate into a state-sponsored rewriting of history.And while the media scrolls on to the next headline, Trump’s inner circle is busy turning this democracy into a monarchy.That’s why we can’t sit back.We can’t just watch history being erased — we must be the ink that writes it back.What we need right now isn’t the same old tired playbook — we need new blood and bold leadership.A new generation of Democratic leaders willing to stop playing defense and start taking this fight straight to Trump and MAGA, day after day.Leaders with fire in their hearts and truth in their minds, who are fearless, unafraid, and unbought.We don’t need caretakers of a broken system — we need warriors for democracy, ready to lead with courage, conviction, and clarity. Because this moment isn’t about politics anymore. It’s about survival. It’s about who we are, and whether we still have the strength to fight for the America we love.New York Times,Hunter Biden Pursued a Deal to Sell Land Around the U.S. Embassy in Romania, Kenneth P. Vogel, Oct. 7, 2025. Kenneth P. Vogel is the author of the forthcoming book “Devils’ Advocates; The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests,” from which this article is adapted.The proposed transaction, stemming from relationships that started while his father was vice president and involving a Chinese partner, underscores the extent of Mr. Biden’s questionable business dealings abroad.While his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was vice president, Hunter Biden began developing relationships that led to an audacious proposal to sell the land around the United States Embassy building in Romania to a group that included a Chinese company.Hunter Biden was involved in the proposed deal from multiple perspectives, creating what he privately acknowledged to an associate was an ethical quagmire, according to documents and four people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak about it.Even after years of investigations, and a suggestion by federal prosecutors that Mr. Biden’s work in Romania left him vulnerable to a foreign lobbying charge, the full story of his efforts there has not been told before. Previously unreported details exemplify how Mr. Biden’s pursuit of lucrative foreign deals fit into the broader foreign influence industry and complicated U.S. diplomacy.The deal he was pursuing left open the possibility that the Chinese could have ended up with an ownership stake in a critical asset — the land around the embassy in Bucharest, and possibly the land on which the embassy sat. The possibility concerned one of his former partners who sought to avoid the outcome at the time, while another partner later rejected the idea that it was ever on the table.The chapter fits into a well-worn playbook used by deep-pocketed foreign interests to seek favor in Washington by courting politically connected Americans, including presidential family members like the adult sons of President Trump or the son and brother of former President Jimmy Carter.Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings mostly came as he spiraled from addiction and self-destructive behavior that exacerbated family and financial problems, amid his grief over the illness and death of his older brother, Beau.This account of the Romania proposal is derived from hundreds of pages of business documents, letters, emails and text messages obtained via public records requests, provided to congressional and executive branch investigators or retrieved from a cache of files linked to Mr. Biden’s abandoned laptop, as well as interviews and testimony transcripts.The land deal collapsed in 2017 before the Chinese invested any money in it amid a contentious struggle for control among Mr. Biden’s partners, during which he protested in a WhatsApp message: “I’m the only one putting an entire family legacy on the line.”There is no evidence that Mr. Biden’s father was involved in the business dealings, though he was introduced by his son to executives of the Chinese company, CEFC China Energy, in an apparent effort to impress them.A spokeswoman for the former president declined to comment. Hunter Biden, James Biden, Mr. Popoviciu and their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for the younger Mr. Biden previously told The Times that his client never discussed anything related to Romania with his father.Nonetheless, U.S. government officials were alarmed about potential conflicts of interest between his father’s vice-presidential portfolio and Hunter Biden’s business.The activity became a political liability when his father began a successful campaign for the presidency in April 2019.By then, the international dealings of Hunter and James Biden had largely run their course.New York Times,Supreme Court Live Updates: Justices Seem Set to Rule Against Colorado’s Ban on Conversion Therapy, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 7, 2025. Colorado and over 20 other states have banned the practice aimed at changing the sexual orientation or gender identity of young people.The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday seemed poised to rule for a Christian therapist who says her free speech rights are violated by a Colorado law barring mental health professionals from seeking to change a teenager’s sexual orientation or gender identity.In a lively argument, which lasted an hour and a half, the justices debated whether the so-called conversion therapy covered by Colorado’s law causes harm to minors. Lawyers for the therapist and the Trump administration said there were no studies indicating such therapy causes harm. The state’s lawyer countered that there is a “mountain of evidence” that conversion therapy is ineffective and harmful.Medical organizations began to speak out against the practice in the late 1990s, citing a growing body of research that it was ineffective and potentially harmful.The court’s decision, expected by June, will have implications for the more than 20 other states that have similar laws.If the Supreme Court rules that Colorado’s law infringes on free speech and is subject to a demanding form of judicial review, the justices could send the case back to the lower court for further consideration — or declare the law unconstitutional and strike it down.Colorado lawmakers passed the restrictions in 2019, after major medical associations found conversion therapy ineffective and potentially harmful for young people.Here’s what else to know:
- First Amendment: An important question for the justices is whether Colorado’s law is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech or a legal regulation on professional conduct. The case has split the lower courts.
- Conversion therapy: The practice uses a range of techniques in an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. It surged in popularity among evangelical Christian communities in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Therapist: The therapist challenging the law, Mrs. Chiles, is an evangelical Christian and says she is not trying to “cure” clients of same-sex attractions or “change” their sexual orientation.
- Care for minors: The court is taking up this case just a few months after upholding a ban in Tennessee prohibiting certain gender-transition care for young people. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the thorny questions that case posed should be resolved by “the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process.”
Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 6, 2025 [Who Is White House Shutdown Czar?],Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 7, 2025. If White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is at the head of the administration’s deployment of federal agents against undocumented immigrants, it appears that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought is running the administration’s approach to the government shutdown.As Beth Reinhard explained in the Washington Post in June 2024, Vought is a hard-right Christian nationalist who drafted the plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the first Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank.In 2022, Vought, left, argued that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought advocates what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised its far-right members, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.Vought was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. He wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda.In August 2024, two men associated with the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting secretly video recorded Vought assuring the men, who he thought might donate to the cause, that he and his Center for Renewing America were secretly writing a blueprint of executive orders, memos, and regulations that Donald J. Trump could enact immediately upon taking office a second time. Although Trump was saying he knew nothing about Project 2025, Vought assured the men that Trump was only disavowing Project 2025 for political reasons. In reality, Vought said, Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”Since Trump took office, Vought’s predictions have come true. The administration has illegally slashed through programs Congress set up and for which it appropriated funds, and now is using the government shutdown to threaten more cuts to programs and to personnel. As soon as the government shutdown began on October 1, 2025, Vought announced that he would use the shutdown to continue his illegal cuts, vowing to cancel $26 billion in infrastructure and climate projects in states led by Democrats, and to fire—not just furlough, as a shutdown requires—federal employees.But the program Vought is advancing is hugely unpopular. Republicans have called for cuts to the government for decades using rhetoric that suggested such cuts would only affect racial minorities and women. Those who voted for such cuts assumed they would not be affected by any of the proposed cuts. Now they are discovering otherwise.There were signs of this dramatic disconnect between Republican rhetoric and reality in the 2024 campaign season: when voters in 2024 learned about Project 2025, only 4% of them wanted to see it enacted. At the time, Trump insisted he had nothing to do with the program. Now, though, he is boasting that he is meeting with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump posted on social media.But it is increasingly clear that the cuts Vought and the MAGA Republicans are making to government programs are hitting a wide swath of Americans. Those cuts are no longer rhetorical, and members of the administration appear to be aware they are unpopular with a large part of their own base.At a press briefing today, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out that while Trump had said Democrats would bear the blame for layoffs during the shutdown, in fact shutdowns only create furloughs. If the administration was choosing to lay people off instead of furloughing them, she asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, didn’t this mean the president was responsible for the layoffs? Leavitt responded: “This conversation about layoffs would not be happening right now if the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down.”But the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down. They refused to vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government—which was necessary because the Republicans have not managed to pass any appropriations bills—until Republicans reverse a drastic cut they have made to healthcare. Democrats want Republicans to agree to extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance that they permitted to lapse when they wrote the law they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”Both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have been open about their determination to roll back the ACA, also known as Obamacare, a policy advanced in Project 2025. In October 2024, Johnson told a crowd there would be “massive” changes to healthcare if voters reelected Trump. “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board,” he said.Now, though, those hypothetical cuts are real, and without the extension of the premium tax credit, the cost of many Americans’ healthcare premiums will skyrocket. As NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin pointed out on Saturday, about 24 million Americans who don’t have health insurance through their jobs or through Medicaid buy health insurance in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. According to the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, without the extension of the tax credits, premiums will go up an average of 114% for consumers. Spiking premiums will mean the healthiest people decide to go without health insurance, sending prices up for everyone else.Enrollment starts November 1, putting pressure on Congress to provide a fix before then. In a partisan twist, more than three in four people enrolled in ACA plans live in states Trump won in 2024. A KFF poll published October 3 shows that extending the premium tax credits is popular. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say they want Congress to extend the tax credits. That number includes 59% of Republicans and 57% of MAGA supporters.On Sunday, Trump lashed out at the Fox News Channel for interviewing Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and letting him point out that Republicans had shut down the government rather than extend the premium tax credits. “Why is FoxNews…putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare?” Trump posted on social media. “The FAKE SPIN is so bad for Republicans that it is hard to believe that we WIN.”On the White House South Lawn yesterday, a reporter asked Trump if he was open to extending the premium tax credit for purchasing healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act.Trump answered: “We want to fix it so it works. It’s not working. Obamacare has been a disaster for the people. So we want to have it fixed so it works.”Today Speaker Johnson tried to get out from under popular anger over the shutdown and spiking health insurance premiums. He said: “Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare. Republicans are the party working around the clock everyday to fix healthcare. This is not talking points for us: we’ve done it.”In fact, Johnson has sent the House home until October 14, and what he appears to mean by “working around the clock to fix healthcare” is that Republicans have made cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in their budget reconciliation bill of July, claiming the cuts will address “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates those cuts will increase the number of people without health insurance by 10 million by 2034.Yesterday, Meryl Kornfield and Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reported that another of Vought’s priorities is also on the table: the Trump administration is overhauling Social Security to eliminate age as a factor in evaluating disability claims, which are separate from retirement benefits. Right-wing thinkers say that since people are living longer and fewer work in manual jobs that hurt their bodies, many could adapt to desk work rather than claiming disability benefits.In a statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the Washington Post journalists: “This is Phase One of the Republican campaign to force Americans to work into old age to access their earned Social Security benefits, and represents the largest cut to disability insurance in American history. Americans with disabilities have worked and paid into Social Security just like everybody else, and they do not deserve the indignity of more bureaucratic water torture to get what they paid for.”The pushback against the administration’s politicization of the civil service—another hallmark of Project 2025—continued today when 282 former Department of Justice career officials wrote a letter warning that Trump and his appointees are destroying the Department of Justice. MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the former prosecutors, FBI agents, intelligence analysts, civil rights attorneys, and immigration judges called out the administration’s violation of court orders, destruction of anti-corruption units, endangering national security, and using law enforcement to persecute those Trump sees as enemies, saying, “We believe it’s our duty to sound the alarm.”Today the New York City Bar Association drew its own line against the administration, warning that whatever legal advice officials are using to justify their attacks on Venezuelan boats will not protect them in court. The bar association called the strikes “illegal summary execution” that are “prohibited by both U.S. and international law,” or “murders.” It called for Trump to stop such attacks and for “Congress to remind the President that he lacks authority to continue to misuse our military forces for similar unlawful attacks on foreign vessels and their civilian crews and that continuation of such attacks is unlawful.”
The Contrarian,Words & Phrases We Could Do Without: Armed Conflict?Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 7, 2025. Trump declares war on all of us.Last week, Donald Trump sent Congress a disturbing letter announcing that under Section 1230 of the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, certain drug cartels’ actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”You might be wondering how smuggling drugs into the country amounts to a “non-international armed attack,” as the letter puts it. The only side engaging in any military conflict is the United States military, which on four occasions has destroyed suspected smuggling and murdered those on board.You also might be wondering how the president—rather that Congress—has the power to declare what amounts to war. You are not alone in recognizing the frightful implications of this dictatorial degree.Trump now claims the right to kill someone “affiliated with a designated terrorist organization [who] at the time, engaged in trafficking illicit drugs, which could ultimately be used to kill Americans.” Under that frightfully vague, unlimited edit, he dubs people engaged in this supposed non-international armed conflict, “unlawful combatants.” As a measure of for whom such classification would be appropriate, that is how we designated ISIS and al-Qaeda members whom we captured, in some cases tortured, and held for years in prison without trial.As many experts in the national security and international law would agree, the technical term for Trump’s notice is “garbage.” Once more, Trump (for obviously nefarious reasons) affixes labels to activities and people that bear little or no resemblance to Trump’s designation.In particular, “armed conflict” means, under international law and common parlance, ongoing violent hostilities between a nation state and discrete enemy. That is not what is happening here, as the New York Times reminds us:In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.[Retired judge advocate general lawyer] Geoffrey S. Corn… said drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” — the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes — against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different from an armed attack.Dictators love to call things “wars” as a ruse to abolish ordinary legal restraints, individual rights, transparency, and due process. In this case, Trump is “conflating the trafficking of an illicit consumer product and associated crime with an armed” without explaining how drug smuggling equates to armed conflict.In particular, security expert Marty Lederman reminds us that a “non-international armed conflict” requires:(i) that the non-State entity is an ‘organized armed group’ with the sort of command structure that would render members targetable on the basis of their status because they’re subject to commanders’ direction and control and(ii) that the organized armed group has engaged in armed violence against the State that is of some intensity (think of al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001) and that has been protracted.In the words of U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, who enjoined Trump’s invasion of Portland, Trump’s assertion that we are engaged in an “armed conflict” is “simply untethered to the facts.”Trump has not even attempted to make the case the people he is blowing up are part of a single organized group. And, since “there’s nothing in international law that even suggests that such drug activity is sufficient to trigger the right of the affected State to kill persons simply because they are members of the drug cartel (which isn’t surprising, given the radical implications of such a theory),” Trump’s mumbo-jumbo is legally invalid. If we were in an armed conflict, only Congress, not the president, would have the constitutional power to declare war, or as in Afghanistan, pass a resolution authorizing the use of military force.SubscribedAs if that were not scary enough, Trump’s warped language may be aimed at domestic, not foreign, use of force. If, say, Chicago drug dealers getting shipments from overseas were part of an “armed conflict” with the United States, does that mean Trump can summarily execute a suspected drug dealer plus all the people providing material support (e.g., his landlord, his bank, the Uber driver who took him to the airport)? What about liberal protesters he claims have ties to the bogeyman ANTIFA?We should be exceptionally alarmed about the very, very dangerous road he is taking us down. Trump’s actions after sending the notice to Congress certainly indicate he plans to throw off legal restraints and deploy the military to wage war against Americans. He quickly turned up the violence in Chicago, and government lawyers attempted to defy (albeit unsuccessfully) Judge Immergut’s ruling barring deployment of Oregon national guardsmen to Portland by trying instead to send California and Texas guardsmen(!). He also delivered a disgustingly partisan speech to sailors in Norfolk, Va., suggesting the need to rid the United States of Democrats:Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comTrump to the Navy: “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats.”Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:51:50 GMTView on BlueskyIn short, Trump may envision a phony overseas war as a predicate for a despotic war against Americans. We should disregard words that Trump regularly distorts beyond recognition (e.g., armed conflict, non-international armed conflict, unlawful combatant). In Trump’s mind such terms are infinitely elastic, allowing him free rein to go after his enemies. If his rhetorical chicanery prevails, nothing will prevent him from targeting Americans, executing or rounding them up, and doing away with constitutional protections altogether. Which would be, by any definition, a dictatorship.We therefore find ourselves less than ten months after Trump took office with the open question as to whether the president, anywhere, anytime he pleases, can execute or round up people he says are terrorists—without due process. That we are even entertaining such a discussion tells you how far Trump has damaged democratic guardrails and how derelict the MAGA majorities in Congress and on the Supreme Court have been in checking his power grabs.The courts, Congress, the voters, and/or the military itself (which is obligated to refuse illegal orders) must be adamant that his dangerous charade will not work. U.S. Government ShutdownMorning Shots via The Bulwark, When in Doubt, Blame the Immigrants, Will Saletan, In the fight over the government shutdown, Republicans are testing an insidious political strategy: Can they get a majority of voters to oppose programs that clearly benefit American citizens, on the grounds that a tiny fraction of the money might also end up—through some inadvertent channel—helping illegal immigrants?That’s the message Republicans have repeated throughout the shutdown. They claim, falsely, that the Democratic position—that expanded Obamacare subsidies should be renewed and that the Republican cuts to Medicaid passed this year should be repealed—is really a demand to provide “free healthcare for illegals.”The GOP’s argument is dishonest in many ways, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn has explained. But it should also worry us for a reason that goes well beyond the shutdown: If it succeeds, it will become a template for self-destructive nativist populism. It will prove that Americans care more about choking off aid to undocumented immigrants—even where the aid is already prohibited—than we do about helping fellow Americans.This isn’t the first time Republicans have played the “free healthcare for illegals” card. Remember when Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “You lie” during Barack Obama’s speech to Congress in 2009? Wilson was objecting to Obama’s assurance—which was true—that the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act “would not apply to those who are here illegally.”The ACA’s section on subsidies explicitly stated: “Nothing in this subtitle or the amendments made by this subtitle allows Federal payments, credits, or cost-sharing reductions for individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.” But Republicans said the mechanisms to enforce that exclusion weren’t good enough and that the bill therefore subsidized illegal immigrants.In 2006, when George W. Bush was pushing for reforms to immigration and Social Security, Republicans accused Democrats of using the retirement program to provide “benefits for illegals.” In 2009, Republicans played the same card as Congress moved to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. From 2021 to 2024, they played it against the American Rescue Plan. Last year, some Republicans used it to rail on a proposed expansion of the Child Tax Credit.The history of these attacks is instructive. It shows that no matter what lawmakers do to exclude illegal immigrants from a program, the GOP will find a way to claim that some of the money will go to these immigrants. Republicans propose hair-splitting amendments to tighten the rules until they come up with an amendment Democrats will vote against. Then they use that vote—and ignore the Democrats’ other votes to explicitly bar undocumented immigrants from receiving benefits—to accuse Democrats of opening the federal spigot to illegal aliens.If a bill’s exclusion of illegal immigrants is airtight, Republicans say the enforcement mechanisms are inadequate. They do so even if they previously expressed no objection to the same enforcement mechanisms or if they voted for essentially identical language in Republican legislation.Many of these tricks are being played again in the shutdown fight. No matter how many times Democrats repeat that they’re not proposing to change federal laws against public funding of healthcare for illegal immigrants, Republicans insist that they are, or that the enforcement mechanisms aren’t good enough.So far, the GOP isn’t winning that debate. In a CBS News poll taken from Wednesday to Friday, when Americans were asked what the shutdown standoff was about—and were given a list of issues that might answer that question—only five percent selected immigration. By contrast, 36 percent selected health care. Eight percent said taxes or the deficit, and another 29 percent said all of the above.If that advantage holds—if Democrats can keep the conversation centered on health care, and if the Republican campaign to focus on “illegal aliens” fails—it doesn’t guarantee that the shutdown will end on Democrats’ terms. But it will show that most Americans care more about helping themselves and each other than they do about choking off the last trickle of aid to undocumented immigrants. It will discourage the worst kind of populism—and it could become a template for the best.More On U.S. Politics, GovernanceNew York Times, Trump to Unveil Farmer Aid as China Shuns U.S. Crops, Alan Rappeport and Kevin Draper, Oct. 7, 2025. As it did in 2018, the White House plans to dole out relief funds to struggling U.S. farmers who have lost their biggest customer.Punishing Chinese tariffs that prompt painful retaliation. American farmers on the brink of bankruptcy. A multibillion-dollar bailout to keep farmers afloat.It is 2018 all over again as the Trump administration prepares to address the same policy crisis it faced seven years ago when President Trump, who imposed stiff tariffs on Chinese imports, had to shield the U.S. agriculture industry from the fallout of his trade war.Mr. Trump has once again hit China with tariffs in his second term, eliciting the same economically painful retaliation by Beijing. As a result, the Trump administration is expected to unveil another round of economic support for farmers as soon as Tuesday. The scale and mechanics of the bailout remain unclear, but the crisis is even more urgent as China, the biggest buyer of American farm products, has drastically scaled back purchases of U.S. crops this year.“I’m going to do some farm stuff this week,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Monday.The need for federal farm aid demonstrates the limits of Mr. Trump’s trade agenda, which relies on tariffs to gain leverage in trade negotiations that are intended to open up markets to U.S. exports. Instead, the tariffs have pushed up costs for American farmers, who are facing higher prices for fertilizer and equipment. At the same time, they have lost their biggest customer.“We have an export-dependent industry, we’ve angered its biggest customer, and, boom, now we’re bailing out the export-dependent industry,” said Scott Lincicome, the vice president for general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s kind of a slow-motion train wreck six years in the making.”Farmers have long been a reliable voting bloc for Mr. Trump, making them a rich target for retaliation. In Mr. Trump’s first term, China hit back at his tariffs by imposing its own levies on U.S. whiskey, cranberries, pork and soybeans. The fallout was so painful that the administration delivered more than $20 billion in aid to farmers.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.Republican lawmakers have estimated that, this time around, farmers could need as much as $50 billion in economic support.Where that money will come from remains an open question. In 2018, the funds came from the Commodity Credit Corporation, a bucket of money at the Agriculture Department that is currently depleted.Mr. Trump has discussed funneling tariff revenue to farmers, but it is not clear that he has the legal authority to do so without congressional authorization.The United States has been trying to get China to restart purchases and has been holding talks since May. But no agreement has been reached, and China has instead looked to Argentina and Brazil to fulfill its needs for agricultural imports.Trump administration officials have justified the pain that American farmers are experiencing as necessary for reorienting a global trading system that they maintain is rigged against the United States.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent even blamed the Biden administration for the predicament.“The Chinese followed through during President Trump’s term in 2020,” Mr. Bessent said on CNBC last week. “And then under President Biden, their feet were not held to the fire for these ag purchases.”Promising that “substantial” support was on the way, Mr. Bessent added: “It’s unfortunate that Chinese leadership has decided to use the American farmers, soybean farmers in particular, as a hostage or pawn in the trade negotiations.”Mr. Bessent owns thousands of acres of soybean farmland in North Dakota.Mr. Trump’s tariffs in 2018 forced China to the table and the two countries ultimately reached a limited trade deal, one that required Beijing to buy an additional $200 billion of U.S. farm products over a two-year period.According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China bought only about 83 percent of the U.S. farm products that it had committed to purchasing through 2021.Despite ongoing trade tension between the United States and China during the Biden administration, China did continue buying American farm goods. That stopped this year when Mr. Trump increased tariffs on Chinese imports above 100 percent, causing China to raise its own duties on U.S. goods. The U.S. levies have since fallen to 30 percent, and China reduced its retaliatory tariffs to 10 percent.Mr. Bessent, who has been leading the negotiations with China, said during his confirmation hearing that he would press China to honor its purchase commitments from the deal struck during Mr. Trump’s first term. However, despite several rounds of talks with Mr. Bessent, the Chinese have so far refused to honor that agreement.Chinese negotiators have suggested in recent meetings that they could resume purchases of American soybeans, but that the United States would have to reciprocate by dropping its levies, a person familiar with the negotiations said.Through July, China bought $2.5 billion fewer soybeans than the same period last year and has purchased none since May. If Chinese buyers continue holding out, America will sell $10 billion fewer soybeans to China than it did last year.The drop in sorghum exports is even starker. Last year China bought about $1.3 billion worth of American sorghum. But sorghum exports to China are down 97 percent this year.Farmer incomes have already been under pressure for years.Most growers of most row crops lost money in 2023 and 2024, and some lost money in 2022. Next year is projected to be as bad as, if not worse than, 2025.The cost of machinery, fertilizer and seeds has grown faster than inflation over the last several years, and interest rates have risen, while prices received for nearly every row crop are below the cost of production. Global demand for cotton has fallen as textiles include more synthetic fibers, while corn prices are low because of a glut of supply.Any bailout for farmers would probably require a lot of money to help them break even. Shawn Arita, an economist at North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Risk Policy Center, projects that, in total, growers of nine row crops will lose $45 billion from what they planted this year, before any government payments. Growers of corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton make up the bulk of that total.With harvest underway, farmers in the United States have been clamoring for government support even though they say they would much rather be able to export their products to their customers.“We definitely need some type of aid,” said Andy Hineman, who grows sorghum, corn and wheat in Dighton, Kan. “I’ll be the first one, if they hand out money, I’ll take it and gladly use it in our operation.”But he acknowledged that government assistance would be just a Band-Aid, and that some farmers were likely to go bankrupt, while others would limp through to another season.U.S. Law, Crime, Courts Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Perfect Brew For the Culture War, Cathy Young, Oct. 7, 2025. The sentencing last week of the would-be assassin of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a bizarre 2022 plot related to the then-imminent repeal of Roe v. Wade was perfect fodder for our culture wars.Not only did the relatively light sentence issued by a Joe Biden–appointed federal judge—eight years, compared to the minimum of 30 asked by the prosecution—rekindle claims that “the left” both commits and condones political terrorism; the defendant, a 29-year-old Californian whose legal name is Nicholas John Roske, had also asserted a transgender identity in a recent court filing under the name “Sophie Roske.” What’s more, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman cited Roske’s gender struggles as a factor in the low sentence.You don’t need to be a right-winger in search of outrage bait to wince at some of Judge Boardman’s reported comments explaining her sentencing—for instance, “I am heartened that this terrible infraction has helped the Roske family . . . accept their daughter for who she is.” Attempted murder is not a vehicle for family therapy. And, while there are complex debates around gender dysphoria, this case raises real questions about the validation of all transgender identity claims based solely on self-identification, even when, as here, they coexist with severe mental illness.Where I think Judge Boardman’s reasoning is defensible is in highlighting the fact that Roske—who had traveled from California to Maryland in June 2022 with the intent of killing Kavanaugh and possibly two other conservative justices—phoned the emergency police line to confess the plot and surrendered. National Review writer Jeffrey Blehar, who asserts that the sentence is a “recipe for judicial assassinations,” argues that Roske did not have a change of heart but simply “called 911 in a rush” after being spotted and tailed by federal marshals outside Kavanaugh’s home, “with a bag full of murder gear.” But Blehar misstates the facts as laid out in the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum: while the marshals did notice Roske and signal their presence, there was no “tailing” and no “rush.” Roske walked past the marshals, and then away from them before calling 911 about 20 minutes later. During that time, Roske’s sister was on the phone persuading the would-be assassin to surrender.This is not to minimize the gravity of what Roske did. Despite being related to mental illness, the actions taken still amounted to a political murder plot, and they merited a longer sentence. But the sentencing still does not translate into a license to kill as Blehar suggests—especially since the sentence hinges on the fact that Roske did not kill anyone, appears to have voluntarily abandoned the homicidal plan, and made a commitment to mental health intervention. Notably, after release from prison, Roske will remain under lifelong supervision by federal probation officers. And it is, finally, worth adding that in her remarks at the sentencing, Judge Boardman called Roske’s actions “reprehensible” and spoke in strong terms about the harm to Kavanaugh and his family and the need to ensure that judges and public officials do not have to fear for their lives. It was a regrettably light sentence for an admittedly reprehensible act. But it was not condoning murder.New York Times, Opinion: Megyn Kelly Knows Which Way the Winds Are Blowing, Michelle Goldberg, right, Oct. 7, 2025 (print ed.). Megyn Kelly, it seems safe to say, understands her audience. Since she was pushed out of TV news in 2019, the biting conservative commentator has built herself an enormous audience online. She has over four million subscribers on YouTube and one of the most popular right-wing podcasts in the country. So it’s instructive to see how she’s positioned herself in the conservative movement’s increasingly acrimonious civil war over Charlie Kirk and Israel.Before Kirk was killed, one of his donors, Robert J. Shillman, reportedly told him he was withdrawing a $2 million pledge to Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, because of its relationship with the increasingly anti-Israel podcaster Tucker Carlson. That fact has set off a roiling debate on the right about the degree to which Kirk was becoming disillusioned with Israel, in turn leading to insinuations that Israel had Kirk murdered.Some of the more high-profile people behind these conspiracy theories try to maintain a degree of plausible deniability, insisting, in the manner of trolls everywhere, that they’re just asking questions.Candace Owens, a former colleague of Kirk’s who last year suggested that Judaism is a “pedophile-centric religion” that “believes in child sacrifice,” claims that Kirk was about to break with Israel and reunite with her. “He said it explicitly that he refused to be bullied anymore by the Jewish donors,” she said on her podcast, asking, “And then did he just 48 hours later conveniently catch a bullet to the throat before our onstage reunion?”Carlson has been even more careful; he hasn’t made any direct claims, only suggestive analogies. Since the killing, he’s talked repeatedly of Kirk’s impatience with pro-Israel donors. Then, speaking from the podium at Kirk’s memorial, he said that Jesus, like Kirk, was killed for telling the truth. He could picture the scene 2,000 years ago, he said: “A lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us?’” One of them, in Carlson’s telling, suggested, “Why don’t we just kill him?”Plenty of people — both hard-core antisemites and anxious Jews — thought Carlson was implying that Jews killed Kirk just as they had Jesus. But, of course, he never said that; perhaps the hummus eaters were Romans.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.Others have been less cautious; endless posts on social media blame Israel for assassinating Kirk. The meme became so widespread that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel made a video denying it, which only seemed to fan the flames.Some Zionist conservatives are extremely worried about this increasingly paranoid hostility to Israel in the MAGA movement, and they want to marginalize Carlson and his ilk. “Cut Tucker Loose” said a headline in the Jewish publication Tablet, writing that he has “not only embarrassed the administration but also fractured the president’s base, elements of which are now at each other’s throats over the words of a glorified podcaster.”The conservative actress Patricia Heaton, a Fox News regular, posted a video about big-name podcasters giving a platform to antisemites. “We’re all seeing it,” she said. “Many of us are alarmed.” The left, she argued, coddles its extremists. “Don’t let that happen to the conservative movement,” she pleaded.But it already has. Given her stature on the right, Kelly has come under pressure to denounce Carlson and Owens. She has declined. “If you need me to condemn Candace or Tucker for their opinions in order to listen to me, then I may not be for you,” she wrote on X. “He’s a close friend and she is under enough pressure without gratuitous shots from me.” A few days later, on the “Fifth Column” podcast, she said she didn’t think Carlson was an antisemite, then added; “But I don’t really care. I think Tucker’s a very important, valuable voice in the national conversation.”Last month, Kelly went to Virginia Tech, filling in for Kirk on what was supposed to be his college tour. A student brought up claims the white nationalist Nick Fuentes has made about Israel — he didn’t identify which ones — and said he was having a hard time discerning truth from falsehood. Kelly was extremely circumspect in her response. She told the student to trust independent voices over the corporate media, but to avoid those who “get too out there, unless that’s just your jam for fun.” She didn’t mention Fuentes at all.I have no way of knowing what’s in Kelly’s heart, but from a business point of view, her hesitation about punching right seems shrewd. Carlson, after all, is not tangential to the MAGA movement; he is one of its most important figures. As of this writing, his podcast is the highest-ranked right-wing show on the Spotify charts, with Owens not far behind. Fuentes has become so influential that, as The New York Times reported last month, both current and former Trump officials are afraid to publicly criticize him. The three of them are far more representative of the American right than their critics.Many pro-Israel conservatives refuse to see this. Under Trump, American conservatism has given itself over to an orgy of berserk hallucinations, nihilistic transgression and epistemological disorder. It barely made news in September when Trump shared an A.I. video promoting “medbeds,” fantasy devices that, in QAnon lore, can cure all ailments but are selfishly hoarded by evil elites. If a young person like the one at Virginia Tech can’t figure out what’s true and what’s not, it’s at least in part because the right has systematically undermined the very idea of dispassionate expertise. Now, conservative Zionists are surprised that the resulting chaos has spun out of their control.Consider Dinesh D’Souza, who is probably best known for “2000 Mules,” a conspiracy film about the 2020 election, for which he was sued and had to publicly apologize. Last week he appeared on the podcast of Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante who once shared a video on X calling the Sept. 11 attacks an inside job. Together, they bemoaned how successful Owens and Carlson had been in sowing suspicion of Israel.Owens’s “investigations,” D’Souza lamented, “never produce a single fact, a single reliable theory that you can work with. They never reach any conclusion. And the moment they run out of gas, a new incendiary accusation comes in its place.” Must be frustrating.More on Charlie KirkNew York Times,Supreme Court Hears Free Speech Challenge to Ban on Conversion Therapy, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 7, 2025. The court’s ruling in the Colorado case will have implications for more than 20 other states with similar laws.The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear a challenge to a Colorado law that prohibits licensed mental health professionals from trying to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of clients who are under 18.Kaley Chiles, a therapist and evangelical Christian, says the law violates her free speech rights because it prevents her from working with patients who want to live a life “consistent with their faith.”State lawmakers passed the restrictions in 2019, in response to the findings of major medical associations that conversion therapy is ineffective and potentially harmful for young people. The outcome of the case has implications for Colorado and more than 20 other states with similar laws.A central question for the justices is whether Colorado’s law is a permissible regulation of professional conduct or an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.Colorado’s statute prohibits “any practice or treatment” that tries to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”Colorado officials have never enforced the measure, which includes fines up to $5,000 for each violation and possible suspension or revocation of a counselor’s license. The law includes a religious exemption for those “engaged in the practice of religious ministry.”Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, says states have long regulated medical practices, including treatments carried out through speech, to protect patients from substandard care. The law, he says, is about professional conduct, not speech.The Supreme Court has in recent years issued a series of decisions in favor of religious people, notably conservative Christians. In 2023, the court sided with a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. In 2022, the court said a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.The conversion therapy case is being heard a few months after the court’s conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law barring certain medical treatments for transgender youth that the state deemed unsafe. Later this term, the justices will also hear challenges to state laws prohibiting transgender athletes from participating in girls and women’s sports.New York Times, As Trump’s Justice Dept. Pursues His Enemies, an Ally Goes on Trial, Santul Nerkar, Oct. 7, 2025. Xinyue Lou is accused of funneling foreign campaign donations to President Trump’s campaign. The president has said the justice system has been used against him and his supporters.In March 2019, the night before a fund-raiser at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, a zealous supporter passed out thousands of dollars in cash in a Florida hotel room, according to federal prosecutors.The supporter, Xinyue Lou, had struck a deal with Mr. Trump’s fund-raising committee: If he raised $25,000, he would receive two V.I.P. tickets to the event and two slots for attendees to take photos with Mr. Trump.He had secured the money, and on this night, he was repaying the people who had helped conceal its true source, the prosecutors said.Mr. Lou, also known as Daniel, had recruited so-called straw donors to support Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts, according to prosecutors. They had given money on behalf of an unnamed Chinese national who wanted to attend the event and take a photo with Mr. Trump, but could not make campaign contributions as a foreigner, according to prosecutors.Last year, prosecutors said Mr. Lou’s efforts were criminal. He had sought to circumvent campaign contribution limits, they said, by concealing the source of the donations.Mr. Lou, who lives in Staten Island, is now on trial in a Brooklyn federal courtroom. His case, which came as part of a Justice Department investigation into illegal contributions made by Chinese nationals during the 2020 election, was charged under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It is now in the hands of Mr. Trump’s Justice Department.Mr. Trump has long railed against what he says is a system of justice that has been turned against him and his supporters. In his second term, he has sought retribution, pushing for charges against his adversaries. He has pardoned supporters convicted of crimes, and his Justice Department has ended investigations of them.In a filing last month, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York sought to prevent Mr. Lou’s lawyers from arguing that he had been the victim of selective prosecution because of his support for Mr. Trump.“There is absolutely no evidence that the defendant was selectively prosecuted,” the prosecutors wrote. They added that Mr. Lou should not be able to argue that he was being prosecuted “simply because of his support for” Mr. Trump.Editors’ Picks36 Hours in Busan, South KoreaThe Simple Pleasure of a Long Walk and a Fun MealMargs, Stars and Classic Cars: Surprising Retirement CommunitiesLawyers for Mr. Lou have sought to exclude certain evidence from the trial, including witness statements, that would suggest Mr. Lou was “coordinating a shadowy effort to steer Chinese funds to President Trump’s re-election campaign.”Neither Mr. Trump nor the Republican Party is accused of wrongdoing. A representative for the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.China’s broad attempts to influence politics in the United States — its main geopolitical rival — have caught the attention of federal prosecutors in recent years.In New York City, social clubs backed by the Chinese government have quietly tried to influence local elections. Linda Sun, a former aide to two New York governors, was indicted last year on charges that she was working as an unauthorized Chinese agent. In July, a Republican donor from Long Island pleaded guilty to charges that she had swindled Chinese investors who paid millions to gain access to Mr. Trump and to secure investors’ visas.In 2020 and in 2022, the Federal Election Commission informed Mr. Lou that he was under investigation. He was interviewed by F.B.I. agents in late February and early March 2024, and was soon after charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and one count of making contributions in the name of others.Mr. Lou, a Chinese American businessman, told agents that he had once worked for the Chinese government’s press office, which manufactures propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party, according to prosecutors, and that he frequently traveled to China in the 2010s and met with government officials there.Since 2016, Mr. Lou has contributed nearly $100,000 to Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts, other Republican candidates and Republican causes more broadly, according to F.E.C. filings. Mr. Lou, who has been out on bail, was allowed by Judge Ann M. Donnelly to travel to Washington to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January.Prosecutors plan to show jurors emails between Mr. Lou and an unnamed co-conspirator who provided the money, and messages sent to the people he recruited for the scheme before the 2019 fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago. According to prosecutors, Mr. Lou and the co-conspirator discussed “various budgeting scenarios” that would allow them to gain access to the event and obtain photos with Mr. Trump.But after Mr. Lou secured the tickets to the event, he was told by the fund-raising committee that the Chinese nationals on his guest list could not take a photo with Mr. Trump, because they were not American, prosecutors said. He expressed his disappointment, saying he had “made so much effort to raise the funds.”“Well, a rule is a rule and I am happy to respect and follow it,” Mr. Lou wrote back over email, according to prosecutors.New York Times, Wesley Hunt Enters Texas G.O.P. Senate Race, Complicating Path for Cornyn, J. David Goodman, Oct. 7, 2025 (print ed.). Mr. Hunt, a U.S. House member, and Senator John Cornyn will be competing for voters who dislike the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who has led in many polls.Wesley Hunt, one of the first Black Republicans to represent Texas in the House of Representatives, announced on Monday that he was running for the Senate seat occupied by John Cornyn, adding a new complication to the already caustic and costly Republican primary in 2026.Mr. Hunt had been teasing a Senate run for months, watching to see whether Mr. Cornyn would remain in the race in the face of a strong challenge from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a darling of the state’s conservative Republican voters. Television advertisements have appeared around Texas, paid for by the main pro-Hunt super PAC, introducing the congressman to voters.A Hunt challenge had seemed to grow less likely as Mr. Cornyn strengthened his position and lashed Mr. Paxton with millions of dollars in negative advertising, with recent polls showing a close race between the two bitter rivals.But on Monday, Mr. Hunt went forward anyway.“The time is now,” he wrote on social media, alongside a three-minute biographical video that stressed his military service, his conservative upbringing and his interracial marriage.In an interview on Monday, Mr. Hunt said he decided to run because the race had become a “blood feud between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn” and that he would offer voters an alternative. He said that while Mr. Cornyn had succeeded in damaging Mr. Paxton’s standing in the polls, he had yet to improve his own numbers very much.“They’re just slinging mud at each other,” he said. “I’m going to be the one that’s going to put the priorities of Texans first.”Sign up to get J. David Goodman’s articles emailed to you. J. David Goodman is a Houston-based reporter covering the people and politics of Texas. Get it sent to your inbox.Taking a swing at Mr. Cornyn, Mr. Hunt said his first priority if elected would be the repeal of a bipartisan gun control law that Mr. Cornyn helped negotiate after the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.“You cannot author gun control legislation in Texas,” Mr. Hunt said. Mr. Paxton has also attacked Mr. Cornyn on the issue.That line of attack showed how Mr. Hunt’s entrance is likely to complicate Mr. Cornyn’s re-election effort. The congressman and the senator are likely to draw from the same pool of conservative voters who dislike Mr. Paxton because of his long history of legal and ethical entanglements.Global NewsNew York Times,Israel Marks a Somber Two-Year Milestone in Subdued Fashion, David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 7, 2025. The second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks comes with peace talks underway, but with hostages still in Gaza, more than 67,000 Palestinians dead and Israel isolated.LBC News (United Kingdom),Russian head of Soviet-era newspaper mysteriously falls 70 ft to his death from Moscow window, Henry Moore, Police are investigating whether his death was a suicide, an accident or involved some kind of foul play. Yet another prominent Russian has fallen to his death from a window in Moscow.Listen to this articleVyacheslav Leontyev, 87, who headed the secretive Pravda publishing house fell at least 70ft to his death on Sunday.Mr Leontyev was the head of Soviet paper Pravda, which translates to Truth, the main news outlet of the Communist Party.He continued leading the paper long after the fall of the USSR in 1991.Police are investigating whether his death was a suicide, an accident or involved some kind of foul play.It marks the latest in a slew of suspicious deaths in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.Reacting to the news, exiled Russian Andrey Malgin said: “The window falls continue. Leontyev fell from a window.“He was found near his home on Molodogvardeyskaya Street, where he lived.”Malgin added: “He gave the impression of a sort of underground millionaire.“He also knew a lot about the ‘Party’s money’ — the Pravda publishing house was the most profitable enterprise in the business empire of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Central Committee.”It comes just months after Andrey Badalov, vice president of Russian oil pipeline company Transneft, was found dead beneath the windows of a home on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye highway.Media, Education, Tech, Religion False Flag via The Bulwark,MAGA Turns on Trump’s Top Lawyer, Will Sommer, above, Oct. 7, 2025. Todd Blanche discovers that your place is never totally secure in the modern conservative movement. In similar news,you might think that Paramount’s purchase of Bari Weiss’s Free Press for a whopping $150 million would occasion rejoicing in conservative media circles. Instead, I’m detecting a lot of bad feelings about the high price.It’s hard to imagine a more loyal Trump foot soldier than Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, right. A former defense attorney for Trump, Blanche has played a role in administration controversies big and small. At one point, Trump even appointed him to run the Library of Congress. (It’s still not totally clear who is running it right now.)Most infamously, Blanche conducted a friendly interview with imprisoned sex trafficker, sex abuser, and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell just before she was suspiciously transferred to a lower-security prison.And yet, as is often the case in MAGA land, it’s never enough.Blanche has become the target of a right-wing media campaign pushing for his ouster. His accusers blame him for, among other things, holding up a Maxwell-like arrangement for Tina Peters, a conspiracy theorist and former county clerk in Colorado sentenced last fall to nine years in prison for letting another conspiracy theorist copy hard drives of voter data and post the stolen materials to his website. And in an administration that takes many of its cues from right-wing media, that might spell trouble for even entrenched Trump loyalists like Blanche.“We now can definitely identify Todd Blanche as the problem,” Emerald Robinson, an anchor for MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell’s LindellTV, said in an InfoWars appearance last week.I watch this stuff so you don’t have to. In exchange, consider becoming a free or paid Bulwark subscriber!!!SubscribedNo one’s position inside the MAGA movement is ever fully secure. And that holds particularly true for those who serve in Trump’s Justice Department, where each month a new top official seems to be in the crosshairs of activists yearning for prosecutions, accountability or just good old-fashioned liberal tears. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, both at the FBI, have had to manage disappointment and anger over the lack of disclosures around the Jeffrey Epstein files. And Attorney General Pam Bondi recently was the subject of intense criticism for claiming that hate speech wasn’t legally protected.Blanche, by contrast, had largely skated. Until now.He has recently been blamed for a host of misdeeds, including holding up “reparations” for January 6th defendants. But the most significant allegation against him comes from Peter Ticktin, a former Trump military-academy chum turned MAGA lawyer who’s now at the center of the get-Blanche campaign.In Ticktin’s telling, the Justice Department was poised last month to essentially rescue his client Peters from Colorado state prison, where she has started serving her nine-year sentence.Peters, shown right in an AP file photo, has become a kind of election fraud martyr, thanks in part to interviews from prison where she lays out grievances with prison life, including smelly cups, loud doors slamming, and guards yelling her name too loudly. But because Peters is held on state charges, Trump can’t pardon her, even though he’s demanded her release repeatedly in Truth Social posts.Ticktin claims the Justice Department was poised to transfer Peters in September to a cozier federal prison. But, in an appearance last week on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show, Ticktin alleged that the plan was quashed by Blanche.“Who’s holding it up on our side?” Bannon asked.“Todd Blanche!” Ticktin said.Peters has kept up the pressure herself, issuing a statement on X demanding that the DOJ “send in the marshals” to rescue her.“Why is the DOJ defying Trump’s demands?” she tweeted. “Get off your asses and get me out!”What kind of rinky-dink scheme could have saved Peters?According to Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, right—an election denier and Peters friend whom Ticktin is attempting (so far unsuccessfully) to represent in an unrelated trial—the plan was for the Justice Department to claim that Peters is a “witness” in an unspecified upcoming case. That, in turn, would create a need for her to be in federal custody. Then Peters would have been transferred to a nicer, camp-style prison.It all could have worked out, allegedly, had Blanche not intervened!“Todd Blanche put the kibosh on that,” Byrne said in an appearance on Robinson’s LindellTV show. “Todd Blanche is just a menace.”Byrne added that Blanche was “blocking everything [Trump] says he wants done” at the Justice Department—a serious accusation in Trump world, where it is held as an article of faith that Deep State actors in the security agencies and DOJ scuttled the president during his first term.The call to fire Blanche has been picked up by other MAGA influencers, including the popular “Hodge Twins” and InfoWars chief Alex Jones. Happy to pile on, Jones claimed that Blanche had also blocked an investigation into alleged unfairness in the Sandy Hook lawsuits that bankrupted InfoWars.“You think you got that killed, think again,” Jones said on his show last week, addressing the deep state. “You wait till your little deputy AG’s—” Jones then snapped his fingers and made a whistling noise to suggest Blanche would soon be gone.Blanche’s Maxwell deposition gambit and other displays of loyalty have no doubt built up a reserve of loyalty on Trump’s part. But Trump has also posted a lot about Tina Peters. And far more modest social media campaigns have gotten other people canned in this administration. Consider the many heads lopped off by Laura Loomer, or how a post from right-wing journalist Julie Kelly apparently prompted the firing of a senior federal prosecutor in Virginia last week.Perhaps that’s why the Fire Blanche campaign has received so much pushback from top Justice Department officials and other MAGA figures. On Friday, Chad Mizelle—the chief of staff to attorney general Pam Bondi—defended Blanche on X.“Todd Blanche is crushing the deep state,” he wrote.Former congressman Matt Gaetz, now a host at One America News, argued that Blanche was “no squish.” But perhaps the strongest defense of Blanche came from former Trump lawyer Alina Habba, now fighting her own battle to remain as the lead federal prosecutor in New Jersey.Blanche “is one of the GOATs,” Habba tweeted, using the popular acronym for “Greatest of All Time.”Regarding Paramount’s purchase of Bari Weiss’s Free Press for a whopping $150 million:
- Right-wing pundit Clint Russell of the “Liberty Lockdown” YouTube channel griped on X that his own videos regularly outpace Weiss’s in terms of viewership, and he doesn’t even have a support staff. Russell groaned that the purchase was “legal bribery.”
- Right-wing activist Laura Loomer—no stranger to attacking other women in right-wing media—was on this train weeks ago. In late September, Loomer tweeted that Weiss was the “Jewish Elizabeth Holmes,” an allusion to the fraudster-CEO of notorious med-tech startup Theranos. Like Russell, Loomer complained that she gets far more online attention than Weiss’s publication does.
- Even alt-conservative podcaster Tim Pool isn’t happy.
- “I don’t understand $150M at all,” Pool tweeted on Monday, saying the price should’ve been slashed by half or even cut down to a third of the reported amount.
Should Paramount have purchased Tim Pool’s podcast and related West Virginia skateboarding empire for $150 million to make the punk-rock Pool the head of CBS News instead? Sound off in the comments!Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: The devolution of CBS News, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 7, 2025. A network once revered for fact-based reporting is embracing right-wing pseudo-journalism.From the pioneering broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite’s trusted voice and Ed Bradley’s impactful reporting, CBS News earned a reputation as one of America’s most trusted news sources. Its flagship program, 60 Minutes, became synonymous with fearless, truth-telling journalism.More recently, however, things have taken a turn.In July, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, paid $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit filed by President Trump. In September, CBS News hired a Trump loyalist to serve as its new ombudsman, charged with reviewing news coverage for “bias.”The most dramatic move came Monday, when Paramount announced that it would hire former New York Times opinion columnist and anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss to be the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. She has no experience in broadcast news. Weiss departed the New York Times in 2020, writing in her resignation letter that the publication had become too left-wing and that she faced harassment for having “centrist” views.In 2021, Weiss, right, founded The Free Press, a publication that is purportedly committed to “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.” In a 2023 column, Weiss suggested the progressive movement “demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.” In 2024, Weiss claimed that the “political left… makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project.”Along with hiring Weiss, Paramount purchased The Free Press for a reported $150 million.In her initial note to CBS News staff, Weiss said that she was committed to producing journalism that was “fair,” “factual,” and “tell[s] the truth plainly.” A Popular Information review of The Free Press’ work, however, reveals that the publication repeatedly distorted the truth to conform to its right-wing ideological agenda.Falsely accusing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer of covering up child sex traffickingIn a January 2025 article published by The Free Press, writer Dominic Green accuses UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, left, of participating in a cover-up of the “grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls.” The accusation, as Green notes, was popularized by Elon Musk on X. Musk alleged that Starmer ignored the crimes because the perpetrators were Muslim. This fits into The Free Press’ preferred narrative that “political correctness” has run amok.The Free Press article praises Musk for highlighting the issue and echoes his allegations. Green suggests that Starmer, who was director of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013, sought to minimize the issue because the “majority of their crimes were committed in cities with a Labour Party–controlled council and a Labour Party MP who needed Muslim votes.”Green accuses Starmer of “complicity,” saying that as CPS director, he “failed” to bring “major cases to court.” As a result, England is “shamed before the world.” Underneath a picture of Starmer, The Free Press writes that he has “come under fire for his role in an alleged cover-up of a serial rape scandal.”While the crimes against English girls are real, the allegations against Starmer levied in The Free Press are baseless. As CPS director, Starmer did not cover up the crimes against English girls — he successfully prosecuted them.Three days before The Free Press article was published, the Financial Times reported that Starmer “began the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gang during his final year in post, shortly after the scandal in the Greater Manchester town became the first to come to light.” Further, “Starmer launched an overhaul of the way the CPS investigates sexual abuse to ensure more perpetrators are brought to justice. The reforms also paved the way for historic cases to be reviewed.”Starmer’s work is praised in a 2013 parliamentary report, highlighted by The Banter, produced by a Conservative government:We would also like to commend the work of the Director for Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC and the Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West, Nazir Afzal OBE … Mr Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecutions and, when he leaves the Crown Prosecution Service this year, he will be missed. His response should provide a model to the other agencies involved in tackling localised groomingGreen’s piece briefly notes that he “secured some successful convictions,” without reconciling that with allegations that he was complicit in a cover-up. Instead, Green highlights an instance where CPS prosecutors dropped a case in 2009, believing they could not succeed in court. But Green does not mention that the decision was reversed with Starmer’s support.“The only way we could bring that case was to admit that we had failed these victims when they had first made a complaint in 2008,” Nazir Afzal, the prosecutor who ultimately secured convictions in the case, said. “Keir was 100% behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.”Afzal praised Starmer’s leadership on the issue during his tenure, crediting him for helping him succeed. “Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir,” Afzal said.The Free Press article, meanwhile, concludes by accusing Starmer of “covering the party’s backside at the expense of justice for the victims.”Wrongly accusing the U.N. of inflating civilian casualties in GazaA May 2024 article published in The Free Press states that “millions have marched across the world demanding Israel end its ‘genocide’ in Gaza, pointing to the number of civilians killed by the war.” The article, written by Peter Savodnik, claims that the United Nations (U.N.) “now concedes that this number—provided by Hamas—is wildly inaccurate.”Savodnik’s claim is absolutely false and was directly refuted by U.N. officials.According to Savodnik, on May 4, the U.N. claimed that around 24,000 civilians had been killed in Gaza. Two days later, Savodnik claims, the U.N. “quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died.”But this was not true. Savodnik, along with others on the right, was conflating two different data sets. One is the estimated number of civilian fatalities among “an overall death toll.” The other figures are the civilian fatalities among those “whose identities (such as name and date of birth) have been documented.”U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq made clear at a press conference that although there are two sets of data maintained, the total number of fatalities “remains unchanged.”Unfounded claims that the famine declaration in Gaza was based on manipulated dataIn an editorial published in August, The Free Press claimed that an international committee had doctored its metrics to declare famine in Gaza. The Free Press editors wrote that the “United Nations-associated body” had “monkeyed with the metrics for its assessment in Gaza.”As evidence for this claim, the editors link to an opinion column by Seth Mandel in Commentary Magazine, which relies on an article in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine.The Washington Free Beacon claims that the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) lowered its standards to issue a “famine classification” for Gaza. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the IPC switched to a less rigorous metric that “has not [been] historically used” for measuring famine: measuring mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) instead of the ratio of height to weight in Gazan children. The article also claims that the IPC moved the threshold for famine to 15% of Gaza’s children experiencing acute malnutrition, down from 30% to “make it easier” to declare famine.However, the IPC has previously used MUAC to measure famine in other regions, such as Somalia and Sudan. MUAC has been found to be an effective, non-invasive malnutrition measure that can be easier to obtain in difficult conditions because it requires less equipment and training.Further, the IPC did not lower the famine threshold for Gaza. Instead, the threshold for famine depends on the metric used. When using a weight-height metric, it is 30%, while it is 15% for MUAC. This is because the arm circumference tends to shrink in the later stages of malnutrition. This standard was applied in the reports on Somalia and Sudan.Distorting data about Muslims in CanadaAn article published in The Free Press in December 2024, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada,” claims that a study by researcher Robert Brym “found that more than 40 percent of the [Canadian] Muslims surveyed said that suicide bombing targeting Israeli citizens is justified.” But that is not true and is based on a misreading of the data.The study asked respondents if they agreed with the statement: “There is no justification for Palestinian suicide bombers targeting Israeli civilians.” The study found that 43% of Canadian Muslims agreed with the statement, and therefore believed that the Palestinian suicide bombing of Israeli civilians was not justified. The study found that 30% of Canadian Muslims disagreed.Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East wrote a letter to The Free Press, noting the misreporting of the study data and numerous other errors in the article. No corrections were ever made. Oct. 6The Triad via The Bulwark, Commentary: The Washington Post and CBS News are dying. The Bulwark is the future, Jonathan V. Last, above, Oct. 6, 2025. We drink their milkshake.Hey fam, I have news: Catherine Rampell, right, has joined The Bulwark.I’ve been reading Catherine for years at the Washington Post. The highest compliment I can give is that she always adds value for me. When I read her pieces, I learn something, or see something in a different way, every time.For the last few years she was high on my list of people I knew belonged at The Bulwark.And when the Post started imploding a year ago, I was pretty sure she’d wind up riding with us.Why? Because the rise of authoritarianism in America is the defining challenge of this generation and our legacy media institutions have structural problems that made them unequal to the moment.I’d like to talk about these problems because journalism is one of the load-bearing beams of liberal democracy. It’s going to be a bit of a journey, but I promise that at the end we’ll get back to Catherine Rampell herself.The Paper. “Modern” journalism begins at Watergate. America had a maturing broadcast news sector alongside a robust print sector. Print journalism was leaving the guild era, in which most practitioners were the products of an apprentice system, and becoming professionalized. There was a small galaxy of highly profitable weekly and monthly magazines and newspapers were transitioning from local, to regional, and in three cases, eventually national businesses.Watergate set off a period of expansion for the entire industry. Within twenty years there were 24-hour cable news networks, the Washington Post was a national paper at the center of a corporate conglomerate that included real estate holdings and a test-prep empire, and Condé Nast was printing money so fast that a new glossy magazine appeared on the scene every couple of months.The economics of journalism were solid during this period. Broadcast news was a cash cow. All three evening network newscasts pulled big audiences because there were limited viewing options. The upstart cable networks were supported by a combination of carriage fees plus ads. And newspapers and magazines were the only way for advertisers to reach consumers in the print format: They had a monopoly on that ad medium.By the early 1990s journalism was in an expansion phase, with media companies leveraging themselves to make acquisitions. And because so many of these institutions had taken on debt in order to grow, the internet arrived at a moment of extreme vulnerability.The first thing the internet did to journalism was cut the legs out of the classified-ad business. Craigslist changed everything, gleefully doing for free what local newspapers had long relied on as their steadiest revenue source.The second thing the internet did was befuddle the managers of print media outlets. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, newspapers and magazines had no idea what was happening. Some resisted moving their products online. Others thought that being online would instantly grow their total addressable market and become a new revenue stream.While print managers worried about near-term strategy, none of them saw the fundamental shift the internet represented: Where print media once had a monopoly on display advertising, the internet expanded the available space for display ads to infinity. This would eventually drive down ad prices per unit, but that was just the small problem.The big problem was that print media’s monopoly on display advertising disappeared. It now had to compete with the entire internet: AOL and Yahoo homepages; celebrity gossip blogs; home-improvement sites; and most importantly, Google search results and Facebook.In the span of a decade, print media went from having a monopoly on display ads to being worst-in-class in a crowded business. This was the fundamental disruption the internet unleashed on journalism.At that point it should have been clear that journalism would have to become reader-supported in order to survive. That print media would have to retrench and cultivate direct a relationship with its audience.The problem was timing.The ’00s were the heyday of “information wants to be free” thinking.Hell, Chris Anderson, then the editor of Wired, wrote a cover story for his magazine about how “free” was the future.Anderson is a smart guy. How could he have been so stupidly wrong? Because in that moment, consumers were not willing to pay for stuff the internet.So people in journalism were grasping for any business case they could find. Lots of smart people tried interesting ideas to make journalism work during that period.None of them were sustainable. By the 2010s, print journalism was in slow-motion collapse. Newspapers and magazines shut down. Some tried to reorganize through bankruptcy. Others got bought by rich people, to be run as vanity projects.Which brings us back to the Washington Post. In theory, having a newspaper owned by one of the richest men on the planet seems like a good idea. If the owner is benevolent and civic-minded, then it’s a nice arrangement. Jeff Bezos floats one of the most important journalistic institutions in America, and in return people think well of him. He has no incentive to meddle with the paper because if he did, then people would stop thinking well of him. And besides, what would meddling get him? It’s a low-risk, low-reward game.But that dynamic only works in a liberal democracy.Once you move into illiberalism, and authoritarianism, the game shifts. Now, owning the Washington Post poses real costs for Bezos, because if he displeases the regime, the autocrat will come for his businesses. Maybe even for him.In an authoritarian context owning the Post is a high-risk proposition. Which is why Bezos, left, is remaking the paper to be more acceptable to President Trump. Yes, some people have stopped thinking well of him. But in an authoritarian context, that’s a small price to pay.The Washington Post is owned by a man who, in an authoritarian context, is journalistically compromised by his business interests. He has employed as the Post’s publisher a man who is journalistically compromised by his own conduct. Which is why the Post has been bleeding talent for a year.2. Propaganda. In an authoritarian context, all journalism will tend toward propaganda unless it is explicitly formulated as anti-authoritarian.That’s the nature of the beast. Unless an institution is explicitly designed to counter authoritarianism, it will end up aiding the authoritarians. Either on purpose, as is happening at the Post and CBS News (more on this in a minute) or by accident:Oopsie. Once authoritarianism shows up to the party, there can be only two kinds of media:• Propaganda that is sanctioned by the regime• Independent media that exists to see the authoritarian project endedThere is no third way. Eventually, every media institution will have to choose a side.It is desperately hard for legacy media institutions, which have always existed in the sun-dappled space of liberalism, to recognize this unpleasant reality. It’s even harder for them to choose anti-authoritarianism. They have too much institutional memory, too deep an attachment to the Before Times. And too much to lose.In a weird way, that’s The Bulwark’s secret sauce:
- We were born in the now. The fight against authoritarianism is all we’ve ever known as an institution.
- We were built from the ground up to be supported by readers. There is no billionaire behind the scenes. We have only ever been accountable to you guys.
- Because many of us are political apostates, we don’t have baked-in loyalties to anything except liberal democracy. And when you don’t have loyalties, you’re free to (a) say what you really think, but also, (b) change your mind as facts change.
What we’re building here at The Bulwark is the future of journalism.No chasing pageviews. No corporate ownership. No partisan loyalties. No kabuki theater. No filters. And we’ve built this thing of ours together,with you. Your support is what made it possible for us to go out and get Catherine Rampell. I’ll have more soon on what Catherine will get up to for us but for now I want to express my gratitude. Thank you. That’s just a half-year after we hired Will Sommer away from the same newspaper. Think about that: The Bulwark is now a place people leave the Washington Freaking Post for.And we’re not done. I’m in full I-drink-your-milkshake mode.We’ve created a virtuous cycle where the bigger our community gets, the more resources we have to get the best writers. And then the community grows even more. You all made this happen. Thank you.For sharing our work, for telling people about The Bulwark, for attending our live events, for investing in this enterprise. We’re savaging the carcass of the pliant, corporate, both-sides media and building something real. Something true. Something that is going to matter when the time comes for everyone to take their stand.3. CBS. Look, if you thought I was being hyperbolic when I said that the only choices for media in an authoritarian moment were propaganda or independence, just look at what Paramount did this morning.You have one of the richest families on earth attempting to grab a share of American media to add to its tech platform holdings.The Ellisons understand that in an authoritarian context they must transform their media company so that it is acceptable to the regime.That’s why they are buying Bari Weiss’s Free Press and making her editor-in-chief of CBS News, with a direct report to David Ellison—bypassing the president of CBS News in the org chart.It’s a preposterous hire that makes sense for one reason: The Ellisons believe it will buy them good will with the Trump administration. If Weiss, right, screws up CBS News, or the news division’s business goes pear-shaped, that hardly matters. She’s a loss leader for the larger project of tech lord consolidation. Meidas Touch Network,One of Trump’s Favorite White House Reporters Denies Moon Landings, J.D. Wolf, Oct. 6, 2025. Brian Glenn tweeted that he doesn’t believe the United States landed on the moon. Brian Glenn, a Real America’s Voice host often touted by Donald Trump as one of his favorite reporters, tweeted, “We didn’t land on the moon. Have a nice night,” echoing a fringe conspiracy theory that has been debunked for decades. Glenn is also the boyfriend of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who has been known for spreading QAnon conspiracy theories. Brian GlennHis comment comes as the Trump administration is actively promoting plans for America’s return to the moon, a centerpiece of its space policy. The disconnect highlights the uneasy overlap between Trumpworld’s embrace of conspiracy-driven media personalities and the administration’s official initiatives.Oct. 6 New York Times,Judge Again Blocks Guard Deployment as Trump Expands His Targets, Shawn Hubler, Anna Griffin and Eric Schmitt, Updated Oct. 6, 2025. A federal judge in Oregon accused the administration of circumventing her order, even as the president turned to Texas for troops aimed at Chicago and other cities.A federal judge on Sunday night blocked the Trump administration from deploying hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops to Oregon, even as President Trump turned to the Texas guard in a widening hunt for military forces to send to Democratic cities.The Trump administration had tried to send hundreds of California National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., while mustering hundreds more from Texas, despite a stern ruling from Judge Karin Immergut of U.S. District Court in Oregon just Saturday that sought to block military forces.Judge Immergut, an appointee of President Trump, called an emergency hearing Sunday, then broadened her restraining order to cover “the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of any state or the District of Columbia in the state of Oregon,” telling Justice Department lawyers that the president was ”in direct contravention” of her order.The blizzard of moves by the Trump administration, from Texas to California, Illinois to Oregon, has left governors and the courts scrambling to keep pace. First, the administration tried to sidestep Judge Immergut by turning to California. Then the president ordered as many as 400 members of the Texas National Guard to deploy for “federal protection missions” in Portland, Chicago and potentially other cities, according to a letter released by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, on Sunday night.“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, said in a statement.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, shown at right in a file photo, fully backed the deployment.“You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” he wrote on social media. “No Guard can match the training, skill, and expertise of the Texas National Guard.”The president had said the troops were needed to respond to demonstrations at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland and another in suburban Chicago.But Judge Immergut wrote on Saturday that the protests in Portland, which have been generally small, “were not significantly violent or disruptive” and that she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority. The Trump administration quickly appealed.Then, in a pivot that outraged both states, the president ordered 200 members of the California National Guard who had been commandeered earlier this summer and sent to Los Angeles as part of another contested federal deployment to travel to Oregon support federal law enforcement. The decision to essentially substitute California troops for the thwarted Oregon deployment drew vehement criticism from Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, both Democrats, who charged that the use of the out-of-state troops without their consent was an abuse of power and illegal.“The rule of law has prevailed — and California’s National Guard will be heading home,” Mr. Newsom said after the judge’s restraining order was issued late Sunday.But the judge’s order did not cover a pending deployment of guard troops to Chicago. Mr. Pritzker charged that the mustering of guard troops from Texas was aimed at escalating tensions.“It started with federal agents,” Mr. Pritzker said in a statement. “It will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.”Mr. Pritzker said he had not been contacted by anyone in the federal government to coordinate or discuss the deployment.Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that 200 California National Guard troops had been reassigned to Portland from duty in the Los Angeles area “to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.” Newsweek,Judge Diane Goodstein’s Home Burns to Ground After Ruling Against Trump, Alia Shoaib, Oct. 6, 2025. The home of a South Carolina judge was destroyed after it went up in flames on Saturday.A fire engulfed the home of Judge Diane Goodstein, who serves on the state Circuit Court, and led to three people being hospitalized with injuries, including her husband, per The Post and Courier.The cause of the fire is not immediately known, and the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) said it is investigating the incident. The fire comes weeks after Goodstein issued a ruling against the Trump administration.Authorities have not yet determined the cause of the blaze, and there is currently no evidence to suggest it was an act of arson. Still, it has sparked conversation about online hostility toward members of the judiciary who rule against Trump and his allies.The judge’s husband, former Democratic state senator Arnold Goodstein, was among those injured after he reportedly jumped from the house and had to be rescued from a marshy area behind the property, a neighbor said.The neighbor, Tom Peterson, told The Post and Courier that the judge told him she was walking her dogs on the beach when the home caught fire. The Contrarian,Opinion: We Found the ‘Enemy from Within,’ Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 6, 2025. He’s in the White House.For Donald Trump, the “enemy from within” includes not only undocumented immigrants, drug cartels, foreign terrorists, liberal activists, and the press. ICE’s raid on a Chicago apartment building and the ensuing ICE violence against civilians make clear that Trump has initiated an unconstitutional, brutal war against ordinary Americans.A military attack more akin to an overseas military operation than a domestic police action unfolded in that Chicago apartment building on Tuesday.Families were separated, and children were zip-tied together and left traumatized. The local public radio station recounted: “Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.” Neighbors also reported that “federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through the building, and several drones and helicopters were deployed.” The local ABC affiliate station quoted a neighbor who witnessed ICE agents: “One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”This incident was just one episode in Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” an exercise in indiscriminate and excessive force. Another raid was “carried out in suburban Elgin, when agents led by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rode in a military vehicle and blew down the front door of a home where they detained six people, including two U.S. citizens,” WBEZ reported.Chicago, state officials, and civil rights groups have denounced ICE’s onslaught of abuse and excessive force. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, decrying ICE for “running around the Loop harassing people for not being white,” enumerated the violent actions taken against civilians, including “posting social media videos mocking and glorifying the detention of individuals—including U.S. citizens—who are later released.” He also recounted, “Kristi Noem’s and Greg Bovino’s masked agents threw chemical agents near an elementary school, arrested elected officials exercising their First Amendment rights, and raided a Walmart.”ICE’s violence escalated quickly. On Saturday, an ICE agent shot and wounded a motorist. Following his playbook from Portland, Los Angeles, and D.C., Trump first threatened to nationalize the Illinois National Guard.Pritzker swiftly responded on social media that for Trump, “this has never been about safety. This is about control.” He reiterated that no military troops were needed because state, county, and local forces were protecting public safety. He also vowed, “I will not call up our National Guard to further Trump’s acts of aggression against our people. In Illinois, we will do everything within our power to look out for our neighbors, uphold the Constitution, and defend the rule of law.”With the ruling Saturday night from U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, enjoining Trump’s invasion of Portland, Trump might be stymied in Chicago, at least at the lower court level.On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Pritzker summed up the situation:What happened at that building is shameful. Our Department of Children and Family Services are investigating what happened to those children who were zip-tied and held, some of them nearly naked, in the middle of the night, and, again, elderly people being thrown into a U-Haul for three hours and detained, U.S. citizens.What kind of a country are we living in? And this raid at this building is emblematic of what ICE and CBP and the president of the United States [and] Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, are trying to do. They want mayhem on the ground. They want to create the war zone, so that they can send in even more troops…. They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.Responding to Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s unhinged attack on Judge Immergut, Pritzker noted that “this judge is a Trump-appointed judge” who found that “what the government is doing, what Trump is doing, is untethered from the facts.”“What kind of a country are we living in?”By Sunday evening, Trump reversed course and threatened to send several hundred members of the Texas National Guard to invade Illinois. Pritzker responded on social media: “I call on Governor Abbott to immediately withdraw any support for this decision and refuse to coordinate. There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation.”Trump’s unprecedented assault on Chicago and other American cities is the inevitable result of the MAGA Supreme Court’s acquiescence to the Trump regime’s violent assault on individuals who look Latino, speak Spanish, and/or work or live among undocumented migrants. Last month, the Supreme Court’s majority, again misusing its emergency docket, condoned Los Angeles raids based on racial profiling. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s shameful concurrence ludicrously minimized and mischaracterized ICE’s brutality.) ICE took that as a green light to ratchet up violence and shred civil liberties nationwide.On the flimsiest of pretexts, Trump’s regime has deployed overwhelming force against Americans, traumatized children, detained suspected undocumented immigrants (many of whom turn out to be citizens or legal residents) for days or weeks, wrecked people’s homes, and stirred up violence on the streets.The “enemy from within” is Donald Trump. The “violent extremists” are Trump lackeys who have turned ICE into fascistic shock troops. This is not business as usual, or “Trump being Trump.” In response to Trump’s brutal, racist, and unconstitutional campaign of terror designed to desensitize Americans to police state tactics, the country must mobilize collectively.Lawyers can sue to protect victims and stop the invasion of our cities. Judges can block violent ICE raids lacking probable cause and—as Immergut did in Portland—halt military invasions that unconstitutionally supplant domestic police, refusing to defer when Trump’s actions are “untethered to facts.” (Long ago, courts should have refused to grant deference to a president who perpetually acts in bad faith.) Congressional Democrats can demand oversight hearings and deny votes to fund egregious ICE conduct and misuse of National Guard forces. Legacy media outlets could even renounce the sane-washing of Trump and phony equivalence (i.e., cover Trump as they would a foreign autocrat).SubscribedAll Americans can respond with peaceful, robust protest. As the ACLU suggests, you can take action such as “going to a No Kings protest, filming ICE activity, taking a Know Your Rights training, or simply helping your neighbors’ children get safely to school, …. [to] help protect not just our loved ones, but our communities.”This will not end until voters boot out MAGA lawmakers who refuse to rein in Trump. We will not be safe from a dictatorial presidency as long as the Supreme Court refuses to check executive overreach. Court expansion and repeal of its appellate jurisdiction must be on the table.Meanwhile, all Americans must defend our neighbors, our deepest-held values, and what is left of our democracy. Stars and Stripes,Veterans ‘Long-overdue validation’: CDC formally recognizes Gulf War illness, Linda F. Hersey, Oct. 6, 2025. Gulf War illness, a debilitating medical condition linked to military service, has received formal recognition as a legitimate illness after more than three decades of reports by veterans about unexplained symptoms they developed during active duty in the Persian Gulf.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced a medical diagnostic code for Gulf War illness that will enable doctors and scientists to more effectively track, document and treat the cluster of symptoms reported by tens of thousands of veterans who served in the early 1990s.The new diagnostic code — which became effective Oct. 1 — is part of a standardized system doctors use to identify diseases and medical conditions. The National Center for Health Statistics at CDC is responsible for modifications to those codes.“Veterans have been told it was in their heads. The medical establishment cannot do this anymore with this [medical diagnostic] code. This is an official illness,” said Ronald Brown, an Army veteran and toxic wounds specialist.The lack of a formal medical diagnosis for Gulf War illness until now meant doctors and researchers were unable to easily identify and treat veterans with the condition “inside and outside the VA health care system,” according to Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group.The medically unexplained symptoms include chronic fatigue, breathing problems, joint pain, skin rashes, digestive disorders and memory loss that may worsen over time, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.The VA instead assigned other diagnoses — such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and “undiagnosed illnesses” — to the ailments many Gulf War veterans experienced.Gulf War illness continues to affect up to a third of the 700,000 troops deployed during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm more than 30 years ago, according to VA.“The first time I got sick was within 15 minutes of the demolition of an Iraqi chemical weapons depot in Khamisiyah in March 1991,” Brown said.Clouds of smoke rise above spots in the desert.Ronald Brown, a former Army specialist, took photos of mushroom clouds that resulted from the demolition of a munitions depot in Khamisiyah, Iraq, in 1991. “The first time I felt sick was 15 minutes after those demolitions started,” said Brown, whose unit secured the compound prior to the demolition. (Ronald Brown)Brown referred to toxic exposures from the destruction of a major weapons depot in the Khamisiyah region that the military found later contained chemical weapons. He estimated he was stationed a few miles from the depot when it was demolished.“I stayed sick, came home sick and left the military sick,” said Brown, a former specialist with the 82nd Airborne division.Anthony Hardie, an Army veteran and national director of Veterans for Common Sense, served in Kuwait and southern Iraq in 1991.His organization often hears from Gulf War veterans who say they returned home with health problems but were dismissed by doctors.“It has been a travesty for them,” said Hardie, a 57-year-old former Army staff sergeant.Vietnam Veterans of America said the addition of the diagnostic code means that Gulf War illness is recognized as a legitimate medical diagnosis after three decades.“This validation is crucial for veterans who have long struggled to have their symptoms acknowledged and taken seriously,” said Tom Burke, president of the organization, which works to advance policies to benefit all veterans.More On Trump Troop Deployments Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, center, is shown flanked by Chicago’s mayor, left, and the state’s lieutenant governor in a file photo on Sept. 2, 2025.New York Times,Pritzker Says Federal Agents Are Trying to Make Chicago a ‘War Zone,’ Sonia A. Rao, Oct. 6, 2025 (print ed.). Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said he had ordered state agencies to investigate a raid on a Chicago apartment building where there had been reports of “nearly naked” children zip-tied by federal officers.Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois blasted recent federal immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago on Sunday, dismissing assertions by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that the city was a “war zone” and blaming federal agents for escalating a sense of conflict.“The secretary doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” the governor said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that Chicagoans were “booing her on the street.”Mr. Pritzker singled out a late-night Border Patrol raid last week at an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, when video taken by bystanders showed residents of the building restrained with zip ties.Federal agents were “just picking up people who are brown and Black and then checking their credentials,” Mr. Pritzker said. He added: “They are the ones that are making it a war zone. They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the president said they were going to do.”Mr. Pritzker suggested that the Trump administration, which plans to send 300 National Guard troops to Chicago, was intentionally heightening tensions. The administration wants to “create the war zone so they can send in even more troops,” he said.Mr. Pritzker said he had directed state agencies to investigate what happened at the apartment building, citing reports of “children who were zip-tied and held, some of them nearly naked” and “elderly people being thrown into a U-Haul for three hours and detained.” Mr. Pritzker added he believed that some of the people were U.S. citizens.“What kind of a country are we living in?” he said.The governor also said he wanted to know more about an episode in Chicago on Saturday when a federal agent shot and wounded a motorist who, according to federal officials, had rammed and boxed-in a law enforcement vehicle.“It’s really hard to know exactly what the facts are, and they won’t let us access the facts,” Mr. Pritzker said. “They are just putting out their propaganda. And then we’ve got to later determine what actually happened.”Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: October 5, 2025 [Trump Troop Planning],Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 6, 2025. On Friday the Minnesota Star Tribune reported a conversation on the messaging app Signal between one of Stephen Miller’s top deputies, Anthony Salisbury, and a senior advisor to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Patrick Weaver. Stephen Miller is the deputy White House chief of staff and is widely identified as the figure directing the administration’s attacks on immigrants and diversity initiatives.Salisbury was in Minnesota to attend a funeral. His Signal chat was clearly visible to bystanders, one of whom provided images of it to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The two men were discussing a plan to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Portland, Oregon. Since World War I, the elite 82nd Airborne has specialized in parachute assaults into hostile areas.But President Donald J. Trump had apparently not signed off on the plan. Weaver told Salisbury that Defense Secretary Hegseth wanted Trump to give him a clear order to send troops into Portland. “Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver wrote.As Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian reported, Weaver said Hegseth preferred to send in the national guard owing to potential backlash over using the famous 82nd. “82nd is like our top tier [quick reaction force] for abroad,” Weaver wrote. “So it will cause a lot of headlines. Probably why he wants potus [Trump] to tell him to do it.”This conversation raises the question of how involved Trump is in the decisions his administration is making about the use of the military. On September 29, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Miller has taken the lead in the administration’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean, vessels the administration claims are Venezuelan drug boats although it has offered no evidence either to lawmakers or to the public for that claim.A White House spokesperson said in a statement that Trump directed the strikes and that he oversees all foreign policy. The statement said: “The entire administration is working together to execute the president’s directive with clear success.” But that raises echoes of the conversation on March 15, 2025, also on Signal, in which Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance included editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in a discussion about whether to strike the Houthis in Yemen. Miller ended the March discussion simply by invoking Trump: “As I heard it,” he wrote, “the president was clear: green light….” And the attack was on.As Dan Froomkin spelled out last week in Press Watch, Trump has been focused on the misguided idea that Portland, Oregon, is a war zone ever since he apparently watched a September 4 Fox News Channel special report that passed off footage from the violence of 2020 as happening now. About twenty people protest every night outside an ICE facility, but while the protesters are insulting (they have been “ICE fishing” with donuts on fishing poles), the protests have been peaceful, with very few arrests.On September 25, Trump asserted that “nobody’s ever seen anything like it every night and this has gone on for years. They just burned the place down…. These are professional agitators. These are bad people and they [are] paid a lot of money by rich people….” He claimed Portland was plagued by “anarchists” and “crazy people” who were trying to “burn down buildings, including federal buildings.”Two days later, on Saturday, September 27, Trump’s social media account posted: “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”Oregon governor Tina Kotek told Trump his impression of Portland (whose skyline is shown above in a file photo) was wrong. On Sunday morning, Trump told NBC White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor: “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice. But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”The same day, Hegseth federalized 200 National Guard personnel from Oregon to “protect U.S.Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other U.S. Government personnel who are performing Federal functions.”Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield and the city attorney of Portland immediately sued to stop the mobilization, saying it is unlawful, infringes on Oregon’s state sovereignty and police powers, and would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids federal troops from being used for law enforcement. On October 1, Trump’s social media account posted that in Portland, “conditions continue to deteriorate into lawless mayhem…. We will never allow MOBS to take over our streets, burn our Cities, or destroy America. The National Guard is now in place, and has been dedicated to restoring LAW AND ORDER, and ending the Chaos, Death, and Destruction!”On Friday, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, a Trump appointee, heard arguments in the case. As Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reported, deputy assistant attorney general Eric Hamilton said that the administration had called out troops to defend against “cruel radicals who have laid siege” to the ICE facility in Portland and who, this past summer, threw rocks at law enforcement officers. Lawyers for Portland pointed out that local police had handled the situation and that the order for deployment had come several months later.Senior deputy city attorney Caroline Turco told the judge: “We ultimately have a perception-versus-reality problem. The perception is that it is World War II out here. The reality is that this is a beautiful city with a sophisticated resource that can handle the situation.”Judge Immergut said she would rule by Saturday, but before she ruled, Hegseth activated the 200 National Guard troops. Shortly after, Immergut handed down her decision blocking the deployment. She declared “the President’s determination” that law enforcement could not execute the laws of the United States “was simply untethered to the facts.”“[T]his is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote. The administration has “made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.” Miller called her decision “[l]egal insurrection.” He posted: “This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.”Troy Brynelson and Alex Zielinsky of Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that after Immergut’s ruling, federal officers showed force. They pushed protesters “hundreds of yards down city streets and fired tear gas, flash-bang grenades and pepper balls without any clear signs of provocation.” Brynelson and Zielinsky noted that the troops “were flanked by videographers, toting professional equipment and wearing high-visibility vests. They filmed from behind the lines of officers, capturing the show of force. At least two drones swept over the scenes.”At 7:56 on Saturday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Noem posted a video that appeared to show the federal raid on a Chicago apartment building on September 30. The video used that raid to show a fantasy military-style invasion that misrepresented the actual event in which federal agents arrived with a Black Hawk helicopter and large vehicles and dragged the unarmed residents out of their beds. Agents took all but one of the residents outside in zip ties before trashing the apartments. Their targets included U.S. citizens and children, some of whom were separated from their parents and all of whom were terrified.Over the video, Noem commented: “Chicago, we’re here for you.”Later on Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents wounded a woman on Chicago’s Southwest Side. DHS immediately claimed agents had fired “defensive shots” after being “rammed by 10 cars,” but no reporter has been able to confirm that story. Later, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted that Hegseth had called him. “This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” he wrote.Pritzker added that the administration planned to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. “They will pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance—not a serious effort [to] protect public safety. For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.” On Saturday afternoon, a spokesperson for the White House said Trump has “authorized” the deployment of 300 Illinois National Guard members. Later, Pritzker said he had been informed that members of the Texas National Guard would be deployed to Illinois.On Saturday afternoon, Miller posted: “The issue before us now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”Blocked from deploying Oregon National Guard troops in Portland, the administration on Sunday deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland instead. California governor Gavin Newsom broke the news, adding: “This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power. The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words—ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents.”Governor Kotek confirmed that troops had arrived. “This action appears…intentional to circumvent yesterday’s ruling by a federal judge,” she said. “The facts haven’t changed. There is no need for military intervention in Oregon. There is no insurrection in Portland. No threat to national security. Oregon is our home, not a military target. Oregonians exercising their freedom of speech against unlawful actions by the Trump Administration should do so peacefully.”Both California and Oregon asked Judge Immergut to stop the Trump administration from taking this end-run around her initial ruling. Tonight, Judge Immergut held an emergency hearing on the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops from California to Oregon. She forbade the deployment of any federalized National Guard troops from any state to Oregon for 14 days.After staying out of the public eye since his performance last Tuesday in front of the nation’s top military leaders and the press conference later that day, Trump spoke to sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, today. The president arrived an hour late and delivered a meandering, political address much like the one he gave on Tuesday.Global News New York Times,French Prime Minister Resigns in Surprise Move, Aurelien Breeden, Oct. 6, 2025. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of France resigned on Monday less than 24 hours after forming his cabinet, catching the nation by surprise and making his government the shortest-lived in modern French history.President Emmanuel Macron’s office said in a one-sentence statement that Mr. Macron had accepted the resignation of Mr. Lecornu, which came amid turmoil over the composition of his cabinet, an uneasy coalition of centrists and conservatives.The resignation immediately ratcheted up pressure from opposition parties on the left and far-right that are pushing Mr. Macron to call snap parliamentary elections.Mr. Lecornu, a close ally of Mr. Macron, was appointed less than a month ago. He is the third prime minister to leave office in under a year, a near-unprecedented level of turmoil in France’s modern political history.In a televised address on Monday, Mr. Lecornu said he had “tried to build the conditions under which we might adopt a budget for France” and “respond to a handful of emergencies that cannot wait for 2027,” when France’s next presidential elections are scheduled. But “the conditions were no longer met for me to perform the duties of prime minister,” he said.The resignation of Mr. Lecornu came amid growing concern that he would not be able to get a budget passed by the end of 2025 to tackle France’s surging debt and deficit. Since snap elections called by Mr. Macron in 2024, France’s lower house of Parliament has been deadlocked between a collection of left-wing parties, a tenuous center-right coalition and a nationalist, anti-immigrant far right.No party has a working majority. Aware of the difficulties, Mr. Lecornu had announced last week that he would not use a constitutional prerogative to push through a spending bill without a full vote in Parliament — a tool that his predecessors had often used to force lawmakers to pass a budget. His announcement, a risky gamble, aimed to stave off the threat of being toppled before budget discussions had even begun.But in his speech on Monday, Mr. Lecornu accused France’s parties of failing to seize that opportunity for parliamentary debate. He blamed “partisan appetites” — suggesting that many politicians were more interested in setting themselves up for the 2027 elections — and argued that the absence of cross-party negotiations in French politics had set him up for failure.”Political parties are continuing to act as though they all have an absolute majority in the National Assembly,” Mr. Lecornu said, referring to France’s lower house of Parliament. “I was ready to compromise, but each political party wants the other to adopt its whole platform.”For opposition parties, however, the fault lies with Mr. Macron for refusing to appoint a prime minister and a cabinet that might undo his pro-business agenda, even though his centrist alliance lost badly in the snap elections.Jordan Bardella, the president of the nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally party — who was told about the resignation by reporters on live television — blamed Mr. Macron for the turbulence in French politics, saying he had “fallen back on his last supporters.”“There can be no return to stability without a return to the ballot box,” Mr. Bardella said. New York Times,Israel and Hamas Prepare for Talks on Trump’s Plan to End Gaza War, Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 6, 2025 (print ed.). Indirect negotiations through mediators are planned for Monday in Egypt and are expected to focus on one main issue, swapping hostages for Palestinian prisoners. That may leave talks on other obstacles to ending the war until later.Israeli and Hamas negotiators were preparing for talks in Cairo planned for Monday, which mediators hope will pave the way for the end of the war in Gaza.But American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators will face numerous roadblocks that could delay or undermine the chances for a quick cease-fire. This round of talks is expected to focus on one main issue — swapping the remaining hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners — which may leave negotiations on other formidable obstacles to ending the war until later.Israel believes that about 20 living hostages still remain in Gaza, as well as the bodies of at least 25 others. But because Hamas views the captives as their most significant leverage with Israel, the group is unlikely to free them unless other elements of the deal are worked out.Under the terms of President Trump’s latest plan to end the nearly two-year-old war, the hostages will be swapped for 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in prison and for 1,700 Gazans jailed by Israel during the war. Israel will also hand over the bodies of 15 Gazans for each dead Israeli.Mr. Trump suggested in a post on social media on Saturday that the hostages might be released as soon as Hamas agrees to the latest terms, particularly how far Israeli forces will withdraw from their current position in Gaza.New York Times,Internal Audits Shed Light on Ukraine’s Secret Weapons Spending, Andrew E. Kramer, Oct. 6, 2025. The government reviews show the country’s challenge as U.S. support wanes and Kyiv pivots to production from a domestic arms industry with a long history of corruption.More on U.S. Governance, Pollitics New York Times,In 2019, Trump Made Her a Federal Judge. In 2025, She Blocked His Troop Deployment, Oct. 6, 2025. Judge Karin Immergut worked on Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton. Now she’s ruled against Trump’s attempt to send troops to Portland.When President Trump’s plan to deploy National Guard troops to Portland hit a major snag over the weekend, it did so at the hands of one of his judicial nominees, Judge Karin Immergut of the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon.“This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote Judge Immergut, 64, in a Saturday order rejecting the administration’s claims that it needed military support to protect federal property and enforce immigration law, what she called an “extraordinary measure.”Arguments made by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department, she continued, “risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.”Hours earlier, after a Friday hearing before Judge Immergut, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who is the architect of Mr. Trump’s push to deploy U.S. soldiers on their own soil, said the problem lay elsewhere. “Far-left Democrat judges,” he said, were obstructing the administration’s attempt to “dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”But Judge Immergut is anything but a far-left judge. When Mr. Trump first nominated her to the federal bench in 2018, she arrived with strong conservative credentials, and her career shows a willingness to pursue cases no matter which party’s ox is gored. As a lawyer during the 1990s, she served under Ken Starr during his investigation of President Bill Clinton.She personally questioned Monica Lewinsky about the details of her affair with Mr. Clinton before a grand jury, successfully eliciting fine-grained specifics of their sexual encounters that critics would later call salacious when they appeared in Mr. Starr’s report.During the next two decades, she built a career as a federal prosecutor, first in California and then in Oregon. She prosecuted white-collar fraudsters, money launderers and drug traffickers. In 2003, she was chosen by President George W. Bush to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, supervising dozens of prosecutors and overseeing high-profile terrorism cases.As a prosecutor, Judge Immergut was “incredibly hard-working” and “apolitical in her approach,” said Billy J. Williams, who has known her since the 1990s and also went on to lead Oregon’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, first under President Obama and then continuing through Mr. Trump’s first term. “When she’s on the bench, she’s an incredible listener who isn’t afraid, in the moment, to either make a statement or ask deeper questions. She’s always prepared.”Scott Asphaug, who also worked under Judge Immergut during her time as Oregon’s chief federal prosecutor, said she told her team to “do the right thing, for the right reason.”“Our job was not simply to win,” he said. “Our job was to act in a judicious and just manner.”New York Times, Trump Administration: Staffing Shortages Begin to Cause Flight Delays, Niraj Chokshi, Oct. 6, 2025. Travel snarls loom: Air travelers are starting to see the impact of a government shutdown, as both Denver International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport experienced ground delays Monday because of air traffic staff shortages.Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, warned that officials were tracking a “slight tick-up” in air traffic controllers calling in sick. He also warned a program subsidizing flights to rural areas runs out of money by Sunday. Air travel delays helped spur the 2019 shutdown, the longest in history, to an end. Read more ›Government shutdown: President Trump suggested he was open to a deal with Democrats who have sought the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies as a condition of ending the government shutdown. Mr. Trump told reporters he was willing to make “the right deal,” adding “we’re talking to the Democrats.” Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, quickly denied any talks were underway, but said Democrats were ready to be “at the table.”Awaiting her seat: Democrats have accused Speaker Mike Johnson of keeping Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, from taking her seat to fend off efforts to force a vote on the release of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Read more ›The Senate just voted for a fifth time to block two competing efforts to reopen the government.Democrats opposed advancing the G.O.P. funding extension on a 52-to-42 vote, short of the 60 needed to move forward, with all but three of their members voting no. Republicans voted against taking up the Democratic plan, which would tie short-term government funding to an extension of expiring health care subsidies and the restoration of Medicaid cuts enacted as part of Republicans’ marquee tax cut law. The vote was 45 to 50, along party lines. No senator changed their vote, in a reflection of the deep impasse in the chamber.New York Times,Trump Aimed Shutdown Cuts at Democrats, but G.O.P. Districts Are Hit, Too, Catie Edmondson, Oct. 6, 2025. As the president cancels projects in Democratic-run states, he is cutting money that benefits his own party’s lawmakers in some of the most competitive House districts.When Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, announced last week that he was canceling $8 billion in federal funding for energy projects, it was clear that his directive was aimed at hurting Democrats in states they lead.It was part of the White House’s strategy to maximize the pain of a government shutdown that has now entered its second week. President Trump has repeatedly suggested that he views the shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to cut programs and agencies favored by Democrats.“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Mr. Trump said last week. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”But the energy cuts also appear to have done collateral damage to projects championed by House Republicans in competitive districts in blue states from New York to California — the kind of seats that built the G.O.P. majority, and whose loss could wipe it out. It is the latest example of how Mr. Trump’s aggressive moves to bend the government to his will have threatened his own party’s political standing.All told, the White House funding cancellations this month have hit projects in 28 Republican House districts, including those of six so-called front-liners, the most politically vulnerable lawmakers facing re-election next year: Representatives Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado and Mike Lawler of New York; and Ken Calvert, David Valadao and Young Kim, all of California. A total of 108 Democratic districts were hit by cancellations, according to data released by House Democrats on the Appropriations Committee.Typically, administrations try to avoid making moves that could create political blowback for their allies in Congress, especially those who could make or break their party’s grip on power. But the Trump administration has largely taken a meat-ax approach to cutting federal programs and funding, ignoring Congress and leaving its allies on Capitol Hill to cope with the consequences.New York Times, Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August, Aatish Bhatia and Amy Fan, Oct. 6, 2025. The data shows the steepest decline in August international student arrivals since the pandemic.Oct. 5Lincoln Square Media,Political Opinion: The Silence of the Generals, Rick Wilson, right, former Republican campaign advisor, Oct. 5, 2025. Here’s the thing, and you know it in your bones: That speech was insane. Not “politician riffing” insane. Not “grandpa got a little too stoked on Adderall” insane.It was the kind of rambling, aggrieved, slack-jawed performance you get when a man has fused his ego to a teleprompter and still can’t find the plot.Donald Trump shuffled out, tried to grunt his way through a “speech” that was really just a slurry of “Sir” stories, self-fellation, and absurd lies … and then inevitably fell back into the only narrative he’s truly capable of sustaining: grievance, fantasy, and the endless autobiographical fan fiction where he alone is hero, martyr, and field marshal.And the room knew it.This wasn’t the county GOP Lincoln Dinner; this was a forced assembly of America’s senior military leadership, men and women who manage more complexity before breakfast than Trump, Pete Hegseth, and their entire MAGA cosplay corps could comprehend in a lifetime.They lead in real danger, in real time, in real space, against real adversaries. They run multivariate operations across the globe that would leave the weekend cable-host-turned-pretend-Patton drooling into his third morning cocktail. Instead, they had to sit for two hours and watch Pete Hegseth try to swing his rhetorical broadsword before Trump wandered onstage and word-vomited all over the carpet.The silence was deafening. The smatterings of polite applause? Mercy claps from Hegseth and Trump’s staffers. You could feel the oxygen getting sucked out of the room as the Commander-in-Chief proved what all of the Flag officers in the room knew already: He is utterly unqualified, mentally unfit, and below the standard of leadership they’d expect from a green 2nd LT.Let’s start with Pete. His speech was the cinematic trailer for an ’80s straight-to-VHS war flick: sweaty machismo, fantasy heroics, and the intellectual depth of a shot glass. His theory of the military: fewer adults, more door-kickers; less infrastructure, more chest-thumping. More worries about haircuts and beards than about military personnel and their missions.Hegseth (shown below in a promotional photo) wants to turn basic training into a contact sport and calls that readiness. It’s juvenile. It’s performative. And his little homily about drill sergeants “putting hands on” recruits was…let’s call it awkwardly eager. Warfighting isn’t a fetish club. It’s a trade that requires discipline, law, and the boring, blessed grind of preparation.He’s a dangerous clown … but still a clown. The danger lies in the job title and the proximity to a president who seeks loyalists, not leaders; performers, not professionals.Trump’s performance was pure Trump: The greatest hits album no one asked for. Patton, MacArthur, Bradley, names he can remember because he saw them in movie portrayals or History Channel docs. He knows only a wax museum of heroes invoked by a man who “learned” naval warfare from Victory at Sea reruns.For younger readers: Think Chauncey Gardiner from Being There. “I like television.” That’s your Commander-in-Chief’s historical method.He droned through the vendettas: Biden, “the woke left,” Democrats, governors, cities he hates, the perennial “enemy within.” He painted Portland and Chicago as war zones worse than Afghanistan.Sure, Don.Let’s see you walk ten blocks in Kabul and ten blocks in Chicago and we’ll compare notes. The man is obsessed with proving that America is weak and at war with itself, then insisting only he can save it.He sees the military not as an institution bound by law and tradition but as a personal guard to be pointed inward at domestic political foes. He has said the quiet part out loud so many times it’s deafening.Here’s what matters: every foreign adversary watched that speech and laughed. If you’re Xi Jinping, you saw an unserious man, a Cabinet of courtiers, and a military leadership forced to watch the king lurch around the throne room, muttering to ghosts. You saw a country’s military leadership deeply divided…and the divider-in-chief gloating about it.The lack of real applause wasn’t a production glitch; it was a temperature check. Those were not roaring ovations. For Trump, a man who needs crowds like a shark needs blood, that quiet had to sting. For Hegseth, it had to land like a brick. The fantasy of “I summoned the warfighters and they all swooned” died right there, under the fluorescents of that auditorium at Quantico.Trump dipped back to the prompter at times, and you could hear the speechwriter’s syntax trying to herd the cats. Those brief islands of coherence only made the rest of the glossolalia more obvious. He is not all there.And yes, I know the screaming match this invites. Spare me. We’re beyond “he’s just riffing.” You could see the diminished bandwidth, the greatest-hits autopilot, the repetition that comforts a failing narrator. The man who once ran rings around the media with shamelessness alone now struggles to keep his story straight for five minutes.He still holds the title. He still holds the levers. That’s the bad news.There is a bedrock in American civil-military life: the military is apolitical, bound by law, and obligated to refuse illegal orders.That’s not a “norm.”That’s not “ guidelines.”That’s the Constitution. Presidents ask; the law decides. If the President says, “Nuke Buffalo,” the legal machinery isn’t supposed to say, “Let’s talk targeting options.” It’s supposed to say, “No.”Trump’s entire project is to blur that line, to make the uniform a loyalty test, the chain of command a personal chain. He wants a fascist military: not jackboots and banners (though he wouldn’t mind the banners), but a force that treats the president’s domestic enemies as the nation’s enemies. When he says “the enemy within,” read your 1930s German history. The slippery slope here is greased with words like that.Could he succeed? Not today. President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025, preceded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer who prefers to call himself “Secretary of War” instead of the congressionally mandated term “Secretary of Defense.” Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.New York Times,Trump Seizes On Shutdown to Punish Political Foes, Tony Romm, Oct. 5, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump has embarked on a legally dubious campaign to weaponize the federal budget during a contentious government shutdown, halting more than $27 billion in approved funding in a bid to punish Democratic-led cities and states.Rather than broker a legislative truce or seek to ameliorate the fallout of a costly fiscal stalemate, the president has leveraged the crisis to exact revenge on rivals, slash federal spending and pressure Democrats into accepting his political demands.Since the shutdown started on Wednesday, the Trump administration has canceled or delayed federal aid to 16 states, most of them run by Democrats. In the latest example, Russell T. Vought, right, the White House budget director, said on Friday that the administration would halt about $2.1 billion in approved funding for long-planned transit improvements in Chicago.The funding cuts are a stark escalation in Mr. Trump’s campaign to cut federal spending and reconfigure the budget in service of his political priorities. Since returning to office, the president has closed agencies and programs while halting or canceling billions of dollars in enacted funds, acting out of a belief that he can override lawmakers to achieve his agenda.Mr. Trump has attacked funding for science and research, public education, public broadcasting, green energy, transportation infrastructure, disaster response, federal oversight and foreign aid. He has often blocked this money because he believes it was being spent wastefully or fraudulently, or because it did not conform to his views on policies like immigration.States and other recipients have filed dozens of lawsuits to force the release of federal aid, claiming that the president has broken the law by withholding congressionally approved funds. A federal court ordered the Trump administration this week to restore $187 million in counterterrorism funding to New York, which the federal government had stripped without explanationTrump name-checks Project 2025 as he threatens to dismantle agencies. Partisan language was inserted into Education Department workers’ automated emails without their consent. ‘Really bummed’: Visitors find a closed presidential library in Atlanta.But Mr. Trump has remained undeterred by legal threats and unconstrained by Republicans in Congress. He and Mr. Vought, an architect of the conservative Project 2025 blueprint, have instead seized on the moment to test the limits of their powers.“We have the authority to make permanent change in the bureaucracy here in government,” Mr. Vought told Fox Business on the eve of the shutdown.Hours into the shutdown, Mr. Vought began by taking aim at New York City. He wrote on social media that the administration would halt $18 billion in infrastructure funding “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” using the initials for diversity, equity and inclusion.Meidas Touch Network,Commentary, Important Sunday Message from Meidas Founder, Ben Meiselas, Oct. 5, 2025. These Sunday messages are my most important articles of the week. It’s when we reflect together on what happened and where we are headed.This week has been the most utterly deranged week of Trump’s term yet, and that’s saying a lot. Let’s discuss.Before going further, I want to thank our Substack subscribers. Thanks for helping MeidasTouch remain the most-watched news network in the United States.More people watch us than Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and any other news network online. If you aren’t a subscriber, the MeidasTouch Network would love your help by becoming one today. It’s the biggest difference-maker when you subscribe.Let’s get back to my Sunday post. Donald Trump shut down the government this week. He and MAGA Mike have ordered Republicans to take a paid vacation all of next week and not show up to work. Trump has ordered Republicans not to speak with Democrats at all and to have no negotiations.The official message from the White House spokesperson was for Democrats to “go fuck yourself” for fighting to save healthcare for Americans.Trump continued to post messages about how the shutdown was a “great opportunity” for him. He posted weird AI images showing he was having fun and enjoying the shutdown. MAGA Mike Johnson and Republicans seem to be having fun seeing Americans struggle. It’s like a party for them.Fortunately, the American people recognize that Trump and MAGA control all branches of government, and their refusal to even speak with Democrats shows they are to blame for the shutdown. All nine major national polls show that the American people overwhelmingly blame Trump and MAGA for the shutdown. Trump has been golfing during the shutdown.The fact is that Trump loves the shutdown because he hates the government. He views the shutdown as a way to accelerate his Project 2025 agenda to destroy the government and rule as a dictator. I don’t think he ever wants to reopen the government for the rest of his term. When the No Kings Protest happens on October 18, I suspect the government will still be shut down.During the first days of the shutdown, Trump has accelerated his military invasions against Americans. His ICE agents, serving as a personal military force, have been engaged in crimes against humanity and chemical warfare against Americans. We’ve seen unthinkable war crimes committed by ICE against people living in the country. The language used by Trump and his regime is that of fascists, demanding ICE engage in war crimes against people in this country.The MeidasTouch Network continues to track all of this conduct across the country.Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge in federal court in Oregon made a critical ruling. Judge Karin Immergut ruled that Trump’s deployment of troops in Portland violated the Constitution. The Trump-appointed judge had strong words about Trump’s unlawful conduct and said that Trump was propelling the country into a state of constant martial law.In essence, America is under the martial law of a dictator—and even this Trump-appointed judge called it out for what it is.As soon as the order dropped in Oregon blocking Trump’s military deployment, I was able to get the first exclusive interview with the Oregon Attorney General. Similarly, the MeidasTouch Network got the definitive interview with Democratic Leader Jeffries, where he challenged Trump, Vance, and MAGA Mike to meet in front of the press. That interview with Jeffries is widely considered the pivotal moment in House Democrats deploying the type of aggressive approach people have always been looking for. MeidasTouch Network has been at the center of all news surrounding the shutdown.Trump has never looked more pathetic and unhinged.But this also makes him very dangerous. His desperation manifests in more authoritarian behavior. Trump has a knack for exploiting the crises and problems faced by others, but he’s an utter failure at handling a crisis when he’s in charge—which is why he’s bankrupted so many companies in his life. He doesn’t take the action to stop the bleeding; he causes his companies to bleed out.We all need to continue to find our power in the face of this authoritarian regime. We all need to stick together and remain in the fight. It’s time we make a massive push through the No Kings Protest. MeidasTouch will continue to be the main network of the resistance, and we will continue to report fearlessly during these perilous times. If we stick together, I promise we will make it out of this mess. The cracks in this regime continue to grow each day.Dsiputed Federal Deployments To U.S. Cities New York Times,Trump Sends California National Guard Troops to Portland, Ore. Shawn Hubler, Anna Griffin and Eric Schmitt, Oct. 5, 2025. The move follows a judge’s order on Saturday that blocked the Oregon Guard from deploying there. California’s governor said the state would sue.The Trump administration has sent hundreds of California National Guard troops to respond to protests in Portland, Ore., despite the objections of governors in both states and a stern federal ruling just Saturday that sought to block military forces.The extraordinary move sidestepped the ruling of Judge Karin Immergut of U.S. District Court in Oregon, who had issued a temporary restraining order that prevented the Trump administration from mobilizing 200 Oregon troops for a 60-day deployment in the state. Instead, Mr. Trump turned to neighboring California.The president had said the troops were needed to respond to demonstrations at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland. But the judge wrote that the protests, which have been generally small, “were not significantly violent or disruptive” and that she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority. The Trump administration quickly appealed.Then, in a pivot that outraged both states, the president dispatched 200 to 300 troops that had been commandeered earlier this summer and sent to Los Angeles as part of another contested federal deployment. The decision to essentially substitute California troops for the thwarted Oregon deployment drew vehement criticism from Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, both of whom are Democrats.Late Sunday, California joined Oregon’s lawsuit and the two states asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon for a second restraining order to block the use of the California troops. An expedited hearing was set for Sunday night.“The commander in chief is using the U.S. military as a political weapon against American citizens. We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the president of the United States,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said that the move violated not only federal law, but also the order under which the president had commandeered the California troops.The mayor of Portland, Keith Wilson charged that federal authorities were not only overstating the protests, but “trying to inflame a situation that has otherwise been peaceful.” The deployment of troops from a neighboring state without the consent of either governor was “far beyond the pale,” he said.New York Times,2 Motorists Charged in Chicago, Including One Shot by Federal Agent, Julie Bosman, Oct. 5, 2025. The account in the federal criminal complaint, which differs significantly from an earlier homeland security statement, says the motorists rammed officers’ vehicle and that an agent shot one when she drove her car at him.Two Chicago residents have been charged with using their cars to “assault, impede, and interfere with the work of federal agents,” federal prosecutors said on Sunday.The charges stemmed from a confrontation Saturday morning between federal agents and motorists on the Southwest Side of Chicago that resulted in a federal agent shooting one of the motorists, Marimar Martinez, 30. She was treated and released from a hospital.She was charged along with another motorist, Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21.The criminal complaint makes no mention of any firearm in the possession of either motorist, in contrast to an earlier statement from the Department of Homeland Security.According to the criminal complaint, three Border Patrol agents who were conducting an operation in Oak Lawn, Ill., were followed by Ms. Martinez and Mr. Ruiz. They pursued the agents’ cars, running red lights and stop signs as they did so, and eventually crossed the city line into Chicago, the complaint said.During the chase, the complaint said, Ms. Martinez “regularly and loudly” referred to the agents as “la migra,” the Spanish term for immigration authorities.Ms. Martinez and Mr. Ruiz then drove into one of the federal agents’ cars, causing the agent to lose control of the vehicle, the complaint said. Once the agents’ car had stopped and the agents had stepped out of it, Ms. Martinez drove her car directly at one of the agents, the complaint said, prompting him to fire five shots at her.The account given in the complaint differs significantly from the one offered on Saturday in a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. That statement said that agents were “forced to deploy their weapons and fire defensive shots” at a driver who was “armed with a semiautomatic weapon.” The criminal complaint does not include that claim.It also differs from an account given to The New York Times by Mr. Ruiz’s mother, Elizabeth Ruiz. She said her son called her immediately after the confrontation and told her that federal agents were being chased and rammed by other cars, not his, and that the agents had struck him.“‘Mom, they hit me, they hit me,’” she said he told her. “‘I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said ‘ICE.’”“I told him to get himself situated and then I started hearing boom, boom, boom, and he yelled, ‘Mom, they’re shooting,’” she said. U.S. Supreme Court as it was comprised on June 30, 2022, with membership extending to the present. Seated from left are Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito and Elena Kagan. Standing from left are Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Associated Press,New Supreme Court term confronts justices with Trump’s aggressive assertion of presidential power, Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst, Oct. 4-5, 2025. A monumental Supreme Court term begins Monday with major tests of presidential power on the agenda along with pivotal cases on voting and the rights of LGBTQ people.The court’s conservative majority has so far been receptive, at least in preliminary rulings, to many of President Donald Trump’s aggressive assertions of authority. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invoked the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip after one such decision allowing the cut of $783 million in research funding.“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”The conservative justices could be more skeptical when they conduct an in-depth examination of some Trump policies, including the president’s imposition of tariffs and his desired restrictions on birthright citizenship.If the same conservative-liberal split that has marked so many of Trump’s emergency appeals endures, “we are in for one of the most polarizing terms yet,” said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University’s law school.The justices will pass judgment in the next 10 months on some of Trump’s most controversial efforts.More On U.S. Government ShutdownNew York Times,Not All National Parks Remain Open in the Shutdown. Here’s What to Know, Chris Hippensteel, Oct. 5, 2025. Some underground attractions are closed, and many outdoor sites have reduced their services.As the government shutdown enters its first full week, travelers planning visits to national parks and other tourist sites run by the federal government face more than a little uncertainty.National parks largely will remain open, but there are exceptions, and even those that are open may reduce services for visitors. Specifics likely vary from park to park.“As a general rule, if a facility or area is locked or secured during nonbusiness hours (buildings, gated parking lots, etc.) it should be locked or secured for the duration of the shutdown,” a contingency plan posted online by the Interior Department states.Roughly two-thirds of the employees at the National Park Service, which is already facing a steep staffing shortage, have been furloughed during the shutdown, according to the plan. How much the remaining crew members will be able to do involving essential functions like law enforcement, emergency services and wildfire monitoring is unclear.While not a comprehensive list, here is a rundown among prominent destinations of what is open, what is not and what is limited while the shutdown persists.U.S. Governance, Law, PoliticsThe Opposition via The Bulwark,Can a Repentant, Regretful Republican Thrive as a Dem?Lauren Egan, Oct. 5, 2025. Geoff Duncan isn’t just running for governor of Georgia as a Democrat. He’s testing how wide the party’s ‘big tent’ can stretch.Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, keeps repeating a three-word phrase that most politicians go their whole careers without uttering: “I was wrong.”He was wrong, he says, about guns and the National Rifle Association, whose “A” rating he once celebrated. He was wrong about abortion and about standing by Gov. Brian Kemp as he signed a six-week ban of the procedure into law. And he was wrong to oppose Medicaid expansion in his home state.“I’m willing to say ‘I’m sorry I got a few things wrong,’ and be very transparent and very vulnerable about that,” Duncan told me last week.At a time when politics seems like a playground for the egocentric, self-assured, and unapologetic, Duncan is placing a huge bet that vulnerability can resonate with voters. He has switched parties to run as a Democrat in the race for Georgia governor. And he is banking his career on the notion that Democrats will not just reward him for his past criticisms of Donald Trump but find his pleas for redemption to be endearing and his ideological conversions to be sincere.It’s not just the governor’s race at stake, either.Whether Duncan can effectively win over Democrats will provide one of the clearest illustrations to date as to how forgiving or rigid the party’s voters remain in the second Trump era. Or, as Duncan put it to me: “My campaign, my election is going to be a great gauge on the Democratic party and their desire to win.”Over the course of several days in Georgia, I had a front-row seat to see how this gambit was playing out.I met Duncan at Clinch Memorial Hospital, which serves one of the poorest and most rural parts of the state just an hour north of the Florida border. It’s a part of Georgia where “Trump Country” signs, RV parks, and Baptist churches pepper the two-lane highway; where Georgia Bulldogs flags proudly fly next to the occasional old Georgia flag bearing the Confederate battle emblem. The air has a distinctive smell here letting you know you’re not all that far from the wetlands of the Okefenokee Swamp.The visit to Clinch Memorial Hospital was one of Duncan’s first few campaign stops since announcing his candidacy two weeks ago. It was designed, in part, to reassure skeptical Democrats that he has genuinely evolved on issues important to the party, such as health care. But it was also meant to send a message about the type of candidate he believes Democrats need to nominate if they want a shot at winning the governor’s mansion in Georgia for the first time since 1998: someone who can both attract disaffected Republicans in the Atlanta suburbs and peel off votes in places like Clinch County, which Donald Trump won in 2024 with 76 percent of the vote.“If there’s this movement towards being a lifelong Democrat or 100 percent purity—the unfortunate part is, Democrats will lose again in Georgia. And it might be another thirty years before there’s another opportunity like this,” Duncan argued. “It’s important for Democrats to realize elections are about timing and opportunity, and there’s never been a better time or better opportunity than right now.”Duncan’s gubernatorial bid comes amid a larger debate roiling the Democratic party over how to win back power in red and purple parts of the country. It’s a debate made urgent by the dismal view voters have of the party and the obstacles keeping the party from building sustainable Senate majorities.On one side are Democratic strategists and officials who have urged the party to adopt an unsentimental approach to politics that prioritizes winning over ideological purity. They argue that the party must embrace unconventional candidates with heterodox policy positions who can appeal to disaffected voters and send a message that Democrats really are the “big tent” party they profess to be.“Our party has extended the tent in only one direction lately,” said Matt Bennett, cofounder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “We no longer have the Joe Manchins, we no longer have the old style of red-state Democrats. Where we have the opportunity to welcome into our party very viable candidates that can win, we should do that. And we should be nominating them in these races.”On the other side of the debate are operatives who say the path back to power is not to embrace centrism or ex-Republicans but to run more inspiring Democrats. They argue that persuasion is as important as conversion; and that authenticity is more important than both. Their playbook involves an embrace of more traditionally liberal policies with the goal of winning back the working-class voters who left for Trump over the past decade.Duncan is squarely in the former camp. Though he has disavowed many of his past policy positions, his foremost characteristic is that he is an ex-Republican who found himself an outcast in his party as he grew more critical of Trump.The other candidates in the field have very different profiles. Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is seen as the early favorite to win the nomination. A poll her campaign conducted last month found that she pulled in 38 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, while former DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond received 12 percent. Duncan got 9 percent, former state Sen. Jason Esteves received 4 percent, state Rep. Derrick Jackson received 2 percent, and former pastor Olu Brown received 1 percent.All the usual caveats apply to the survey: It’s an internal campaign poll, voters aren’t fully paying attention, no one knows how opinions could shift as things heat up, and a potentially decisive percentage of the voters (36 percent) say they are still undecided. Plus, the primary field isn’t even fully set: Since the poll was released, another Democratic candidate jumped in the race.But Bottoms’s early frontrunner status is enough to worry some Democratic officials who privately question whether she is a flawed general-election candidate. They note that nothing about the current political climate suggests that a former big-city mayor who was in office during COVID and oversaw a massive spike in crime is the answer to the Democratic party’s problems. Plus, she’s carrying some Joe Biden baggage: After deciding not to run for re-election in 2022, Bottoms joined the Biden White House as the director of the Office of Public Engagement and senior adviser to the president.New York Times,Push for Military Coverage of I.V.F. Faces Challenge in Congress, Megan Mineiro and Caroline Kitchener, Oct. 5, 2025. A proposal to expand the Defense Department’s health care plan to include in vitro fertilization is moving through Congress but could die behind closed doors, again.Kathleen Whipple and her husband had dreamed of a big family, but struggled to conceive.Upon his return from an overseas deployment with the Navy, the couple learned from a fertility doctor that her husband’s sperm count was half of what it had been before his most recent tour of duty, which had involved diving daily into water contaminated with heavy metals.To get pregnant, the couple was told, they would need to undergo in vitro fertilization, a procedure that would cost over $25,000. And because they couldn’t prove that their infertility resulted from the circumstances of her husband’s deployment, they would have to shoulder the entire cost themselves.“We would like to be able to purchase land and start building a home,” said Ms. Whipple, who is based in San Diego and asked to be referred to by her maiden name out of fear of retribution by the military against her husband. “We don’t have any savings anymore to do that.”Such cases are the driving force behind an effort in Congress to expand military health coverage to cover I.V.F. for service members and their families, a push that has generated some degree of bipartisan support but has so far been thwarted by Republicans.For months, advocates have hoped that this would be the year that the effort could succeed. President Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail to make the procedure free for all Americans, then doubled down on the issue within weeks of taking office, issuing an executive order that promised to lower the cost of I.V.F. and expand access.And Democrats won inclusion of the coverage expansion in the annual defense policy bill making its way through Congress. But the provision faces long odds after Speaker Mike Johnson intervened to kill a similar one last year.Aides say Republicans are largely unconcerned with the public support Mr. Trump has expressed for the procedure, suggesting that the president may not be prioritizing I.V.F. policy to the extent he did during the campaign. The Trump administration has yet to announce any policy plans on in vitro fertilization, though a report on the subject was prepared for the president last spring.A White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said the Trump administration would soon announce further plans on in vitro fertilization.“The president remains committed to expanding I.V.F. access for Americans looking to start families,” Mr. Desai said.Many Christian conservatives are deeply opposed to I.V.F., a procedure in which the egg is fertilized outside of a woman’s body, because the procedure can involve discarding human embryos. After staying largely silent on the matter in the wake of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling last year that restricted the procedure, a growing coalition is now rallying around a “natural” approach to infertility called restorative reproductive medicine — and working hard behind the scenes to steer the Trump administration away from I.V.F.Republicans are “terrified of being put on the record because they know they’ll be attacked by the anti-choice people,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat who led the effort to include the proposal to cover I.V.F. in the Senate’s defense bill. “They don’t want to talk about it. They just want to avoid it.”New York Times,Can Conversion Therapy Be Banned? Colorado Faces Test at the Supreme Court, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 5, 2025. Colorado and more than 20 other states restrict therapists from trying to change the gender identity or sexual orientation of clients under age 18.When Kaley Chiles welcomes therapy clients to her tranquil bungalow of an office, she offers loose-leaf tea and asks what brings them to counseling, what’s causing distress and how she can help them meet their goals.Under a 2019 Colorado law, if clients under 18 tell her that their same-sex attractions are causing them stress, as a licensed therapist, she is forbidden from counseling them to change their sexual orientation. If they want to talk about their gender identity, she cannot advise them to change it.Colorado lawmakers and major medical groups say that kind of counseling is ineffective and potentially harmful for minors, and it is therefore appropriate for state governments to outlaw it for licensed mental health professionals.Mrs. Chiles, an evangelical Christian with a master’s degree in clinical mental health from Denver Seminary, says the law violates her First Amendment rights, constraining what she is allowed to say in therapy sessions with young people who have sought out her care.“It seemed like an invasion for the state to kind of be peering into our private counseling sessions,” Mrs. Chiles said in an interview. “My speech is being censored because my clients are not able to see me and make certain goals that the state does not endorse.”The Supreme Court will on Tuesday hear Mrs. Chiles’s challenge to the Colorado law, in a case with implications for more than 20 states with similar laws. It will now fall to the justices to decide whether Colorado’s law, as it applies to talk therapy, is about properly regulating medical treatment or impermissibly censoring speech.More Global NewsNew York Times,A Pacific Gateway Shows the Kremlin’s Grip on Russia’s Vast Expanse, Ivan Nechepurenko, Visuals by Nanna Heitmann, Oct. 5, 2025. In a country where power is highly centralized, Moscow sets the tone for Vladivostok, 4,000 miles away, complicating ambitions to make it a trading powerhouse.Vladivostok is deeply Russian, sharing one of the nation’s defining features: Even here, 4,000 miles from Moscow, at the far end of the world’s largest country, attention is focused on the seat of power in the Kremlin. Moscow sets the city’s preoccupations, its tone, its culture, even its appearance.Two of Vladivostok’s former mayors, who had been serving time in penal colonies for corruption, are now fighting in the war in Ukraine to escape their sentences. They serve with thousands of other locals, many of them of Ukrainian descent.Mobile internet gets throttled now and then because of fear of Ukrainian drone attacks, just as it does across the country. A government building dominates the central square, and at night some of its windows are lit up to form a V shape, a propaganda symbol of the war.“Everyone here feels the presence of Moscow,” said Gleb A. Akulich, a local historian and art curator with the Zarya Contemporary Art Center. “Everyone here has a feeling of external control, no one feels autonomous.” Though it is an eight-hour flight away, he said in an interview, Moscow “doesn’t sleep, it follows everything here.”Science, Media, EducationNew York Times,The Superintendent’s Bio Seemed Too Good to Be True. It Was, Oct. 5, 2025. Ian Roberts rose through the ranks of American education with talent, charm and a riveting back story. He was also hiding a shocking secret.School district leaders in Des Moines drew up a detailed wish list when they set out to hire a new superintendent in 2023. They wanted someone who could increase reading scores, improve the math skills of Black boys, adhere to an affirmative action plan and much more.Most of all, Des Moines Public Schools needed a galvanizing leader who could meet a moment shaped by the aftermath of Covid and the racial justice movement of 2020.Ian Roberts’s application seemed almost too perfect.Dr. Roberts had spent most of his career in urban school systems, building a reputation as a charismatic, hands-on administrator. He wrote books, gave speeches and boasted of degrees from brand-name universities. His life story was also compelling: an immigrant from Guyana who competed in the Olympics and spoke bluntly about his experiences as a Black man in the United States.“I believe deeply in the promise of public education being the most important opportunity gap closer for youth, particularly with a focus on diverse populations,” Dr. Roberts, who is in his 50s, wrote in his cover letter for the Des Moines job.Red flags would pop up: The district learned about a past brush with law enforcement and a misstatement on his résumé about where he had earned a doctorate. But Des Moines officials moved ahead to hire him. Two outside companies were involved in vetting Dr. Roberts, who told district officials and a state licensing board that he was a United States citizen.ImageDr. Roberts, in a blue suit, offered fist-bumps to a group of school children.In 2023, Dr. Roberts talked with students before the first day of school at Samuelson Elementary in Des Moines.Credit…Zach Boyden-Holmes/Usa Today Networks, via Imagn ImagesNobody seemed to realize that he was lying, and that the man seeking to run Iowa’s largest school district was not allowed to work in this country.For two years, Dr. Roberts led about 30,000 students and 5,000 employees in Des Moines, earning praise as the district showed signs of academic improvement. Dr. Roberts carried out his work even after an immigration judge in Texas ordered him deported last year, popping into classrooms, asking voters to approve more funds for the district, delivering a Juneteenth speech while wearing one of his signature suits.Dr. Roberts’s secret life burst into view on Sept. 26, a sunny Friday about a month into the school year, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him after he was found hiding near a trailer park. They said he had fled from officers in a school district-owned Jeep, where a loaded handgun was later found.Editors’ PicksI’m a Screenwriter. Is It All Right if I Use A.I.?In Taylor’s Version, Ophelia Has a Fairy-Tale EndingOn the ‘S.N.L.’ Season Premiere, Trump Warns: ‘Daddy’s Watching’Since then, Dr. Roberts has resigned, protesters have held marches calling for ICE to free him and he has been charged with a federal felony in connection to the gun and other weapons officials say they found at his home in Des Moines. Federal officials said those guns had been possessed illegally because Dr. Roberts did not have legal status in the country.New York Times, Both Parties Are Resigned to Deadlock as Shutdown Takes Hold, Annie Karni, Oct. 5, 2025. Republicans, who hold a governing trifecta, have adopted a mostly passive stance while Democrats dig in for a fight, with both feeling they have the political upper hand.At the White House, President Trump is posting A.I.-generated memes about the government shutdown, depicting his wonky budget director dressed as the Grim Reaper and ready to visit death on the federal bureaucracy.In the Senate, Democrats show no sign of backing down from their demands in the shutdown fight, while Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, has given verbal shrugs to reporters who ask about the status of his nonexistent negotiations with the other party about how to bring the crisis to an end.“I don’t know that there’s a lot to sort out,” Mr. Thune said on MSNBC on Friday, before sending senators home for the weekend.And in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson has canceled votes for this week, telling his members they could stay home for the third straight week given the shutdown logjam.With Mr. Trump and lawmakers having made no progress on a deal that would reopen the government, one thing was clear as the shutdown headed into its second workweek: There was little sense of urgency in Washington about cleaning up a mess that has thousands of federal workers facing furloughs and possible layoffs, and could disrupt critical federal programs.It all reflects the reality of two parties so convinced that they have the political advantage in their partisan battle that a shutdown has seemed inevitable for weeks, and a quick resolution feels out of reach.Republicans who hold a governing trifecta have adopted a mostly passive posture in the shutdown fight, insisting that Democrats accept their short-term government funding bill without concessions.Staring down the shutdown deadline, they did not even bother engaging in the typical political theater that often precedes such time-crunch crises on Capitol Hill. In shutdown showdowns past, lawmakers worked late into the evening or the early hours of the morning to at least appear as if they were doing everything possible to head off disaster. This time around, Mr. Thune did not keep the Senate in session much past the dinner hour last Tuesday after a pair of failed votes made it clear that Congress would surely miss the midnight deadline for funding the government.The weekend break was more evidence that they felt little pressure to reassure Americans they were on the job and working hard to break the logjam. Mr. Trump’s trolling has only underscored the blasé attitude.New York Times,Jane Goodall Taught You How to ‘Look,‘ Rhonda Garelick, Oct. 5, 2025 (print ed.). The conservationist used her own style to reveal the hidden lives of animals, to reveal that they, too, had style: individuality, identities, quirks and foibles.We don’t think of Jane Goodall as a style icon. But we should.Style is about having a keen awareness of and control over how the world sees you, and about understanding how you see the world — how to notice and respond to all its tiny details. Dr. Goodall, who died this week at 91, was a master at this.Dr. Goodall grasped the vast power that lay in careful, mutual observation: She sat patiently for months in the rainforest of Tanzania, observing the chimpanzees, who initially fled from her in fear. Undeterred, she kept watching, aware that the chimps were watching her, too. Eventually she gained their trust and immersed herself in their society, engaging in a kind of dialogue with them. This method of intense observation and respect led to Dr. Goodall’s simple yet revolutionary discoveries: that “animals, like us, have personalities, minds and emotions,” and that human beings were not the “highlight of creation” — which had been settled wisdom for centuries — but “an animal like the others.”This work brought Dr. Goodall enduring celebrity, landing her on the cover of National Geographic in 1965, where, at 31, she appeared in what would become her signature look: blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail, notebook on her knees, and a uniform-like outfit of khaki button-down and shorts. In the photo, she sits, bare legs bent up toward her chest, gazing with a warm, engaged smile not at the camera, but at a group of chimpanzees in the foreground. The message was clear: “Don’t look at me. Look at them.”She was modeling, that is, how to look, how to attend to the natural world. She was using her own style to reveal the hidden lives of animals, to reveal that they, too, had style: individuality, identities, quirks and foibles.New York Times,Sean Combs Now Faces Not Just Prison and a Fine, but Shunning, Ben Sisario and Julia Jacobs, Oct. 5, 2025 (print ed.). Many who have tracked the music mogul’s career think his reputation has been irreparably damaged by testimony of abusive behavior as a boss and boyfriend.At a Grammy party five years ago that now seems like the ancient past, music stars like Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and Cardi B listened in rapt attention as Sean Combs accepted an honorary award and demanded that the Recording Academy do more to recognize Black talent.“It’s going to take all of us to get this done,” he declared at a podium to a standing ovation that swept through the Beverly Hills ballroom.It’s doubtful Mr. Combs, right, also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, will ever enjoy that level of adulation and prominence in the entertainment industry again.On Friday, he was sentenced to four years and two months in prison for prostitution-related offenses, following a federal trial this summer in which prosecutors accused him of coercing two former girlfriends into participating in elaborate, drug-dazed sexual encounters that could last for days.A jury acquitted Mr. Combs of the most serious charges against him — sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, which could have resulted in a life sentence — but the case still laid bare evidence of brutal domestic abuse, and the two women testified that they felt violated and manipulated by his sexual demands.Accounting for the year that Mr. Combs has already served since his arrest last September, the onetime music mogul could be free by 2028. But he still faces a hard path to rebuild his career, and many commentators are deeply skeptical that he can regain anything like the status he enjoyed when he wielded a Midas touch in music, fashion and media, and earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a pitchman for consumer brands.“I’m sure he will find his way to hustle into something that’s meaningful to him, because that’s been his M.O. his whole career,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African American studies scholar who teaches about Black popular culture at Duke. “But the return to what he meant to the culture and what he meant to some of these brands — I think that’s forever gone.”Oct. 4New York Times,Israel and Hamas Say They’ll Work With Trump’s Gaza Plan, but Gaps Remain, Aaron Boxerman, David M. Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 4, 2025. Israel said it would cooperate with the White House to end the war, but much is still unclear about Hamas’s future and whether it will agree to disarm.Israel and Hamas signaled a readiness to move forward with parts of President Trump’s cease-fire plan in what many hoped would lead to a diplomatic breakthrough, but significant gaps will need to be negotiated to bring an end to the war in Gaza.The Israeli government said on Saturday morning that it was preparing for the “immediate implementation” of the first steps of Mr. Trump’s proposal. Hours earlier, Hamas said in a statement that it would release all of its remaining hostages, a key part of the plan, but the group did not directly address many other parts of it.Mr. Trump exuded confidence that a deal was imminent, saying it was a “big day” while also exhorting Israel to stop bombing Gaza. He conceded that negotiators still needed “to get the final word down in concrete.”Neither Israel nor Hamas were explicit in their statements about what had long been seen as the major sticking points to reaching an agreement. Hamas’s statement did not say whether it would accept Mr. Trump’s stipulation, backed by Israel, that the group disarm.It was also unclear whether Israel was willing to accept any major changes to Mr. Trump’s plan, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, left, said he supported during a visit to the White House this week.Israeli negotiators were preparing on Saturday to travel abroad for indirect talks with Hamas, but it was not known when they would leave, said four officials from the region, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.Mediators from Qatar and Egypt were holding their own talks with Hamas about the proposal, while the United States was speaking with Israel, according to another two diplomats with knowledge of the contacts, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.Israelis and Palestinians were caught between disbelief, tentative hope and utter confusion after the back-to-back developments, which many hoped could at least bring an end to the nearly two-year war.The Israeli military said it was also preparing for the potential release of hostages, but it was unclear how that was influencing conditions in Gaza City, where Israeli forces have launched a sweeping ground offensive that forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee.Avichay Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, warned displaced Palestinians against seizing on the optimism around a cease-fire to try to return to the north of the enclave. Israeli soldiers “are still surrounding Gaza City, and attempting to return there poses extreme danger,” he said on social media.Two Palestinians in Gaza said explosions and gunfire continued into the early morning, suggesting continued Israeli military activity. Many Gazans, exhausted and traumatized by the war, say they hope Hamas makes whatever concessions necessary to reach a deal with Israel.“Get us out of this situation in any way possible, and quickly,” said Abdelkarim al-Harazin, a doctor who recently fled Gaza City for the south of the enclave. “We’ve been through this before, a million times, thinking that it might happen — only to get burned.”New York Times,News Analysis: For Netanyahu, Trump’s Nod to Peace Puts Him in a Tough Spot, David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 4, 2025. The Israeli leader thought he had a plan from the U.S. president that would have represented total victory over Hamas. Suddenly, it looks as though he might not get everything he wants. This did not go the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.On Monday, the Israeli leader won a peace plan from President Trump that promised him total victory, in the form of a take-it-or-leave-it message to Hamas. The militant group would have to release all the Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza within 72 hours, lay down its arms and surrender any role in the territory’s future — or Israel would be given a free hand to pursue the group’s destruction.On Friday, responding to a new ultimatum from Mr. Trump, Hamas announced that it was ready to release all the hostages. But it said nothing about how soon it would do so, demurred on laying down its arms, and said it wanted to “discuss the details” of Mr. Trump’s plan.To Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Mr. Netanyahu’s, this was “in essence, a rejection by Hamas” of the president’s proposal, he wrote on social media.To Michael Herzog, Mr. Netanyahu’s former ambassador to the United States, it was “a ‘no’ cloaked as a ‘yes,’” he said in an interview.Yet Mr. Trump embraced the Hamas statement as an unqualified “yes.” “Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE,” he wrote on social media. “Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly!”Mr. Netanyahu’s office waited several hours before responding, after 3 a.m. Israel time on Saturday, that the country was ready for the “immediate release of all hostages.” It made no mention of Hamas’s conditions. Instead, it referred back to Mr. Trump’s peace plan, saying Israel would cooperate with the White House “to end the war in accordance with the principles set forth by Israel that are consistent with President Trump’s vision.”The prospect of a return of the hostages and an end to the war buoyed hopes in both Israel and Gaza on Saturday after nearly two years of brutal conflict and devastation.Mr. Netanyahu now finds himself squeezed both by domestic political concerns and by geopolitical pressure from Mr. Trump, from Muslim and Arab nations across the Middle East, and from countries far and wide that greeted Friday night’s developments as if peace had already broken out.“He will find himself with the entire world clapping and he needs to explain why he’s against it,” said Eran Etzion, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser.The president’s call for the Israeli military to stand down immediately — with negotiations to follow between Israel and Hamas — could not have been welcomed by the prime minister, Mr. Etzion said. “These negotiations will be conducted under the conditions of a cease-fire, which is contrary to Netanyahu’s design,” he said. “Netanyahu wanted this all to take place under Israeli military pressure.”The turn of events on Friday night was also likely to threaten Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition. His right-wing partners had already been informed, through Mr. Trump’s Monday proposal, that they would have to abandon their dreams of forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza for good, allowing Israelis to settle and annex the coastal enclave. Now, they were effectively being told that Hamas would not be going away after all, and might not even agree to disarm.“I don’t see how his coalition partners can live with that,” said Shira Efron, an analyst on Israeli policy at RAND Corporation, a think tank.“If Netanyahu wants to market it as an achievement, he can,” she said, by noting the Trump plan would end the war, return the hostages, replace Hamas with some other entity to govern Gaza, and bring Arab and Muslim nations in to help with the stabilization and reconstruction of the enclave.“But his partners were hoping for a different story,” she said. “An unrealistic story.”U.S. Governance and PoliticsNew York Times,Trump Administration Is Said to Plan to Cut Refugee Admissions to a Record Low, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz and Miriam Jordan, Updated Oct. 4, 2025. Many of the slots would go to white South Africans and others facing “unjust discrimination,” according to people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The New York Times.The Trump administration plans to slash refugee admissions to a record low level in the upcoming year, reserving a bulk of the limited slots for white Afrikaners from South Africa and others facing “unjust discrimination,” according to people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The New York Times.President Trump is expected to lower the ceiling on refugee admissions to 7,500, a drastic decrease from the cap of 125,000 set by the Biden administration last year, according to a presidential determination dated Sept. 30 and signed by Mr. Trump.The new limit would effectively shut the door to thousands of families waiting in camps around the world and refocus a program meant to provide sanctuary for those fleeing war and famine to support mostly white South Africans.A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced plans for the refugee program, said the limit on admissions would be final only when the administration consulted with Congress, as the federal government is required by law to do each year. The official said the government shutdown was preventing that consultation from happening and claimed no refugees would be admitted into the country in the fiscal year that started on Oct. 1 until Democrats and Republicans reached a deal to fund the government.Democrats in Congress said this week that Mr. Trump had already missed the deadline and called on him to consult with them.“Despite repeated outreach from Democratic and Republican committee staff, the Trump administration has completely discarded its legal obligation, leaving Congress in the dark and refugees in limbo,” Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Alex Padilla of California said in a statement.“The consequences are dire,” they said, adding that the virtual shutdown of the refugee program was “betraying the nation’s promise as a refuge for the oppressed.”Mr. Trump took steps to effectively kill the refugee program when he signed an executive order on the first day of his second term suspending resettlement for most refugees. He has also effectively cut off migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border from seeking protection under another program known as asylum, part of a broader effort to restrict immigration to the United States.Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, a Jewish resettlement agency, said the administration was eroding America’s global standing by turning its back on the most vulnerable.Editors’ PicksWhat a Signal in a Failed Star’s Clouds Means for the Search for LifeCan an Ancient Ritual Fix Our Loneliness Problem?Sex in a Power Suit“Such a low refugee ceiling would break America’s promise to people who played by the rules,” said Mr. Hetfield, whose organization has had to lay off more than half its staff since Mr. Trump gutted funding for the refugee program.“Trump isn’t just putting the Afrikaners to the front of the line,” Mr. Hetfield said. “He is kicking years-long-waiting refugees out of the line.”The new ceiling on refugee admissions would be half the previous record low of 15,000 slots that Mr. Trump set before leaving office in 2020.In the 2024 fiscal year, the United States resettled roughly 100,000 refugees for the first time in more than a decade. That number has withered since Mr. Trump paused the program. Figures for refugee arrivals in the government database have not been updated since he returned to office, but officials working with refugee organizations say just scores of non-South African refugees have been processed into the United States.When the administration froze the program in January, the White House argued that the nation did not have the resources to absorb refugees after a record number of migrants entered the United States through the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration.Migrants at the border, however, enter the nation through a program that is separate from the State Department’s roughly 40-year-old refugee program. Applicants for the refugee program must often wait years in camps overseas before coming to the United States. They must pass extensive background checks, interviews and medical exams before they are welcomed to the country.Lev Remembers,Commentary: Judge Blocks Trump’s National Guard Move — Generals Rebel Against Dictator Playbook, Lev Parnas, Oct. 4, 2025. Inside the growing pushback against Trump’s authoritarian overreach — and why your voice matters now more than ever.This time, I’m writing with good news — real good news — and as soon as I heard it, I knew I had to share it with you right away.SubscribedA federal judge — one that Trump himself appointed — just ruled that Trump cannot deploy the National Guard into Portland, at least for the next two weeks. Think about that: even judges he hand-picked are starting to push back against his most dangerous power grabs. This isn’t just a legal win — it’s a signal that the walls around Trump’s authoritarian playbook are beginning to crack.In her ruling, Judge Karin Immergut — a Trump appointee — wrote, “This is a nation of constitutional law, not of martial law.” Those words matter. They carry the weight of history. She made it clear that no president, no matter how powerful or angry, can bypass the Constitution to use the U.S. military against American citizens. Coming from someone he appointed, this is more than a courtroom decision — it’s a line drawn in the sand.But it doesn’t stop there. From my sources inside the room, I’m hearing that the majority of the generals gathered with Trump and HegSec left shocked, furious, and shaken. These are not people prone to dramatic language. Yet I’ve been told that several openly said they would “never bow down to a dictator” and that they “would not turn on the American people.” Some of these men and women have given their entire lives in uniform. To hear them use words like that should make every American sit up and take notice.This is exactly what we’ve been warning about — and exactly why we can’t stay silent. Our voices are being heard. This ruling, this defiance inside the military, this pushback — it’s happening because Americans are speaking out, demanding accountability, refusing to normalize authoritarianism.Now more than ever, we must keep going. We must keep pushing. If you’re reading this, you are part of that resistance. Together we’ve built something powerful, and it’s working.New York Times,Treasury Plans to Mint $1 Commemorative Trump Coin, Alan Rappeport, Oct. 4, 2025 (print ed.). The coin, bearing President Trump’s face, would honor the 250th birthday of the United States.The Treasury Department is developing a one-dollar commemorative coin in celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday bearing the image of President Trump.According to draft images of the coin posted on social media by the U.S. treasurer, Brandon Beach, the “heads” side would have Mr. Trump’s profile and the “tails” side an image of him standing before the American flag and pumping his fist under the words “Fight, Fight, Fight.” The coin would be legal tender and go into circulation in 2026.The Treasury is authorized to mint the coins for a year, according to the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020. The coins must have “designs emblematic of the U.S. semiquincentennial,” the legislation says.It is not clear that Mr. Trump’s image can be featured on a coin. An 1866 law enshrined a tradition that only deceased people could appear on U.S. currency to avoid the appearance that America was a monarchy.An explanation of the legislation on an archived page from the Treasury’s website noted that the act “was caused by an uproar over the actions of the chief of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Spencer Clark,” who had “placed himself on a five-cent note and had a large quantity of them printed before it was noticed.”That webpage has been removed from the Treasury’s website.A Treasury spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the legality of featuring Mr. Trump on the coin.Mr. Beach said in his social media post that more information about the coins would be shared soon, “once the obstructionist shutdown of the United States government is over.”Politico,Democratic candidate’s ‘abhorrent’ texts threaten to shake up bellwether Virginia elections, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Oct. 4, 2025. Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, mused about shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert in text messages from 2022.Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, signaled he will not end his campaign. | Steve Helber/AP PhotoByA string of text messages from Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, where he mused about violence directed toward a political rival is triggering widespread backlash and threatening to shake up the state’s November election.But while Jones has signaled he plans to remain in the race, Republicans up and down the ballot are pressing the Democratic nominee for governor, Abigail Spanberger, to publicly call on him to step aside.In August 2022, Jones wrote about shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert in text messages he sent to Republican state Del. Carrie Coyner. The texts, which were first reported by National Review and subsequently viewed by The Washington Post, have not independently been confirmed by POLITICO, but Jones has not questioned their veracity and has publicly apologized for them.“Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot,” Jones wrote. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.”“Jay,” Coyner responded. “Please stop.”Jones later called Coyner to continue their conversation, where he invoked the death of Gilbert’s children and said it might cause the then-speaker to change his political views, National Review reported.The messages risk roiling Virginia’s off-year elections, with early voting already long underway in the state. Virginia’s off-year gubernatorial elections are often viewed as one of the country’s first political touchpoints following a presidential election. The state has trended blue in federal elections for years, but statewide offices are typically hypercompetitive that favor the party out of power in Washington.Still, now-GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory four years ago over former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe was considered an upset, and one that rocketed him to the forefront of the Republican Party. Winning a gubernatorial election in Virginia could be the path to national stardom; Youngkin mulled a 2024 presidential bid before ultimately opting not to run, and is considered a potential 2028 contender.Democrats have generally led in public polling for all three of the statewide elections in November: governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. Now, both Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, Spanberger’s opponent in November, and Youngkin have pressured Spanberger to urge Jones to exit the race.“There is no ‘gosh, I’m sorry’ here,” Youngkin said in a post Saturday. “Jones doesn’t have the morality or character to drop out of this race, and his running mates Abigail Spanberger, Ghazala Hashmi, and every elected Democrat in Virginia don’t have the courage to call on him to step away from this campaign in disgrace.”Earle-Sears wrote on X Friday that the texts “should be wholly disqualifying of someone running for an office that protects the people of Virginia.”“Jay Jones’ horrific comments are a symptom of the entire Democratic Party and his running mate, Abigail Spanberger, needs to call on him to drop out,” she said.Law, Courts, CrimePolitico, Would-be Kavanaugh assassin sentenced to over 8 years in prison, Josh Gerstein, Oct. 3, 2025. Prosecutors had sought a 30-year sentence. Sophie Roske was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home carrying a bag containing a gun, ammunition, a knife and other tools.A person who admitted to traveling to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home in 2022 in an aborted attempt to kill him was sentenced Friday to just over eight years in prison by a judge who called the crime “incredibly serious,” but found unreasonable prosecutors’ recommendation of at least 30 years behind bars.U.S. District Court Deborah Boardman imposed a 97-month prison term— just one month more than defense attorneys proposed — on Sophie Roske, 29, at the end of a daylong sentencing hearing. The judge also ordered that Roske be on supervised release, a form of probation, for the rest of her life.Boardman said her decision to sentence Roske well below federal sentencing guidelines was driven in large part by Roske’s decision to turn herself into police after she approached Kavanaugh’s residence with a gun, other weapons and tools in the middle of the night three years ago.“This is an atypical defendant and an atypical case. … Though she got far too close to executing her plans, the fact remains she abandoned them,” said Boardman, a Biden appointee. “Sophie Roske’s admission of guilt and effort to come clean did not occur after or even because she was caught in the act by police. … If she had not called 911, law enforcement would never have known about Sophie Roske and her plot to kill a Supreme Court justice.”Boardman called the crime an act of terrorism and said the eight-year sentence should convey that Roske’s actions were intolerable.Boardman also said the incident inflicted “real harm” and “anxiety” on Kavanaugh and his family. “He’s a justice on the Supreme Court but he’s a human being, he’s a public servant and he and his family should never have to face the fear of threat because he does his job,” the judge said.In a tearful statement to the court just before the judge delivered her sentence, Roske expressed deep regret over the incident, which she suggested was driven by a mental health crisis.“I sincerely apologize to the justice and his family for the considerable distress I put them through,” Roske said, standing at the defense table in a yellow jail uniform. “I have been portrayed as a monster, and this tragic mistake I made will follow me for the rest of my life. I also realized how twisted my thinking and sense of self can become when my mental health is at its worst.”Defense attorneys disclosed to the court last month that Roske is transgender and now uses the first name Sophie and female pronouns. Defense lawyers and family members did so Friday during their presentation, while the prosecutor who spoke at the sentencing generally avoided the issue by referring to Roske as “the defendant.”During Friday’s hearing, Boardman questioned whether Roske would receive adequate mental health treatment in federal prison. The judge referenced President Donald Trump’s executive order banning gender-affirming care for federal inmates.“Let’s not hide the fact that there’s an executive order on this specific topic,” Boardman said.A lawyer for Roske, Assistant Federal Defender Andrew Szekely, said he is confident that the Bureau of Prisons will give Roske the medicine she requires, but “beyond that little is sure.”When delivering the sentence, the judge said she took Roske’s transgender status into account, although she didn’t say how much weight she gave to that issue.“I take into consideration the conditions of pre-trial confinement and the fact that she is a transgender woman and will be sent to a male-only [Bureau of Prisons] facility,” Boardman said.Prosecutors had sought a sentence of at least 30 years in prison, while defense attorneys recommended an eight-year prison sentence followed by 25 years of probation. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday the Justice Department would appeal the “the woefully insufficient sentence imposed by the district court, which does not reflect the horrific facts of this case.”“The attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a disgusting attack against our entire judicial system by a profoundly disturbed individual,” Bondi said.Politico,Republicans Have a Senate Map Without the Meltdowns, Jonathan Martin, Oct. 3, 2025. Trump may be the kingmaker, but with Thune working behind the scenes, Republicans are avoiding the messy primaries that once cost them winnable Senate seats.hile Washington is gripped with the federal government shutdown, the most revealing congressional news this week may have come from Birmingham rather than the beltway. It’s in Alabama, where college football talk show host Paul Finebaum is musing about trading calls from Phyllis from Mulga (RIP) for quorum calls in the United States Senate.Finebaum is set to visit Washington for meetings with Republicans later this month and is serious about a possible bid, I’m told. Still, it remains to be seen if the “Mouth of the South” wants to spend the better part of his retirement years on airplanes as a freshman senator for a $174,000 salary that’s well south of his ESPN payday (assuming the newly-revealed Republican can get through a purity test of a GOP primary).What’s significant about the Finebaum float — his interest in a run and, more to the point, the interest in him — is how it illustrates the paradox of today’s Senate Republicans.Senate GOP Leader John Thune and his lieutenants have largely remained silent as President Donald Trump has ordered the Justice Department to target his adversaries, enriched himself and his family through brazen self-dealing and repeatedly stepped on congressional prerogatives, among other transgressions they’d never tolerate from a Democratic president. The reason the Republican pushback on the FCC’s threats against Jimmy Kimmel stood out last month is because GOP lawmakers have otherwise been so pliant.Yet at the same time — and with purposefully little fanfare — Thune and other lawmakers have quietly gone about trying to normie’ize their conference with mainstream Republicans. Of course, what’s normal in the Trump era is all relative — the price of admission for every GOP senator and would-be senator not named Murkowski or Collins is complete and total fealty to the president.What Thune is doing, though, is shaping a Senate Republican conference that will outlast Trump (if not Trumpism) and offer some ballast against a House that’s sure to move with the momentary tides toward isolationism and populism.Trump gets winners and Thune gets to repurpose the GOP’s one-man primary to protect his incumbents and anoint his preferred open seat candidates. Not that Thune would ever say it out loud, but he’s effectively reprogramming the ultimate anti-establishment leader to put down any insurgencies. And Trump is happy to do it, as long as the candidates say nice things about him.Just glance at the 2026 Senate map. What jumps out, with one very important exception, is what’s not happening: Unlike so many times in the last 15 years, Senate Republicans are not poised to throw away winnable seats because of messy primaries and controversial nominees.You know the roster, which probably still causes Mitch McConnell to wake up in the middle of the night: Kari Lake, Roy Moore, Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Matt Rosendale. I could go on. Christine O’Donnell, witch, etc. But you get the point.Largely thanks to Thune’s diplomacy — and, yes, willingness to bite his tongue on Trump’s conduct — almost every Senate Republican incumbent appears to be avoiding a primary challenge that could imperil the seat in the general election.The president has already endorsed, among others, Senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Jon Husted (Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (W.V.) and Dan Sullivan (Ark). This early laying of hands effectively insulates these incumbents — who hail from the pre-Trump era of GOP politics — from an intra-party threat.Just as significant, and far more surprising, Thune and White House aides have convinced Trump there’s nothing to be gained by publicly attacking Senator Susan Collins, let alone calling for a primary against her. With his silence, a word rarely used in the same sentence with Trump, the president has done more for the Senate GOP’s most endangered incumbent than his criticism or praise would in blue-but-bifurcated Maine.As striking is how swiftly Trump has intervened in a handful of open seat races, perhaps most significantly in Michigan.By endorsing former Rep. Mike Rogers, who only lost his Senate bid by 0.3 percent last year, the president has spared Thune and Co. of a costly primary in a state once famous for its Republican divisions. Instead, it’s Democrats who will have a protracted primary in the race to succeed Sen. Gary Peters, who’s retiring. A Republican hasn’t won a Senate seat there since 1994, but Rogers, a decidedly pre-Trump figure who’s reinvented himself to pass in Trump’s party, gives them their best chance to win a seat there since, well, he ran in 2024.The biggest potential mess — one of those primaries of yore that still keep McConnell up at night — is in Texas.In a difficult midterm where Republicans can’t flip Georgia, Michigan or New Hampshire, it’s possible to squint hard enough and see Texas as either the 50th or 51stt Democratic seat (yes, that involves some intense squinting — and Maine, North Carolina and potentially Ohio going blue).More Global NewsNew York Times, Sanae Takaichi Is Likely to Be Japan’s Next Leader. Who Is She?Javier C. Hernández and Hisako Ueno, Oct. 4, 2025. Ms. Takaichi would be Japan’s first female prime minister in a country where women are drastically underrepresented at the highest levels of power.Sanae Takaichi, a veteran conservative lawmaker in Japan who cites Margaret Thatcher as an influence, is set to become Japan’s first female prime minister after prevailing Saturday in an important leadership election.While she is poised to break a gender barrier in politics, Ms. Takaichi’s own views on women’s rights are complicated, and she has been criticized by some for not doing enough to promote gender equality.Her rise reflects an eagerness for change by the governing Liberal Democratic Party, which she now leads, after electoral defeats over the past year — as well as the party’s attempt to respond to the growing strength of right-wing groups in Japan.Here’s what to know about Ms. Takaichi, her views and the challenges she might face in leading Japan.What is Ms. Takaichi’s background?Ms. Takaichi, 64, grew up in Nara Prefecture in central Japan. She is an unusual figure in high-level Japanese politics because she does not come from a prominent political family. Her mother was a police officer, and her father worked for a car company. She was first elected to Parliament in 1993.She attended Kobe University, where she played drums and drove a motorcycle. After graduation, she spent time in the United States, interning with Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, a Democrat.How did she rise in politics?In the 2000s, Ms. Takaichi became an ally of Shinzo Abe, who went on to become a long-serving prime minister. He was assassinated in 2022 after he had stepped down. Like Mr. Abe, she supported amending the pacifist Constitution, a contentious position in a country wary of military aggression.Media, Tech, Education, Religion, Culture WarsWhite House Chronicle,Commentary: The AI Tsunami Is Approaching Shore; Jobs at Big Risk, Llewellyn King, Oct. 4, 2025. The Big One is coming, and it isn’t an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world’s norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13% since the widespread adoption of AI.Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer’s Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — like in the next year.Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.These aren’t speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia recently to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn’t hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday’s issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.Lincoln Square Media Logue:YouTube Pays Tribute to Trump & the Supreme Court Chips Away at Due Process, CJ (Charles) Penneys, Oct. 4, 2025. A government shutdown should be the headline — instead it’s the background noise. If you were wondering what counts as governance, it includes inciting an insurrection and receving no punishment for doing so.
- YouTube, once the platform that muted Trump for inciting an insurrection, now cut him a $24.5 million check that mostly bankrolls his dream of a gaudy White House ballroom — democracy’s funeral catered with Google money.
- At Quantico, the commander-in-chief told a hall of generals that American cities should double as combat training zones, because nothing says freedom like using Detroit as a live-fire exercise. The job market lost 32,000 paychecks while the shutdown gagged the official data, leaving workers guessing and Wall Street sweating.
- The Supreme Court kept churning out rulings on its emergency docket, letting Trump’s policies take effect before anyone could blink, because apparently due process is too “woke.”
- By week’s end, Trump had frozen $26 billion for Democratic states, turning the shutdown into a political ransom note while federal workers mowed cemetery grass for free.
What ties it all together is the alchemy of grievance into power. Trump doesn’t need truth when repetition can baptize a lie. He doesn’t need functioning agencies when dysfunction is proof of his own necessity. He doesn’t need courts to rule on the merits when settlements and shadow dockets deliver faster wins. Chaos isn’t a bug in this system — it’s the business model. The destruction itself becomes the credential.And so the state becomes a stage, every institution an unpaid extra in the one-man show. Tech companies fund the props, generals provide the uniforms, courts supply the scripts, and workers pick up the bill. Governance isn’t about outcomes anymore; it’s about applause lines. And the audience is forced to watch whether it buys a ticket or not.YouTube coughed up $24.5 million to end Trump’s lawsuit over his 2021 suspension, transforming what was supposed to be accountability into a funding drive for his next vanity project. Of that haul, $22 million is earmarked for a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom — a $200 million monument to excess that will outlast his presidency even if democracy doesn’t. The rest of the money trickles to his friends at CPAC and Naomi Wolf, proof that Trump never sues alone, only with a cast of professional grievance merchants. Google didn’t admit guilt, but the check they wrote speaks louder than any press release. A penalty for inciting violence has now become a down payment on chandeliers and catering space; the consequences of insurrection are catered dinners under gilded ceilings.This is the MAGA twist on justice: Turn accountability into proof of persecution, persecution into lawsuits, and lawsuits into cash. Meta already financed his presidential library in Miami, X cut its check months ago, and now YouTube has bought its way out of the doghouse. Each case becomes a shakedown, with Trump cashing in on the same platforms that once banned him. He’ll call it vindication, spin it as proof that “the fake news” tech overlords admitted fault, and wave around the receipts as trophies. It’s not a settlement, it’s a tribute — the kind mob bosses collect when people know resistance is bad for business. Big Tech, for all its billion-dollar bluster, keeps lining up to pay protection money.What makes it corrosive is not the payout but the precedent. If the companies that claimed to defend democracy against Trump’s lies are now financing his ballrooms, then democracy isn’t being defended at all — it’s being rented out by the hour. A suspension for undermining the republic has become a cash stream for staging his rallies inside it. Accountability has collapsed into enrichment, punishment into prestige, law into spectacle. Trump doesn’t survive crises; he metabolizes them into monuments. The courtroom that was supposed to restrain him is now underwriting his empire built on grievance and revenge.New York Times,Charlie Kirk Killing: Journalists at 3 Newspapers Quit Over Edits to a Charlie Kirk Story, Neil Vigdor, Oct. 4, 2025 (print ed.). The publications in Alaska lost significant staffing after the owners made changes to an article that had drawn criticism from a Republican state lawmaker.Several journalists resigned this week from three newspapers in Alaska after the publications’ corporate owner made significant edits to an article about Charlie Kirk’s death, appearing to yield to pressure from a Republican state lawmaker who had criticized the coverage.The four journalists, who worked for The Homer News, The Peninsula Clarion and The Juneau Empire, wrote in a joint resignation letter on Monday that they were never consulted about the edits, made by the Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group.“We believe this destroys the credibility the public has placed in us as reporters and editors,” the journalists wrote. “The willingness to acquiesce to a public official’s editorial demands and have conversations with her about the direction of our coverage is a betrayal not just of the journalists who work for Carpenter Media, but of the company’s integrity as a purveyor of news.”The letter was signed by Chloe Pleznac, the Homer News reporter who wrote the article; Erin Thompson, the regional editor of the three newspapers and the one who approved the story; Jeff Helminiak, a sports and features editor for The Peninsula Clarion; and Jake Dye, a reporter for the same publication.The resignations, which they said would take effect on Oct. 13, were accepted immediately and left two of the newspapers with one reporter each, and a third without any journalists on staff, they said.The article at the center of the revolt chronicled a Sept. 17 vigil in Homer, Alaska, for Mr. Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and a right-wing ally of President Trump’s who was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. The story ran online on Sept. 23 and in print on Sept. 25 in The Homer News, according to Ms. Pleznac.Its description in the second paragraph of Mr. Kirk — whom the article called a “Christian-Nationalist icon” and defender of “often racist and controversial views” — had struck a nerve with one of the vigil’s co-organizers.In a letter to the corporate owners of the papers, Sarah Vance, a Republican state representative, assailed the coverage as “hate-baiting at its worst” and suggested that advertisers were planning to boycott the publications. Her criticism was not dissimilar to the political pressure other conservatives have exerted on media companies to punish those whose commentary about Mr. Kirk they deem objectionable, most notably the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who was temporarily taken off the air after remarks he made on his show in the wake of the shooting.Soon after publication, something peculiar happened.“The story just disappeared,” Ms. Thompson, 44, said in an interview on Thursday. “We were all flabbergasted.”Editors’ PicksSex in a Power SuitThe Case for Laughing With Strangers in the DarkShould I Tell an Acquaintance That Her Husband Is Leading a Double Life?Several hours later, the story was reposted online, with some significant changes to its structure and description of Mr. Kirk, who was 31 years old and played an instrumental role in Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.In the revised version, the second paragraph appeared about 12 paragraphs into the article stating that Mr. Kirk’s views “have been tied by many to a rise in Christian nationalism across the U.S.” In describing Mr. Kirk’s frequent visits to college campuses, the article said that he had regularly defended his criticism of the Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as his opposition to gun control and affirmative action.Gone from the article was a line stating that Mr. Kirk had perpetuated “conspiracy theories, including Covid-19 and climate misinformation, as well as replacement theory,” which posits that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.In a statement on Thursday, Carpenter Media Group, which is based in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and owns more than 250 media properties, said that the journalists’ resignation letter had contained a number of inaccuracies. It did not specify what they were.“CMG made the decision to edit a piece of content that fell well short of our standard and the standards of unbiased community journalism,” the company said. “We stand firmly by that decision. Our primary responsibility is to the communities we serve, and we will continue to ensure that our publications reflect fairness, accuracy, and respect for these communities.”All three community newspapers are relatively small. As of 2023, The Homer News, a weekly newspaper, had a print circulation of about 1,205 copies, according to a media kit. It covers Homer, a city of about 6,000 people on the Kenai Peninsula. The journalists said the story also ran on the website of The Peninsula Clarion, in Kenai, Alaska, about 80 miles north of Homer.Gregory Knight, an aide to Ms. Vance, said she had not asked the media company to make changes to the story. He provided a statement from Ms. Vance saying that she did not expect her complaint to contribute to the resignations.“My concern has always been singular and straightforward; I want The Homer News to uphold the highest standards of journalism, to provide reporting that is fair, accurate, and free from bias,” Ms. Vance’s statement said. “I place tremendous value on truth and on the vital role that local media plays in keeping residents informed and connected. That commitment to integrity in reporting is the only reason I spoke up.”Kelly McBride, senior vice president and head of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit focused on raising the standards of journalism, said in an interview on Thursday that she was troubled by the way the story was changed.“That’s a bad practice because it undermines the independence of the journalists,” Ms. McBride said.Ms. McBride said that news organizations need to be clear about what their standards are and have consistent policies in place when those are not being met.She said that there were some similarities in the way the company that owns the papers had responded and Mr. Kimmel’s suspension.The owner of the publications did “exactly what ABC did,” she said. “They capitulated.”Ms. Pleznac, 25, who said she had worked in Alaskan public radio newsrooms since she was 18, referred to the resignation letter on Thursday when asked for comment.The other two journalists who resigned did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Ms. Thompson said that one of her managers had told her the context about Mr. Kirk’s views was presented too high in the article. “They smoothed out the edges,” she said.She said that initially she had not planned to resign, but could not “see a path forward to do my job in an honest and straightforward way, using my best judgment.”Oct. 3Letters from an American,Historical Commentary: Oct. 2, 2025 [Federal Raid on Chicago], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 3, 2025. At about 1:00 on Tuesday morning, federal agents from Border Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) raided an apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive.Using helicopters and large vehicles, as well as flash-bang grenades, and dressed in military fatigues, agents broke down the doors of the residents of the five-story building and pulled them from their homes in zip ties, some of them naked. Agents left the people tied up outside for hours before letting all but 37 of them go. The apartments residents returned to were trashed.Cindy Hernandez of the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the raid, noting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said some of those arrested ““are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.” It also said the neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.”But, as Hernandez reports, DHS did not offer any evidence to support its assertions. Some of the people detained during the raid are U.S. citizens.Eyewitness Eboni Watson told Cate Cauguiran, Craig Wall, Tre Ward, and Lissette Nuñez of ABC News 7 that the people “was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other. That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*ck them kids.’”Eyewitness Darrell Ballard told the reporters: “We’re under siege. We’re being invaded by our own military.”Today, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration informed congressional committees that the president has decided the U.S. is in a formal “armed conflict” with the drug cartels the administration has labeled terrorist organizations. If the U.S. is engaged in such an armed conflict, the administration said, those suspected of smuggling drugs for the cartels are “unlawful combatants.”This declaration backfills the administration’s justification for striking three boats in the Caribbean in September, killing 17. According to international law, Savage and Schmitt explain, in an armed conflict it’s lawful for a country to kill enemy fighters even when they don’t pose a direct threat.This redefinition is problematic not just because most overdose deaths in the U.S. come from fentanyl from Mexico, not drugs from Venezuela, the home base of the boats the administration struck. Legal experts say that trafficking an illicit consumer product is not the same as armed conflict. It is problematic also because the administration did not identify any of the drug cartels it claims it is engaging in armed conflict, who must be engaged in organized armed combat to be part of an armed conflict.Even more problematic, as retired judge advocate general (JAG) lawyer Geoffrey S. Corn, who was the Army’s senior advisor for interpreting the laws of war, told Savage and Schmitt, the administration’s declaration is an “abuse” that crosses a major legal line. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, posted: “Every American should be alarmed that Pres[ident] Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy. Drug cartels must be stopped, but declaring war & ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge—nor legal justification—is unacceptable.”The declaration means that the administration is laying claim that the U.S. is in an active armed conflict, which would give the president extraordinary wartime powers. This dovetails with the September 17 demand of DHS that the “media and the far left” must stop “the demonization of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS law enforcement.” It also supports Trump’s warning to military leaders on Tuesday that “[w]e’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy,” followed by complaints that “Venezuela emptied its prison population into our country” and a vow to “straighten…out” the cities “run by the radical left Democrats.”That assault is underway now, not only through raids like the one in Chicago on Tuesday, but also by administration figures who are using the government shutdown to hurt Democrats and their constituencies. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported this morning that the Department of Education changed out-of-office email replies for furloughed employees from generic messages to ones blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. Leah Feiger and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that when employees changed their out-of-office responses back to neutral language, the message changed back to blaming the Democrats.Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has vowed to cut $26 billion from projects in New York City that Congress approved, despite the illegality of such impoundments, and has vowed to slash the federal government, again without a lawful basis for such cuts. A shutdown gives Vought no more legal authority than he ever had.Jordain Carney of Politico reports that even Republicans are concerned about the damage Vought is doing to their own constituents as he attempts to weaponize the government against Democrats. But, as Carney reports, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) says the Republicans have no control over what Vought might do.The nation’s rapid advance toward authoritarianism is one story right now, but there is another: the administration is rotting from inside.Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports that the groundwork required for the mass layoffs Vought has threatened is not apparent, suggesting the administration is trying to project power it does not have.The Republicans are trying to pin the blame for the shutdown on the Democrats, but Trump is apparently so unstable he is hurting their cause. The Democrats are insisting they will not be complicit in slashing through Americans’ healthcare. The law the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations but permitted the premium tax credits that subsidized the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) to expire at the end of 2025, and people are already seeing dramatic increases in their healthcare premiums.On Tuesday, after his 70-minute incoherent speech to the nation’s top military leaders, Trump proved Democrats’ point when he told White House reporters that the administration intends to use the shutdown to cut programs the American people want, including ones that give them access to medical care.Trump said: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for [Democrats] and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. And you all know Russell Vought, he’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way. So they’re taking a risk by having a shutdown because because of the shutdown, we can do things medically, and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people out.” Then, as if recognizing that he had just proved the Democrats’ point, he added a non sequitur: “We don’t want to do that, but we don’t want fraud, waste, and abuse, and you know we’re cutting that.”Trump reiterated his support for Vought’s program today, posting: “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”This is another unforced error, with Trump tying himself to Project 2025 after assuring voters before the 2024 election that he had nothing to do with it and knew nothing about it. An NBC News poll from late September 2024 showed that voters who knew about Project 2025 hated it. Only 4% of voters said they liked the plan. It was unpopular even among voters identifying as MAGA Republicans; only 9% of them liked it. As the administration has put Project 2025 into place, it’s unlikely people like it more than they did before. Government agencies are not “Democrat Agencies”; they are agencies that provide services and protections for all Americans. Cuts to them have been widely unpopular.Yesterday, the day after Trump’s 70-minute rambling talk in front of the nation’s top military leaders, Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) confronted House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). A camera caught the exchange:Dean: “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”Johnson: “A lot of folks on your side are, too. I don’t control him.”Dean: “Oh my God, please. That performance in front of the generals?”Johnson: “I didn’t see it.”Dean: “That is so dangerous! You know I serve on Foreign Affairs and Appropriations, this is a collision of those two things. Our allies are looking elsewhere. Our enemies are laughing. You have a president who is unwell.”Johnson: “I just left the Speaker’s apartment.”Trump has been posting on social media often since Tuesday but has not appeared in public. Vice President J.D. Vance took the White House press briefing today to answer questions about the government shutdown.The Contrarian,Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 3, 2025. Patriots from Boston to Quantico to Portland defend democracy.We had no shortage of undaunted defenders of democracy this week. In three locations, Americans stepped forward to protect the Constitution and uphold democratic norms.In one of the most damning opinions I have ever read, Ronald Reagan appointee U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston held that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and their subordinates “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech.” He meticulously dissected their gross First Amendment violations, denounced this administration’s attack on dissent, and made a moving plea for Americans to care about our precious rights and liberties.A sample of what Young wrote about Donald Trump:He meets dissent from his orders in those other two branches by demonizing and disparaging the speakers, sometimes descending to personal vitriol.Dissent elsewhere among our people is likewise disfavored, often in colorful scurrilous terms. All this the First Amendment capaciously and emphatically allows. When he drifts off into calling people “traitors” and condemning them for “treason,” however, he reveals an ignorance of the crime and the special burden of proof it requires. More important, such speech is not protected by the First Amendment; it is defamatory. In his official capacity as President, however, President Trump enjoys broad immunity from any civil liability.Young also excoriated Trump for his retribution campaign against political enemies. “Where things run off the rails for him is his fixation with ‘retribution.’ ‘I am your retribution,’ he thundered famously while on the campaign trail.” He then enumerated instances in which courts have intervened to protect law firms, the media, and universities.Young ended with an ominous question:I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected. Is he correct?This opinion is bound to stand the test of time as a magnificent indictment of Trump and defense of the First Amendment. If only the Supreme Court MAGA justices were as clear-eyed and committed to defense of the Constitution as Judge Young.Judge Young was not the only heroic figure this week. Hundreds of our top military officers (unnecessarily dragged away from posts around the world to Quantico, Va. at the cost of $6M to taxpayers) illustrated their loyalty to the Constitution. They remained stone-faced and refused to applaud during the most cringeworthy addresses ever delivered by a secretary of defense and a commander in chief.Trump and his unqualified, clownish Secretary of Defense (who strutted around the stage issuing vulgar pronouncements and silly cliches) grossly underestimated the integrity of our top brass. As the New York Times reported, “The military officers assembled in the room listened silently. It is likely, though, that at least some of them were seething at his suggestion that their collective failure to enforce basic standards had caused, or even contributed to, the military’s failings in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Some likely left more convinced than ever that Trump is nuts and Hegseth is a joke.Military leaders who have attained such high rank and put in decades of service could not help but be repulsed by Trump’s vile suggestion that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Hearing the president declare that “America is under invasion from within…no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in any ways because they don’t wear uniforms” would deeply disgust senior officers steeped in Constitutional norms and a sense of duty. Some previously may not have fully grasped the depth of their civilian leaders’ moral, intellectual, and temperamental unfitness.Although Hegseth and Trump disgraced themselves, uniformed military leadership did us proud. Now, however, they must navigate the next 3-plus years without endangering national security and violating their constitutional oaths. (Frankly, in a functioning democracy, Trump would be carted away under the 25th Amendment, and Hegseth would be compelled to resign.)SubscribedMeanwhile, another band of undaunted democracy advocates rose to the occasion in Portland, Oregon. Local and state politicians, faith groups, community organizers, and unions had prepared for Trump’s military occupation, which he has telegraphed for months. Civil society and political leaders came out in unison to oppose the invasion of federal forces. They blanketed social media with lovely scenes of their peaceful city and mocked the notion their city was “war ravaged.”An umbrella community group Protect Oregon kept the public informed and put out a uniform message. “Any takeover of any community in Oregon is an abuse of power, a gross federal overreach, and a misuse of the military,” its website explained. “People across the state and the political spectrum are coming together to peacefully oppose politically motivated attacks on our communities.” It also helped organize a peaceful demonstration on Sunday away from the ICE facility.Most important, within hours of Trump’s announcement, state and local authorities filed a lawsuit (set for hearing today) spelling out why the deployment is illegal and unconstitutional. “While Congress has delegated a portion of that power to the Executive, it carefully limited the President’s authority to exert control over a state’s National Guard—the modern term for the militia—to specific circumstances,” the complaint stated. “And for over a century and a half, Congress has expressly forbidden federal military interference in civilian law enforcement.” It continued: “Defendants have trampled on these principles by federalizing members of the Oregon National Guard for deployment in Portland, Oregon, to participate in civilian law enforcement.”It was a magnificent “whole of society” response to authoritarian bullying. Trump looked unhinged and clueless. In one of the most revelatory comments he has ever made, Trump asked, “Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?” Well, if he is watching footage of disturbances from five year ago running on MAGA media, he sure is.All told, from a courtroom in Boston to an auditorium in Quantico to Portland, undaunted, unbowed, and unapologetic patriots took up the fight to preserve democracy. We take confidence in knowing that while MAGA fanatics plot to destroy the republic, much larger legions of courageous, principled, and astute pro-democracy voices remain loud and determined.New York Times,The Jobs Report That Wasn’t Leaves Economists Guessing, Lydia DePillis, Oct. 3, 2025. Policymakers have entered uncharted territory without employment data that the government withheld because of its shutdown.Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics produces the most reliable gauge of U.S. employment. But close watchers of the economy were left rudderless when the bureau withheld the data on Friday because of the federal government shutdown.The agency’s measurements of wage growth, unemployment and job creation guide investors allocating capital and monetary policymakers deciding whether the economy needs a boost.Without the data, the outlook is foggy as hazards abound, so businesses could be even less willing to make decisions about the future.“In this environment, the risk of slower growth stems from reduced visibility into the economy in an already uncertain period, and less so from the shutdown itself,” wrote Mike Reid, a U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets, in a note to clients.The numbers are not likely to be released until the government reopens, but right now the forecast for employment growth is muted. Economists polled by Bloomberg expected that employers added 53,000 jobs last month, fewer than the 64,000 added on average over the six previous months, before revisions. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimated that the unemployment rate remained at 4.3 percent.Other labor market indicators generated by the private sector have been downbeat. The payroll processor ADP estimated that nongovernmental employers shed 32,000 jobs in September, while the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that companies’ announced hiring plans so far this year were at the lowest level since 2009.“Labor market weakness is evident and it’s accelerating, and what counts as a good jobs report is going to increasingly get revised down,” said Andrew Flowers, chief economist at Appcast, a recruiting technology firm. “The main driver of that is labor supply contracting, particularly with immigration restrictions. But there’s also evidence that demand is also weakening.”Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, sent a letter on Thursday calling on the Labor Department to release the data despite the shutdown. According to William Beach, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the monthly survey was collected and processed this week.Shutdown or not, the government has already canceled some data collection, such as an annual survey of food security and another on farmworker wages, that will obscure understanding of America’s economic health.New York Times,Government Shutdown Live Updates: Senate to Return for Votes as Spending Deadlock Reaches 3rd Day, Christina Morales, Oct. 3, 2025. The Senate was set to vote on advancing bills that need to pass for the government to reopen. President Trump mocked Democrats in social media posts, adding to the partisan conflict.The Senate was set to reconvene Friday as a federal shutdown entered a third day and seemed likely to extend into next week, with neither side showing signs of backing down from a partisan impasse over federal spending.The Senate was planning to vote on procedural motions to advance the spending bills that need to pass for the government to reopen. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said that he was planning to send senators home for the weekend if Democrats again moved to block the G.O.P. stopgap spending bill.Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Thune said: “They’ll have a fourth chance tomorrow to vote to open up the government, and if that fails, we’ll give them the weekend to think about it, and we’ll come back and vote on Monday.”President Trump and congressional Republicans continued to perpetuate the false claim that Democrats shut down the government because they want to extend federal health coverage to undocumented immigrants. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said the subject barely came up in an Oval Office meeting earlier this week.“We met for over an hour, and probably Republicans spent less than 10 seconds on this fake issue related to undocumented immigrants and health care,” he said.Mr. Trump also seemed to further inflame the conflict late Thursday night, mocking and demeaning Democrats and their leaders in a series of social media posts.Here’s what else to know:
- Maximizing pain: Mr. Trump’s planned meeting on agency cuts was part of a strategy to maximize the pain of the shutdown and target political foes. The White House was also readying a plan to potentially lay off droves of civil servants. The administration also paused or moved to cancel billions of dollars in approved funds, including more than $7.5 billion in awards terminated by the Energy Department, mostly for projects in states with Democratic governors and senators.
- Dueling plans: Unlike many past shutdown stalemates, the current fight is not over any policy provision or funding item that the G.O.P. included in its spending plan. Instead, Democrats are demanding that Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the presidency, negotiate on those terms before they agree to lend their votes to a bill needed to reopen the government.
- Jobs report: The Bureau of Labor Statistics withheld data from the monthly jobs report because of the shutdown.
- Out-of-office emails: Furloughed workers at the Department of Education found out that their out-of-office email messages had been changed without their knowledge to include partisan language that blamed the government shutdown on “Democrat Senators.”
Global NewsLev Remembers,Nuclear Crisis: Europe’s Largest Nuclear Plant in Blackout — Meltdown Risk Rising, Lev Parnas, Oct. 3, 2025. The continent’s largest nuclear plant has lost all external power — pushing Ukraine and Europe to the edge of disaster.A silent and growing danger is unfolding before our eyes. It is not a distant problem or a hypothetical scenario. It is immediate, real, and potentially catastrophic. For over a week, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant — Zaporizhzhia (ZNPP) — has been cut off from external power, forced to rely on fragile diesel backup generators to keep its reactors cool and its safety systems alive. At the same time, Chornobyl — the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster — has again gone dark after Russian strikes. These are not accidents. They are deliberate acts of sabotage and escalation designed to hold an entire continent hostage to the threat of radiation.SubscribedThis is now the tenth time Zaporizhzhia has been disconnected from external power since Russia seized it. The reactors are in “cold shutdown,” but without constant cooling and electricity, the danger remains. Diesel backup generators were never meant to run for weeks at a time under wartime stress. Fuel is limited. Water in the cooling pond is dropping. At 13.4 meters now, it is closing in on the critical threshold of 12 meters, below which cooling could fail.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has already warned that six of its seven safety pillars at the plant are compromised. Staff rotations, security, and logistics are unstable. This is what a slow-motion nuclear crisis looks like.The same pattern is playing out at Chornobyl. Russian strikes on the workers’ city of Slavutych cut off power to the New Safe Confinement, the steel shield built to contain the radioactive remains of Reactor 4. For hours, one of the most dangerous sites on the planet had no external power. Ukraine scrambled to restore it — but this is proof that Russia is using nuclear fear as a weapon.President Zelensky has warned that Russia is deliberately creating nuclear threats, exploiting the weakness of international agencies and the world’s fragmented attention. New York Times,Partisan Language Inserted Into Education Dept. Workers’ Automated Emails, Eileen Sullivan and Michael C. Bender, Oct. 3, 2025 (print ed.).The out-of-office responses from the accounts of employees on furlough cast blame for the shutdown on Democrats.Some furloughed workers at the Department of Education expressed shock on Thursday to find that their out-of-office email messages had been changed without their knowledge to reflect the Trump administration’s view that the government shutdown was the fault of “Democrat Senators.”“Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations,” the emails said. “Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.”One Education Department employee, who like another worker interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they wanted to change the language but worried that logging into the system might violate a federal law that prohibits furloughed employees from working.The language apparently inserted into the emails, which the system automatically sends in response to incoming correspondence, echoes messages plastered on a number of government websites and social media accounts since the government ceased most operations on Wednesday. Congress has been unable to agree on how to fund the government, and congressional Democrats refuse to agree to a spending plan that does not restore funding for Medicaid and extend health insurance subsidies.Some agencies updated their websites on Wednesday with boldface messages announcing the shutdown and laying the blame on Democrats. In some cases they referenced the “radical left,” echoing Republican talking points. Notably, the Education Department’s website has not been among those casting blame on Democrats.Multiple agencies directed federal workers to include similarly partisan language in their out-of-office email responses notifying senders that they would not be able to write back until the government reopened.But the language inserted into the Education Department staff responses appeared to be the first example of the administration overriding an employee’s automatic reply.In response to a request for comment, an automatic reply from an Education Department spokeswoman, Madi Biedermann, did not include the politically charged language. Instead, it read, “Thank you for your email. There is a temporary shutdown of the U.S. government due to a lapse in appropriations.”About an hour later, Ms. Biedermann sent another response referencing the continuing resolution that would have funded the government: “The email reminds those who reach out to Department of Education employees that we cannot respond because Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a clean C.R. and fund the government. Where’s the lie?”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said he had heard from constituents who were outraged that partisan rhetoric was being foisted onto government agencies.New York Times,Trump Offered Universities an Invitation for a Deal. Some See a Trap, Anemona Hartocollis, Michael C. Bender and Alan Blinder, Updated Oct. 3, 2025. Trump officials want universities to sign on to conservative priorities to get special treatment. Some in higher education say agreeing would end academic freedom.The Trump administration promised a select set of universities what the government said would be a great deal.In exchange for agreeing to a list of demands, like limiting international students and protecting conservative voices, universities would get a leg up on grants, potentially beating out the competition for billions in federal funds.At least one institution, the University of Texas, said it would be eager to sign up.But to others in higher education, the Trump administration’s latest effort to use federal funding as leverage to push universities to conform to its own political policy agenda has provoked outrage.They see it as another threat against their independence as the government attacks higher education over what it perceives as endemic liberal bias, and as a remarkable push to grab power for the executive branch.“This is a real inflection point,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.Under the compact, a mix of nine public and private universities would receive favorable terms for government aid if they agreed to conditions like banning consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, capping international undergraduate enrollment, requiring that applicants pass admissions examinations and suppressing grade inflation. Universities with large endowments would be asked to waive tuition for students interested in the hard sciences.While some of the ideas might be broadly embraced, like tamping down tuition increases, Dr. Zimmerman said, he was troubled by the idea that the federal government would be telling universities how to do it.“The parts of the order that drive me crazy are the ones that I actually agree with, like we should have ideological diversity, we shouldn’t stigmatize conservative thought — I’m down with all that,” Dr. Zimmerman said. “Keeping tuition down — that seems fine, in fact laudable. But the federal government being the determinant of that is terrifying.”The institutions approached by the administration included the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia. Most would not say Thursday whether they would agree to the terms.But within hours of the Trump administration’s offer, the compact was inflaming divisions in higher education.The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, said the requirement that universities monitor the speech of employees could violate the First Amendment.“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow,” Tyler Coward, FIRE’s lead counsel for government affairs, said in a statement. “That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”And the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, which represent faculty members, argued that the government’s demands on universities were hypocritical.“They would reward campuses that toe the party line and punish those that cherish their independence,” a statement from the groups read. “In doing so, it would commit the very viewpoint discrimination it claims to redress.”They referred to the compact as a “loyalty oath.”And the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, a vocal political enemy of the president, vowed to strip state funding from any California university that signed on to the deal, saying in a statement Thursday that “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”In contrast, Kevin Eltife, the chairman of the Board of Regents for the University of Texas, said the proposal appeared to complement Republican policies in the state of Texas.“Higher education has been at a crossroads in recent years,” he said in a statement, noting that Texas leaders had implemented “sweeping changes for the benefit of our students and to strengthen our institutions to best serve the people of Texas.”Some of those changes include banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices on every state university campus and strengthening the influence of the regents, who are appointed by the governor.Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, said the document seemed to him like a naked exercise of power, lacking internal coherence. He said that if institutions agreed to the compact, it would set “a horrible precedent to cede power to the federal government.”The compact is part of an emerging trend inside the administration to skirt traditional lawmaking and government spending protocols in Washington.Instead of negotiating with Congress to overhaul federal policy, the administration has increasingly reached out directly to institutions and school systems, seeking their sign-off on pledges to adopt portions of the Trump administration’s agenda — often under the threat of losing federal funding.In April, the Education Department ordered local school officials to sign pledges attesting that they had eliminated all programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which the administration has argued unfairly discriminate against white Americans.That move was blocked by Judge Landya B. McCafferty of the Federal District Court in New Hampshire, who ruled that the government had failed to adequately define “diversity, equity and inclusion.” She also said the policy threatened to restrict free speech in the classroom and overstepped the executive branch’s legal authority over local schools.The administration has also used signed pledges to prioritize funding for groups to develop or expand artificial intelligence courses and certification programs.Dr. Zimmerman argued that the compact was another example of a split screen in the Trump administration’s priorities. Government officials are on the one hand seeking to reduce federal power over education by gutting the Department of Education, while “at the same time they’ve been orchestrating an unprecedented centralization of power.”New York Times,Duke Was Paring Back Diversity Programs. Trump Targeted It Anyway, Vimal Patel, Oct. 3, 2025. Duke University kept a low profile. But it is the alma mater of Stephen Miller, a top Trump official who often criticized the school while he was a student.The Trump administration had for months been expanding its nationwide attack on higher education. But Duke still made for an odd target.Leaders of the school, North Carolina’s largest private university, embraced a stealth strategy as other elite colleges fell into the Trump administration’s cross hairs, avoiding showy standoffs with the government for interfering in academic affairs. The campus is a relatively conservative place, protests over the war in Gaza were muted and it had begun dialing back some diversity efforts.The Trump administration came for it anyway.In late July, Trump officials announced they would investigate Duke over the criteria its student-run law journal used to select editors. They also accused the university’s health system of “systematic racial discrimination,” without citing any specific incident.Duke’s turn on the hot seat provides a window into how the administration’s priorities broadened in recent months, from a focus on antisemitism to efforts to stamping out diversity measures.It also highlights how the administration has sown confusion and fear in higher education as it chooses its targets — and its favorites.Even as the administration has picked out one set of elite institutions it disfavors for drastic funding reductions, it asked others this week to sign a compact agreeing to certain demands in return for preferential treatment.The schools picked for punishment or favor can seem to have little in common. But while the choice of one school over another may seem haphazard, Duke’s case in particular has raised concerns among the president’s critics that the administration’s politics are often personal.Why Duke?Some at Duke’s sprawling Gothic campus in Durham speculate that Stephen Miller, President Trump’s confidante, played a role in earmarking the school for funding cuts.Mr. Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Duke in 2007. Now, he oversees the White House policy operation, and no significant measure emerges from the West Wing without his awareness, input or direction, including a federal investigation into his alma mater. Two senior administration officials, however, said Mr. Miller was not the driving force behind the investigation.But Mr. Miller has been interested in details, the officials said, and his own critiques of Duke are nearly two decades in the making. A former columnist at the school’s student newspaper, he was president of the university’s chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a conservative-leaning group. In his writings, he frequently decried political correctness and criticized his school for its “monolithic academic environment.”Oct. 2News RoundupLetters from an American,Historical Commentary: Oct. 1, 2025 [Fake News From Who?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 2, 2025. Last night, as the government barreled toward a shutdown, President Donald J. Trump posted yet another doctored video on social media.This one showed House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reacting to Trump’s deepfake video of September 29 that faked Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) attacking Democrats and racial minorities and showed Jeffries sporting a Mexican sombrero and waxed mustache while Mexican music played.On September 29, Jeffries told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell: “It’s a disgusting video and we’re going to continue to make clear: bigotry will get you nowhere. We are fighting to protect the healthcare of the Americanpeople in the face of an unprecedented Republican assault.”Trump’s video from last night replayed Jeffries’s statement up to “bigotry will get you nowhere.” Then four images of Trump, each wearing a sombrero and playing an instrument in a mariachi band, popped up behind Jeffries, whose image suddenly had a sombrero and a mustache again.The president does not appear to be taking the government shutdown very seriously.Republicans are though: not to resolve it, but to use it to attack Democrats. Republicans control the Senate and could end the filibuster for the continuing resolution that would fund the government, thus enabling them to pass it through the Senate with a simple majority if they wanted to. Instead, they want Democratic votes for it, evidently wanting to make sure Republicans alone do not take the blame for their budget reconciliation bill of July as its deeply unpopular measures are becoming clear.That measure cut Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits as well as a slew of other programs. While it extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, Republicans permitted the premium tax credit for purchasing health insurance under the Affordable Healthcare Act to lapse at the end of this year. The end of that program is already sending healthcare insurance premiums skyrocketing.Democrats say they will not agree to a continuing resolution to fund the government until the premium tax credits are extended past their end date of 2025. Republicans want to force Democrats to abandon this demand, thus getting at least a semblance of a buy-in to the dramatic cuts that are already hitting Americans hard.Administration officials are making sure the shutdown doesn’t affect their own priorities. They have prioritized the $20 billion bailout of Argentina’s failing economy as essential, so it will proceed.The bailout will help right-wing leader Javier Milei, a Trump ally. Judd Legum, right, of Popular Information reported Mondaythat the bailout will also help billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, an associate of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, shown below, who has invested heavily in Argentine companies and in Argentine debt.The White House says construction of Trump’s ballroom in place of the East Wing of the White House will also continue during the shutdown.Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought has weaponized the shutdown by continuing his illegal impoundments of congressionally approved funding, but this time using them solely against states with Democratic senators. Today he said he is canceling $8 billion in funding for programs that he claims “fuel the Left’s climate agenda.” “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA,” Vought posted on social media. Amelia Benavides-Colón of NOTUS reports that states have not yet been notified of the plan.Vought also announced on social media: “Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” He said he was referring to funding for the Hudson River Tunnel Project known as Gateway, and the Second Avenue Subway project.The publication of a new document today shows that the administration has launched another power grab, this one in foreign affairs. On September 29, Trump signed an executive order giving to Qatar security guarantees that are much like those guaranteed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).The order says: “The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States. In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”An executive order is not a treaty and can be overturned by another president, but the declaration of a military commitment to a foreign nation without ratification by the Senate as the Constitution requires shows the belief of administration officials that they can act as they wish without consulting Congress.The agreement appeared to come to pass during the Monday visit of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, and likely reflects Qatar’s demand for a guarantee that Israel’s recent strike on Qatar would not be repeated. But the deal shows just how ill advised Trump’s illegal demand for, and then receipt of, a $400 million luxury 747-8 from Qatar turned out to be, for now it certainly looks as if Qatar received U.S. military commitments in exchange for a used plane.Usually, administrations asserting authoritarian power make gains because they are popular. The Trump administration, though, is neither popular nor likely to become more popular as its policies hurt ordinary Americans.Today the National Employment Report of the payroll processing company ADP said that the U.S. lost 32,000 jobs in the private sector in September. The ADP National Employment Report measures the labor market based on weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees. ADP also revised August’s employment growth, which had been recorded as 54,000 jobs, down to a loss of 3,000.The independent ADP report has taken on additional significance since Trump has undermined the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In August he fired the commissioner of the BLS Erika McEntarfer, complaining that she had “RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” To replace her, he nominated right-wing economist E.J. Antoni, whose scholarship was not nearly as strong as his support for Trump. Then Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski of CNN uncovered a racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ Twitter account of Antoni’s.Today Trump withdrew Antoni’s nomination after Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska refused to meet with him, suggesting he could not be confirmed.Also today, Leonardo Garcia Venegas, an American citizen born in Florida but currently living in Baldwin, Alabama, and working in construction, filed a lawsuit against the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice and officials including Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The complaint says that “[t]wice in the past few months, federal immigration officers have raided…private construction sites…without a warrant, and detained Leo simply for being at work. Both times, Leo told the officers he was a citizen and showed them his REAL ID, an identification card issued only to citizens and lawful residents. But the officers still wouldn’t let him go.”“Once immigration officers are on a site,” the suit alleges, “they preemptively seize everybody they think looks undocumented. And they detain these workers indefinitely—even those who have a REAL ID—until the officers eventually check the legal status of the people they’ve detained. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes; sometimes it takes days.”On September 8, in a case that permits Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use racial profiling, Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that such profiling is acceptable because “[i]f the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” In practice, though, reports of abuses have become so commonplace that such encounters have been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops.”lThe suit lists similar detentions of U.S. citizens, for example:“Jorge Luis Hernández Viramontes, a U.S. citizen, was arrested while working at a carwash. Immigration agents took him to a nearby warehouse for questioning even though he had shown them his state-issued identification.”“Javier Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed during a workplace raid at a tow yard where he worked despite screaming, ‘I have my passport! I have my ID! I’m a U.S. citizen!’”“Jonathan Guerrero, a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed at gunpoint by immigration officers while working at a car wash in his hometown.”“Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was detained after he handed out his resume at a Jiffy Lube and put in the back of a van without the chance to tell the officers he’s a citizen. The officers drove Mr. Noriega around for four hours and then held him at a detention center for six more hours before someone checked his wallet and realized he was a citizen.”“Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen, was tackled by immigration officers on the sidewalk between her mom’s car and her office door.”“Hediberto Ramirez Perez was arrested during a workplace raid at a nutrition-bar factory despite carrying his employment-verification ID card; immigration officers told him, ‘We don’t care about that for the moment.’”Such detentions, the lawsuit alleges, violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Venegas hopes to make this a class action suit to stop the government from continuing its abusive policies.U.S. Military, Security — War Crimes? President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025, preceded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer who prefers to call himself “Secretary of War” instead of the congressionally mandated term “Secretary of Defense.” Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, VirginiaNew York Times,News analysis: ‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers, Helene Cooper, Oct. 2, 2025 (print ed.). The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.In the middle of Tuesday’s rambling speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, President Trump told hundreds of the country’s military commanders his latest thinking on where they should next set their sights.Not Poland, or Romania, or Estonia or Denmark, all NATO allies where Russian drones have in the past month violated airspace in a challenge to the alliance’s borders.The president chose San Francisco. Chicago. New York. Los Angeles.“We’re going to straighten that out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Mr. Trump told the generals, admirals and enlisted leaders, referring to what he has described as crime-filled urban hellscapes.“It’s a war from within,” he said.In that moment, the president again pitted himself against the wishes of the country’s founding fathers, historians and former military leaders say.Mr. Trump’s suggestion that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” is in tension with a core principle that the country’s armed services have long sought to preserve — that the military should be nonpartisan.This principle, with its deep roots in American democratic traditions, is meant to ensure that the standing army initially feared by the country’s founding fathers serves the nation as a whole, and not one political party or leader.That military was meant to be directed at foreign enemies, not the “enemy from within,” as Mr. Trump said on Tuesday.‘A Fraught Moment’Mr. Trump has tried this before.During Mr. Trump’s first term, Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper and the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Joseph Dunford, tried to prevent the president from using the military domestically to further his political agenda.When Mr. Trump demanded a deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 military troops to fend off what he called a migrant “invasion” at the southwest border, Mr. Mattis responded by sending 6,000 National Guardsmen, and told them to make sure to stick to support roles and to steer clear of migrants.When Mr. Trump wanted to send the 82nd Airborne onto the country’s streets during social justice protests, Mr. Esper called a news conference to announce his opposition, for which he was eventually fired.Those men are now gone, and the men Mr. Trump has installed in their place in his second term have either amplified his wishes or bowed to them.Gone too is the congressional opposition that blocked Mr. Trump during his first term. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and have acquiesced to all of Mr. Trump’s directives and appointments that relate to the American military.The result: National Guard troops deployed in Washington against the wishes of the city’s elected leaders. Active-duty Marines sent to Los Angeles over the protests of the mayor and governor. Books by writers of color, including Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” banned from the library at the U.S. Naval Academy. A Pentagon leadership that refuses to promote decorated combat soldiers who served under men Mr. Trump dislikes. A plan to use military lawyers, known as JAGs, as immigration judges. And Mr. Trump’s promises to send National Guard troops to more American cities.New York Times,Ophelia Disappeared: A Wall Street Analyst and a Deadly Shootout, Shaila Dewan, Oct. 2, 2025. The group was passionately vegan, mostly transgender and highly educated. Seven of them are now in jail. This is the story of one who did not survive.A 10-year-old blue Toyota Prius was rocketing through northern Vermont on the afternoon of Jan. 20 when a U.S. Border Patrol agent pulled it over for an immigration inspection.Law enforcement officers had been watching the two people inside the car for the better part of a week, since a hotel employee reported that they were armed and dressed in tactical gear. Shortly before the Prius was stopped, officers watched them buy aluminum foil at a Walmart and wrap it around their phones.Now, on a stretch of highway flanked by snow-crusted ground and hardwood forest, one of the agents asked them to get out of the car.There seemed little explanation for what happened next. The driver of the Prius was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. The passenger, a German national, had an H-1B visa, reserved for highly skilled workers. Items found in the car might have suggested a dark purpose, but were not illicit: a ballistic helmet, a night-vision monocular, full-face respirators and hollow-point ammunition.Yet without warning, according to an F.B.I. affidavit, the driver drew a Glock pistol and opened fire. A Border Patrol agent fired back. The passenger also reached for a gun, according to an incident summary by the Border Patrol. The agent ordered the passenger to stop. The demand was ignored, and the agent shot at the passenger, too, the summary said.The driver went down, struck in the arm and the leg. The passenger, hit twice in the chest, died at the scene. A Border Patrol agent took a bullet in the neck. He was rushed to the hospital, but did not survive.ImageLaw enforcement vehicles blocking Interstate 91 where snow is covering the ground.Law enforcement vehicles blocking Interstate 91 a day after an agent was shot and killed on the highway in Coventry, Vt.Credit…Carlos Osorio/ReutersThe driver was identified as Teresa Youngblut, 21, a University of Washington computer science student who had been reported missing by her parents eight months earlier. Prosecutors have cited her “associations with individuals suspected of violent acts,” namely the shooting deaths of an older couple in their suburban Philadelphia home in 2023 and the fatal stabbing of an 82-year-old man who was to be the central witness in a trial in California.Eight months later, state and federal law enforcement officials are still trying to piece together a bizarre saga involving the deaths of six people in three states. Seven members of a group that was passionately vegan, mostly transgender, highly educated and following a charismatic and confessional blogger who called herself Ziz are now in jail, awaiting trial on charges ranging from trespass to murder. As the death count mounted, the story of what some news reports called a “murder cult” attracted national attention.The Zizians, as they became known, were a contentious faction within a tech-heavy subculture known as the Rationalists, who are preoccupied with the dangers of artificial intelligence. The Zizians believed that veganism was essential to preventing an A.I. doomsday, and that the Rationalist establishment was hypocritical and covering up abuse and corruption.But the passenger in the Prius that January day did not share the Zizians’ most outlandish beliefs or outsider status. A transgender woman known as Ophelia Bauckholt, she was a 28-year-old, highly paid analyst at a Manhattan trading firm, balancing a brimming social life with a devotion to helping vulnerable people. Her many friends have puzzled over the persistent mystery of how and why she vanished from New York City and, more than a year later, ended up dead on Interstate 91.“Her life was clearly falling apart. She was really stressed, and she didn’t tell anyone about what was going on, and then she disappeared,” said Astra Kolomatskaia, a close friend. “So the story kind of cuts off there.”Transcranial magnetic stimulationMs. Bauckholt arrived in New York City in 2021 for a new job that friends said paid at least $500,000 a year. Brilliant and frolicsome, she plunged into the city’s Rationalist scene, usually accompanied by an entourage of other trans women. She socked away money to give to charity, living on a tenth of her income.New York Times,Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, Oct. 2, 2025. A notice calls the people the U.S. military recently killed on suspicion of drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea “unlawful combatants.”President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all 17 people aboard them, should be seen as lawful rather than murder.Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” — the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes — against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different than an armed attack.Noting that it is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals — Mr. Corn called the president’s move an “abuse” that crossed a major legal line.“This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”The White House did not respond to a request for comment.The Trump administration had called those strikes self-defense, asserting that the targets were smuggling drugs for cartels that the administration has designated as terrorists and invoking the laws of war to justify killing them rather arresting them. The administration has also stressed that about 100,000 Americans annually die from overdoses.However, the focus of the administration’s attacks has been boats from Venezuela. The surge of overdose deaths in recent years has been driven by fentanyl that drug trafficking experts say comes from Mexico, not South America. Beyond factual issues, the bare-bones argument has been broadly criticized on legal grounds by specialists in armed-conflict law.The notice to Congress, which was deemed controlled but unclassified information, cites a statute requiring reports to lawmakers about hostilities involving U.S. armed forces. It repeats the administration’s earlier arguments but also goes further with new claims, including portraying the U.S. military’s attacks on boats to be part of a sustained, active conflict rather than isolated acts of claimed self-defense.Specifically, it says that Mr. Trump has “determined” that cartels engaged in smuggling drugs are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.” And it cites a term from international law — a “noninternational armed conflict” — that refers to a war with a nonstate actor.CBS News, Head of Eisenhower library resigns after sword spat with Trump administration, Gabrielle Ake, Oct. 2, 2025. The head of a presidential library resigned this week after a tug-of-war with the Trump administration over gift selection and a sword for King Charles III, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.Todd Arrington, a career historian who previously held posts with the National Park Service and National Archives and Records Administration, stepped down on Monday as director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home.Sources said Arrington’s departure came after he resisted taking an original Eisenhower sword out of the library’s collection to give to King Charles last month during President Trump’s unprecedented second state visit to the United Kingdom.Four U.S. officials involved in the lavish royal visit were unaware that the library director had left his job, and said the White House played no role in his exit. UK Hosts President Trump And First Lady Melania Trump For State Visit – Day TwoKing Charles III and President Trump inspect the Guard of Honor during the State visit by the President of the United States of America at Windsor Castle, Sept. 17, 2025, in Windsor, England. Anna Moneymaker / Getty ImagesIn a statement last month, Buckingham Palace didn’t specify which sword was given to the monarch, but noted that Charles was given a replica, saying the gift “symbolizes profound respect and is a reminder of the historical partnership that was critical to winning World War II.”A former Army general, Eisenhower, right, possessed several swords, including a Sword of Honor given to him in 1947 by the city of London for his role as allied supreme commander during World War II, an honor saber gifted to him by the Netherlands in 1947, and his West Point officer saber.It is not clear who specifically requested the sword. First lady Melania Trump personally decided which gifts to give Queen Camilla, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and their children, a senior administration official said.Officials at the State Department who compiled an array of gift options for the first couple, sought an Eisenhower sword to reiterate the significance of the U.S.-U.K. relationship since World War II, sources said. But Arrington argued against giving away an artifact that had been accepted as a donation and had become the property of the American people.Arrington told officials he could help find an alternative gift, but sources say State Department officials persisted. The library’s team offered to help find a replica.Ultimately, West Point provided a Cadet Saber from the military academy.Some in the Trump administration were unhappy with Arrington, sources said.Arrington didn’t respond to an email from CBS News seeking comment. NARA didn’t reply to requests for comment, nor did the Eisenhower library, but both entities began operating Wednesday with limited staffing due to the shutdown of the federal government.Two sources close to the matter said no one said anything to Arrington about being upset about not being able to have a museum piece — the conversations before the U.K. trip about finding a substitute for the real sword were polite and tension-free.One administration official said Arrington was believed to have spoken critically about the president and the administration.The White House plays no formal role in hiring or firing directors of presidential libraries that are part of the National Archives system. The duty of hiring library directors falls instead to the archivist of the United States, who oversees NARA. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is serving as acting archivist, and James Byron, a senior adviser to the archivist, is running day-to-day operations for NARA.Arrington started in August 2024 as director of the Eisenhower library, in Abilene, Kansas, one of 16 presidential libraries or museums operated by NARA, including those that will be built for Mr. Trump and former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The president’s son, Eric Trump, announced this week their family plans to one day construct the Trump library and museum in Miami.More On U.S. Governance, Politics Politico,Hegseth fires top Navy official, Daniel Lippman, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Oct. 2, 2025. Jon Harrison is the latest Pentagon official who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has removed from office.Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth on Friday fired Navy chief of staff Jon Harrison, an unusually powerful top aide who had orchestrated a reshuffle of the service’s bureaucracy.The sudden ouster, according to two defense officials and a former defense official, follows the confirmation this week of Navy Undersecretary Hung Cao.The Pentagon, in a statement, confirmed Harrison’s departure. “He will no longer serve as Chief of Staff to the Secretary of the Navy,” it said. “We are grateful for his service to the Department.”Harrison declined to comment.The Navy secretary’s chief of staff has traditionally been a behind-the-scenes job, the senior aide who keeps everything moving smoothly. But Harrison, a Trump administration appointee who joined the service in January, had a rare level of power.Harrison and Navy Secretary John Phelan had introduced sweeping changes to the Navy’s policy and budgeting offices and sought to limit the influence of the undersecretary job.POLITICO previously reported that Phelan and Harrison had reassigned several aides who were supposed to help Cao navigate the role once he’s confirmed. They had also planned to interview all future military assistants for Cao to ensure decisions came from the secretary’s office.Cao is a high-profile Navy veteran and former Republican Senate candidate in Virginia who President Donald Trump nominated for the post.The ouster follows months of musical chairs inside the Pentagon. Hegseth fired several top aides earlier this year and removed the chair of the Joint Chiefs, as well as the uniformed leaders of the Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard.Trump has vowed to revive the shipbuilding industry. But the service’s biggest programs are years behind schedule and both America’s allies and its largest adversaries are surpassing the productivity of U.S. shipyards. The Bulwark Morning Shots,Political Opinion: Trump’s ‘Shoot the Hostage’ Shutdown Strategy, Andrew Egger, Oct. 2, 2025. The White House’s 3D-chess move: crushing the economy to own the libs. Donald Trump’s shutdown strategy: Inflicting maximum economic pain on blue states, without much thought for who it actually hurts. This morning, we woke up to news of a stabbing at a synagogue in Manchester, England, killing at least two on this holiest day of the year for Jews. It is yet another reminder that houses of worship are increasingly targets of violence. Let’s all collectively pray, regardless of our individual faith, that this comes to an end. Happy Thursday.In theory, Donald Trump and his Republicans are the ones holding the cards in this current government shutdown fight. Democrats had plenty of good reasons to withhold their votes for a government funding bill.¹ But it’s always risky being the party that directly provokes a shutdown. Unless you can convince the public that your policy priorities—in this case, renewing expiring health care subsidies—are worth playing hardball, you’re likely to take the blame. And that job is harder when you’re hopelessly outgunned in the realm of industrial-strength Ministry-of-Truth propaganda.Then there’s the other problem facing Democrats: They and their constituents will be feeling the shutdown pain more acutely than Trump and his. (Trump isn’t particularly bothered by the plight of federal workers—and he certainly doesn’t mind that, for instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics wasn’t able to release what was likely to be a third consecutive alarming jobs report yesterday.) In theory, all Trump has to do is play it slow and wait for Democrats to cave.But that’s not really his style, is it? Instead, Trump and his mooks are taking what you might call the “cartoon supervillain” shutdown approach. Yesterday morning, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, right, announced that the administration was freezing $18 billion in federal funding for two major New York City infrastructure works: the Hudson River Tunnel Project and the Second Avenue Subway project. The government was concerned, Vought said, that funding might be “flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”That’s right: The White House had suddenly decided—ten months into Trump’s term—that these contracts needed more Department of Transportation scrutiny. And, ah, wouldn’t you know it? That scrutiny can’t take place while the government is shut down. So Vought decided to put the whole thing on ice for the time being. Better safe than sorry—New Yorkers wouldn’t want a woke subway tunnel.It was a blatantly illegal and nakedly transparent attempt to put the screws on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fact Vice President JD Vance didn’t bother to hide during the White House press briefing yesterday. “I’m sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies,” the vice president smirked.And Vought wasn’t done. A few hours later, he had a new announcement to make: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” he tweeted. Of the 16 affected states he named, all voted for Kamala Harris last year and have Democratic senators.The heedlessness and shortsightedness here is staggering. Set aside the open, obscene partisanship, the loathsome fact that the White House seems to see inflicting economic pain on blue Americans as a worthwhile goal in itself. Although it’s worth wondering whether it will actually be blue America that suffers: The outer-borough blue-collar white guy has been a remarkably valuable voter for the GOP in recent years, handing Republicans a brace of New York congressional seats without which they would not hold the House majority today. Whoexactly does Vought think works construction jobs in the Big Apple, or in any of the rest of those blue states?³But it’s somehow stupider even than that. Keep in mind that all this is happening at a moment of remarkable economic precarity. The jobs data, rattled by tariff pain, looks more unsteady with each passing month; everyone from the chair of the Federal Reserve to the forecasters at Moody’s are warning of storm clouds on the economic horizon.And how does the White House respond to this moment? By firing potentially tens of thousands of federal workers and pulling the plug on a host of already funded and half-finished development projects, most notably in New York City, America’s biggest economic hub. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face—this is more like cutting off your arm.New York Times,Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference, Michael C. Bender, Oct. 2, 2025. The White House on Wednesday sent letters to nine of the nation’s top public and private universities, urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump’s political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds.The letters came attached to a 10-page “compact” that serves as a sort of priority statement for the administration’s educational goals — the most comprehensive accounting to date of what Mr. Trump aims to achieve from an unparalleled, monthslong pressure campaign on academia.The compact would require colleges to freeze tuition for five years, cap the enrollment of international students and commit to strict definitions of gender. Among other steps, universities would also be required to change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”Colleges that sign the agreement would receive “multiple positive benefits,” according to a letter included with the compact signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, right; Vince Haley, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; and May Mailman, the White House’s senior adviser for special projects.Colleges that agree would get priority access to federal funds and looser restraints on overhead costs. Signed compacts would also serve as assurance to the government that schools are complying with civil rights laws. Federal civil rights investigations have been used to halt much of the research funding that the administration has blocked so far this year.Letters on Wednesday were sent to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.The nine schools declined to comment or did not immediately respond to messages late on Wednesday.Ms. Mailman, who has orchestrated much of the administration’s higher education strategy, said the compact could ultimately be extended to all colleges and universities. She said the administration was open to hearing feedback about the compact from college leaders.“We hope all universities ultimately are able to have a conversation with us,” she said.The letters were sent as the White House was aiming to close a settlement with Harvard University, the only university to sue the administration over its pressure campaign. Mr. Trump on Tuesday said that a deal, which had been elusive as talks stalled, was close to being finalized. The Wall Street Journal first reported that the compact has been sent to schools.The administration has secured individual deals with schools to restore funding, requiring the universities to pay steep fines and effectively adopt new policies. And while there is some overlap in the agreements, the first round of deals has all stood on their own.The University of Pennsylvania agreed to align its athletic policies with the Trump administration’s beliefs about participation by transgender people. Brown University promised to provide a more granular level of student admissions data than is required by law.The so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is effectively a declaration of the administration’s political priorities for higher education.The first round of schools received the compact along with a letter that frames the pledge as an opportunity to proactively partner with the administration and its effort to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which the president and his team view as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.The demands in the compact also include providing free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other “hard sciences” if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate.“Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” the compact says.Demands sent to nine top schools included pledging to freeze tuition for five years and to commit to strict definitions of gender. Hedge fund manager Rob Citrone attends a charity dinner in New York City on November 15, 2022. (Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)Popular Information,Accountability Journalism: UPDATE: Hedge fund billionaire pressed Treasury Secretary for Argentina bailout, Argentine media reports, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 2, 2025. Rob Citrone, whose hedge fund bet big on Argentina, reportedly asked his friend for a rescue package. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered.On September 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion package to rescue the Argentinian economy. It was a dramatic move to bail out a country that has little economic impact on the United States. Argentine President Javier Milei is scheduled to meet President Trump at the White House later this month.On Monday, Popular Information revealed that the taxpayer-funded bailout had massive economic benefits for hedge fund billionaire Rob Citrone, a personal friend and former colleague of Bessent. Citrone’s fund, Discovery Capital, had bet heavily on Argentina, purchasing Argentine debt and equity in numerous companies closely tied to the country’s overall economy.Citrone’s investments reflected his belief that Milei’s right-wing economic program, which emphasizes deregulation and sharply reduced government spending, would revitalize the Argentine economy.That theory began to unravel as growth slowed, unemployment spiked, and Milei’s popularity tanked. This spring, Citrone reportedly urged Bessent to help Milei secure a separate $20 billion package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF funds began to arrive in April, but proved insufficient to turn the Argentine economy around.Concerns turned into panic after Milei’s party was routed in the Buenos Aires provincial election in early September, fueling fears that Milei would soon lose control of the economic agenda. Investors began dumping the peso and liquidating other Argentine assets, which spelled major trouble for Citrone’s hedge fund.Major Argentine media outlets are now reporting that Citrone asked Bessent for a United States rescue package. Ariel Maciel, Political Economy Editor at Perfil, a large Argentine media outlet, wrote that after the Buenos Aires elections, Citrone “returned to his friend and former colleague… to request a second bailout, this time from the very coffers Bessent manages: the US Treasury.”CE Noticias Financieras, a major wire service in Latin America, similarly reported that after Argentine officials ran into resistance with lower-level Trump officials, “Citrone managed to connect with Bessent to get him to intervene directly.”Maciel elaborated on his reporting during an appearance on Net TV, an Argentine broadcaster. “Citrone is really the one who intervenes. He basically tells Bessent, ‘Hey, we need to help in Argentina,’” Maciel said during the segment.Popular Information contacted Discovery Capital and asked if the reports that Citrone asked Bessent to bail out Argentina were accurate. Discovery Capital declined to comment.Maciel also noted that two weeks before Bessent announced the bailout, Citrone purchased additional bonds for “almost nothing.” Maciel said the timing of Citrone’s recent purchases has raised “suspicions” that Citrone had access to “confidential information.”New York Times,For Workers, Mixed Signals. For the Public, Limited Impact on Shutdown’s First Day, Eileen Sullivan, Updated Oct. 2, 2025. Federal agencies gave shifting and mixed guidance to their work forces about who should come to work and who shouldn’t, but the initial effect on services appeared scattered and limited.The first government shutdown in nearly seven years left federal agencies in flux and many of their employees in a state of confusion on Wednesday, as they received last-minute and conflicting instructions from managers.Even though the likelihood of a shutdown has been high for months, agencies were late to post their contingency plans compared with previous years, leaving employees and the public in the dark about what to expect. And internal guidance to work forces in some cases was not consistent with the official plans. Some employees who expected to be furloughed learned on Wednesday that they had to report to work.But despite the uncertainty inside the government, the initial ripple effects across the country were scattered and limited.There was no major disruption to air travel. The Internal Revenue Service answered calls from taxpayers. And federal agents arrested immigrants who showed up for routine court appearances in Lower Manhattan.But the impact was felt elsewhere. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta was closed, and visitors got a quick civic lesson: Presidential libraries are operated by the federal National Archives and Records Administration, which furloughed more than half of its staff.“We thought it was privately funded, or we would have come yesterday,” said Cindy Mobley, 64, of Baltimore. Ms. Mobley and her husband were in town visiting their son, a freshman at nearby Emory University.Not being able to visit the museum, Ms. Mobley said, “is a small price to pay if it leads to something better for all of our citizens.” She said she supported congressional Democrats who are refusing to agree to a spending plan that does not restore funding for Medicaid and extend health insurance subsidies.For Chris Hill, of New York, the first day of the shutdown brought an unprompted message from the Department of Veterans Affairs. He said he had been working with the agency to resolve a benefits issue regarding his late father and was surprised to see the message informing him that the government was shut down, noting that some agency services would not be available.The message also blamed Democrats for the shutdown, which Mr. Hill said also caught him by surprise.“It was such a political and one-sided message sent out by a department that is supposed to deal equally with veterans, regardless of their political opinions,” he said in an interview.Similar political responses have come from other agencies, marking what many believe to be the first time an administration has used the bureaucracy to deliver blatantly partisan messaging during a shutdown.Legal experts say doing so violates a federal law, the Hatch Act, designed to ensure that the federal work force operates free of political influence or coercion. And many federal workers expressed discomfort about being drawn into the political morass.New York Times,Fed’s Independence Remains at Risk Despite Temporary Legal Victory, Colby Smith, Oct. 2, 2025. A Supreme Court order keeping Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve Board for now is “a time to exhale but not breathe easy,” one expert said.Lisa Cook notched a temporary win in her legal battle against President Trump this week when the Supreme Court said she could remain a governor on the Federal Reserve Board.But the threat to the Fed’s longstanding independence will continue to loom large over the central bank for at least the next several months.The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her job while her lawsuit against Mr. Trump proceeds. The president, who has tried to gain more control over the Fed, tried to fire her over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud.Still, the decision — part of a two-sentence, unsigned order — fell short of a decisive victory for the central bank. Instead, the court agreed to wait to rule on Ms. Cook’s status until after it hears arguments on the matter in January.“It’s a time to exhale but not breathe easy,” said Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania. “The wrecking ball that the Trump administration has been wielding through the administrative state just hit a brick wall that it could not crumble.” Mr. Conti-Brown warned, however, that the issue was far from resolved.Mr. Trump has accused Ms. Cook of committing mortgage fraud, citing that as justification to fire her. Under the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the president can remove a Fed official only “for cause” — which has typically meant gross malfeasance or a neglect of duty while serving in the job. Congress put that safeguard in place to ensure that the Fed was protected from undue meddling by the president.Ms. Cook, who has not been charged with a crime, has argued that the Trump administration’s allegations are “flimsy” and “unproven.” She has also said Mr. Trump did not give her ample time to rebut them before he fired her.It is not the first time Mr. Trump has taken aim at the country’s independent agencies. But the order on Wednesday reaffirmed that the Supreme Court views the Fed as a distinct one.Earlier this year, the court granted the president the ability to remove leaders of independent institutions like the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board while the cases are being litigated. Mr. Trump fired Democratic officials from those two agencies purely because of policy differences, something previous court rulings barred.Jeremy Kress, a law professor at the University of Michigan who previously worked as a lawyer at the Fed, said the court’s move gave him more confidence that the justices would eventually side with Ms. Cook. Still, he cautioned against reading too much into what he described as an “unexplained procedural order.”Global NewsNew York Times,‘Enough Is Enough’: Many Palestinians Say Hamas Must Accept Cease-Fire Plan, Liam Stack, Oct. 2, 2025. Interviews in Gaza suggest wide support for a proposal that calls for an immediate end to a war that has brought immense civilian suffering.Palestinians in Gaza have spent almost two years longing for an end to the war that has destroyed their communities and killed tens of thousands of their neighbors. Many say their best hope yet is the latest cease-fire plan proposed by the United States — if only Hamas would accept it.“Hamas must say yes to this offer — we have been through hell already,” said Mahmoud Bolbol, 43, a construction worker who has remained in Gaza City with his six children in the battered shell of their home throughout the war.President Trump unveiled the proposal while meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House on Monday. Mr. Trump said that if Hamas did not accept its terms, then he would give Israel the green light to “finish the job” of destroying the armed group.Hamas has not yet given its response to the proposal, but interviews with Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday suggested widespread public support for the plan. It calls for an immediate end to a war that has brought immense civilian suffering.For the past two days, Mr. Bolbol said, his neighbors have talked about almost nothing but the cease-fire proposal. If Hamas rejects it, he said, his family would finally leave Gaza City and head for what he hoped would be the relative safety of the enclave’s south.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.“Hamas needs to understand: Enough is enough,” Mr. Bolbol said. Most Gazans are not members of the group, he added, “so why drag us into this?”New York Times,Live Updates: 2 Killed in Car Ramming and Stabbing Outside U.K. Synagogue, Police Say, Michael D. Shear and Lizzie Dearden, Oct. 2, 2025. The attack in Manchester, England, happened on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The police said the assailant died after being shot by officers.The attack occurred in an area of Manchester that is home to many Orthodox Jews and came at a time of heightened fears in the Jewish community as tensions persist over the two-year-old war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.More On U.S. Media, Religion, Education, Culture WarsThe Contrarian, Opinion: Self-Reflection Allows us to Do Better, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 2, 2025. Atoning for political errors, missteps, and sins. At sundown Wednesday, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, began. It provides an opportunity for reflection, repentance, and change. For defenders of democracy and the Democratic Party specifically (which is the only major national pro-democracy party), this is as good a time as any to take stock.The essential prayers for Jews on this climax of the High Holy Days are the Al Chet and the Ashamnu, acrostic prayers that alphabetically enumerate our collective sins. Going through the entire alphabet (in Hebrew, no less!) would be excessive, but working through the first part of the English alphabet can be instructive. U.S. Capitol in reflectionIn that spirit, let’s recognize, make amends for, and vow to avoid the following, when presented with opportunities to transgress the political sins of:Arrogance: Too many political insiders foolishly insist that all voters listen to politicians 24/7 (hence, they mistakenly assume a level of familiarity with political minutiae). Political elites convince themselves that talking points have saliency beyond hyper-political Americans, that ordinary Americans do not care about immigrants snatched off the streets (leading to anything less than full-throated criticism of ICE), that the most important leadership must emanate from Washington, D.C., and that “democracy under attack” is self-explanatory and motivating for average people.The antidote to arrogance involves listening to voters, speaking plainly, personalizing the results of Trump’s cruel and misguided actions (How many more dollars will tariffs cost you? What happens if Trump can indict or knock off the air any opponent?), and appealing to Americans’ common sense and innate sense of decency (e.g., it’s cruel and stupid to round up and deport grandmothers). Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is expert at this.Bullheadedness: Establishment politicians and stuffy insiders too often stick with political hacks rather than embrace effective reformers (whether candidates for the DNC chairman or the mayor of New York). They have failed to listen to the base (which is invariably far ahead of politicians). They have neglected to set the stage for substantial reform of the Supreme Court, which has become a partisan adjunct to the MAGA regime.The opposite of bullheadedness is pragmatism (choosing what works in practice, which leaders energize voters), humility, curiosity, and respect for a younger generation of leaders and effective voices outside the Beltway. Learning new habits means embracing new media, new platforms, and new expectations for authenticity. It requires discipline to, for example, cheer on lower courts that defend the rule of law but keep up withering criticism of the Supreme Court, which enables authoritarianism through its shadow docket.Caution/Complacency: It is time to end the ossification of the Democratic Party that comes from clinging to deadwood pols unsuited to 21st century politics. Enough with the false confidence that certain segments of the electorate can be taken for granted, the flawed assumption that ignoring issues like immigration or crime is better than coming up with better answers than Republicans are offering, and the fantasy that timidly splitting the difference on major issues has wide appeal. No more phony and stomach-turning courtesy extended to “distinguished colleagues” in Congress and a corrupt New York City mayor; no more naive reliance on legacy media to get the message out; and no more treating Trump like he is an ordinary president.The cure for excessive caution and complacency is experimentation, bold policy ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with voters (e.g., subsidized childcare, paid sick leave, a constitutional amendment to ban dark money), full embrace of alternatives to the legacy media, and support for aggressive reforms (e.g., term limits for the Supreme Court, banning crypto and individual stock trading for everyone in all three branches).SubscribedDistraction-itis: Too many political observers and insiders become convinced that everything is a distraction from something else (e.g., occupation of D.C. is a distraction from the Epstein files, which are a distraction from tariffs, which is a distraction from E. Jean Carroll’s ruling, which is a distraction from…). However, democracy defenders cannot shy away from confronting multiple, serious harms inflicted by a president who floods the field with abuses, cruelties, and lies.Rather than deciding which outrage is distracting from which other outrage, democracy defenders must prioritize our most urgent issues (e.g., mass deportation to El Salvador), as they arise without entirely abandoning other issues. Certainly, one cannot break through the noise by talking about everything all at once. That still means democracy advocates can highlight different things over the course of a week or month. Defense of democracy requires passionately opposing militarization of our streets and Trump’s grotesque corruption and weaponization of the criminal justice system.Ennui: It is easy to become depressed, fatigued, and defeatist in the Trump era. But we do not have that luxury. Democracy and our fellow Americans, especially the most vulnerable, depend on our resilience and fortitude. Falling prey to cynicism (all politicians are alike), pessimism (voters are permanently unreachable), and depression (I cannot do everything so therefore I will do nothing) emboldens authoritarians’ will.To counteract ennui, one must take time for joyful activities, family, and friends. Staying in the fight requires keeping up one’s mental and physical health and recharging periodically. Doing as much rather than worrying or doom-scrolling invariably buoys one’s spirits.Moreover, we must seek inspiration from immigrants struggling to keep their families together, from civil rights advocates working every day on behalf of the powerless, from families caring for loved ones with disabilities, from social workers looking after shut-ins, and from neighbors who unselfishly give time in their community.If they do not quit, we cannot either.For those observing Yom Kippur, I wish you an easy fast and g’mar tov (be sealed in the Book of Life).Oct. 1 A Republican leadership comprised of House Speaker Mike Johnson, center at the microphone, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, at left, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (center, behind Johnson), and Vice President J.D. Vance, right support President Trump’s stance on the government shutdown Sept. 30 at a news conference outside the White House following failed discussions with Democrat (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).New York Times,Shutdown Enters First Full Day With No Hint Either Side Will Give, Catie Edmondson, Updated Oct. 1, 2025. Government funding was cut off shortly after midnight in a spending deadlock that could cut essential services and lead to mass layoffs.The government shut down on Wednesday morning at 12:01 a.m., amid a bitter spending deadlock between President Trump and Democrats in Congress that will disrupt federal services and leave many federal workers furloughed.It was the first federal shutdown since 2019, when parts of the government were shuttered for 35 days in a standoff between congressional Democrats and Mr. Trump over the president’s demand to fund a wall at the southern border.This time, the dispute is over Democrats’ demand that the president agree to extend expiring health care subsidies and restore Medicaid cuts enacted over the summer as part of Mr. Trump’s marquee tax cut and domestic policy law.The shutdown became all but inevitable on Tuesday night after Senate Democrats voted just hours before a midnight deadline to block Republicans’ plan to keep federal funding flowing.In back-to-back Senate votes that reflected how acrimonious the funding dispute has become, each party blocked the other’s stopgap spending proposal, just as they had earlier in the month.On a 55-to-45 vote, the G.O.P. plan, which would extend funding through Nov. 21, fell short of the 60 needed for passage. Republicans also blocked Democrats’ plan, which would extend funding through the end of October and add more than $1 trillion in health care spending, in a 47-to-53 vote.Shortly afterward, Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, directed agencies in a memo to “execute their plans for an orderly shutdown.”Senate Republican leaders held the votes as a part of what they promised would be a daily effort to force Democrats to go on the record against extending government funding.“The Democrats’ far-left base and far-left senators have demanded a showdown with the president,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader. “And the Democrat leaders have bowed to their demands. And apparently, the American people just have to suffer the consequences.”Democrats said they were resolute in their determination to continue the standoff until Republicans relented to their demands, which include the extension of Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, as well as the reversal of cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans included in the tax cut legislation.“If the president were smart, he’d move heaven and earth to fix this health care crisis right away, because Americans are going to hold him responsible when they start paying $400, $500, $600 a month more on their health insurance,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader. “We have less than a day. If there was ever a moment for Donald Trump and Republicans to get serious about health care, it is now.” President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025, preceded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer who prefers to call himself “Secretary of War” instead of the congressionally mandated term “Secretary of Defense.” Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, VirginiaPopular Information,Accountability Journalism: Trump declares war on America, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims, Oct. 1, 2025. “It’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”In a speech before an unprecedented gathering of hundreds of the nation’s top military commanders, President Trump declared war on major American cities.We have many cities in great shape, too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.He also singled out Portland, Oregon, which Trump said was so overrun with crime and chaos that it “looked like World War II.”Trump criticized restrictions on the use of force by the National Guard and other military personnel on U.S. soil. Trump said he has removed those restrictions and, from now on, “they spit, we hit.” He praised members of the military for “pounding” gangs of “kids” in Washington, D.C.Trump said he told Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He highlighted that he “signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances.” Trump said deployments in U.S. cities are “going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”The phrase “enemy from within” has an ugly history. It was famously used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in a 1950 speech: “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.” (McCarthy attributed the quote to “one of our outstanding historical figures,” but that claim appears to be apocryphal.) McCarthy used the concept of the “enemy within” to justify the trampling of civil rights and academic freedom. Earlier, the Ottoman Empire used the concept of the “enemy within“ to rationalize the Armenian genocide.Not only is Trump’s rhetoric disturbing, but his claims about crime trends in American cities are objectively false. He is using this misinformation to justify deploying the military in a manner that is antithetical to American democracy.The facts about crime in American citiesThe reality is that crime is down in many major cities across America. In some cities, crime is at historic lows.In Los Angeles, for example, murders were down 14% in 2024 compared to 2023. Victims shot also decreased by around 19% in 2024. Crime has continued to drop in Los Angeles this year. From January to July 2025, property crime decreased 15%, violent crime decreased 12%, and murders decreased 26% compared to the same period last year, according to the Real-Time Crime Index by AH Datalytics. According to data from the first half of 2025, the city is on pace to see the fewest homicides “in nearly 60 years,” the Los Angeles Times reported.This trend continues across other cities that Trump claims are unsafe. In 2024, murders were down 32% in San Francisco compared to 2023, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data. In 2024, San Francisco’s homicide rate reached a low “not seen in the City since the early 1960s.” Property crime in San Francisco was also down 29% in 2024 and violent crime was down 13% compared to the year before. This year, crime in San Francisco has continued to decline, with murders down 20%, violent crime down 20%, and property crime down 29% in the first seven months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, according to the Real-Time Crime Index.In 2024, murders decreased 9% in Portland compared to the year before, according to FBI data. Overall property crime also decreased by 6% in 2024, while violent crime did not see a significant change. Crime in Portland has continued to decrease in 2025. In the first seven months of the year, murders were down 51%, violent crime was down 16%, and property crime was down 4% compared to the same period in 2024, according to the Real-Time Crime IndexIn Chicago, violent crime dropped 10% in 2024 compared to 2023, according to FBI data. Murder also dropped 7% in 2024, while overall property crime stayed relatively flat, with a 1% increase in 2024 compared to 2023. Crime has continued to plummet in Chicago this year. This summer, “Chicago recorded the fewest homicides in June, July, and August since 1965,” WBEZ reported. According to the Real-Time Crime Index, violent crime was down 20% in the first seven months of the year compared to the same period last year. Murders were also down 31% and property crime dropped 19%.Trump also claimed that New York City is unsafe. But overall crime was down almost 3% last year, according to the New York City Police Department (NYPD). While there was not a significant change in violent crime or property crime from 2023 to 2024, murder was down 5% in 2024, according to data from the FBI. In 2025, crime has continued to drop. According to the Real-Time Crime Index, murders dropped 21% in New York City in the first seven months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, while overall violent crime decreased 3% and property crime dropped 4%. In the first eight months of the year, the city also “saw the fewest shooting incidents and shooting victims in recorded history,” according to the NYPD.Why America has laws restricting the use of the military domesticallyTrump’s call for war on American cities is both legally questionable and contrary to the long-held American principles. The primacy of civilian authorities has been central to American ideals since the Boston Massacre catalyzed the independence movement in 1770.When the British colonized America, grievances about military force and control became a key motivator for independence. In the Declaration of Independence, the colonists wrote that under British rule, the military had become “independent of and superior to the civil power,” which impeded their rights. This principle was so important to the Founding Fathers that they included many provisions in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to check the domestic powers of the military.Two primary laws govern the use of federal troops on U.S. soil: the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act.The Posse Comitatus Act, which was passed in 1878, reads “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”The Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of the military on U.S. soil for law enforcement purposes absent explicit Congressional approval. Other laws allow the military to conduct other domestic operations, including providing emergency relief in the event of a public health crisis or natural disaster. But the military cannot ordinarily make arrests or conduct searches domestically.The Insurrection Act is the main exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. It allows the president to use federal troops when a state requests assistance to quell an insurrection or when an insurrection impedes the federal government’s ability to enforce federal law. For example, the Insurrection Act was invoked to enforce desegregation in the South during the civil rights movement against the wishes of state governments, which sought to maintain segregation.By waging “war” on American cities, Trump threatens to violate this essential American principle and turn federal troops against citizens. But his authority to do so rests on shaky legal ground.While the Supreme Court has held for nearly 200 years that the president retains the authority to decide what constitutes a “rebellion” under the Insurrection Act, it has also ruled that the president’s decision is subject to review by the courts to determine if the decision was made in bad faith or based on an error.Already, Trump’s decision-making has been called into question. In early September, a judge ruled that his administration’s use of federal troops in Los Angeles was illegal because “there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth focused remarks on the importance for the department of a “Warrior Ethos.”Lev Remembers,Urgent: America at the Edge — Trump’s Shutdown, Indictments & the Generals’ Test, Lev Parnas,right, Sept. 30-Oct. 1, 2025. Not random. Not coincidence. A coordinated push to rewrite history and cripple democracy.As I sit here just hours away from the government shutting down, I want you to pause and really hear me. This isn’t about another budget fight in Washington. This is a deliberate, coordinated push to advance Project 2025 — and they’re not even hiding it anymore.Donald Trump is warning Democrats that once the shutdown happens, he will begin making “irreversible changes” — mass firings, dismantling programs, and gutting our institutions — all while still blaming the other side.At the same time, while Washington was consumed with the looming shutdown, down in Quantico Trump was turning his focus on the generals.Even as he moves to weaken the government in D.C., he is testing the loyalty of our military leadership, seeking to bring them under his control. This is not coincidence — it is a coordinated two-front assault: cripple the government in the Capitol, and coerce the military into obedience at Quantico.History is clear: for any dictatorship to take root, it must secure the loyalty of the military. That’s exactly what we’re witnessing now. My sources tell me there is already a list of generals they want gone. This isn’t speculation. This is a purge-in-progress.But it doesn’t stop there.I’m also hearing from my sources that the indictments are not over. More are coming. And simultaneously, Trump and his allies are preparing a full-scale campaign to rewrite history itself. What they want to do with January 6th is exactly what the Chinese regime did with Tiananmen Square — bury it, erase it, and replace it with a propaganda version that claims it was a “deep state Democrat operation” to set up Donald Trump, not a MAGA insurrection.This is the story they are trying to cement into the public record — a lie meant to absolve Trump and vilify his opponents.Think about it: Speaker Mike Johnson did everything he could to keep the Epstein files from being released. Why? Because Trump is doing everything he can to bury them permanently. These are not isolated actions. These are pieces of a larger strategy — part of Project 2025 — to consolidate power, erase the truth, and crush accountability.
- The shutdown.
- The purge of generals.
- The propaganda campaign to rewrite January 6th.
- The suppression of the Epstein files.
- The upcoming indictments.
- The attacks on American cities.
This is all preparation for what’s coming next: a future with no fair and square elections in 2026 and beyond. Everything I’ve been warning you about is coming to a head right now.Our last line of defense is no longer Congress. It’s no longer the courts. It’s the men and women of our military — our generals, our veterans, our military families. These are people who swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any one man. They have risked everything to protect our freedoms, and now they’re being put in an impossible position.Trump has already floated using the military against American citizens. He needs generals who will obey illegal orders. We cannot let that happen.Our generals and military leaders have given their lives to serve this country. They’ve fought wars abroad, endured unimaginable sacrifices alongside their families, and stood as a shield so that we could live free under the Constitution. That same Constitution is now under attack from within. The clear and present danger to our democracy is not America’s cities or its people — it is Project 2025 and those driving it. These leaders must recognize the real threat, stand firm, and refuse unlawful orders. Their loyalty must remain with the American people and the Constitution, not with any one man. They cannot step aside or allow this purge to happen. They are now being called upon to defend the very freedoms they swore to protect — to stand up, to say no, and to ensure that our democracy survives.So I’m pleading with you: call every veteran you know. Call every military family. Share this message far and wide. Let them know we see them. We support them. And we need them to support us — to support the Constitution over any would-be dictator.This isn’t politics. This is about the survival of our democracy.I don’t write these letters lightly. I risk everything to bring you these truths. And with every purge, every whistleblower forced out, it gets more dangerous by the day, by the hour. One day, if we don’t act now, we may wake up and discover our freedom to speak has vanished.This isn’t just a newsletter. This is a movement. Every truth I risk to bring you, is because I believe our voices together can stop what Donald Trump and Project 2025 are trying to do to this country. The Steady State,Pete Hegseth: Platoon Leader, Michael Eiland, Oct. 1, 2025. By one account, Pete Hegseth was a competent platoon leader during his tour in Iraq. This is nothing to belittle. It means he successfully led about 30 soldiers and was responsible for everything from their food to their very lives. Few of our fellow citizens could do that or are willing to try.And that qualifies Hegseth to be . . . a platoon leader. Except in his Tuesday performance he did not reach that level. He sounded more like the platoon sergeant – a mid-level noncommissioned officer — admonishing his 20 year-old charges about shaving, physical fitness scores, and appearance.But Hegseth was not talking to 20 year-olds. He was talking to the nation’s most senior and experienced military leaders. Leaders who were platoon leaders when he was in middle school. Leaders who have experienced far more combat than he has (as honorable as his service was), and who have led scores of thousands of troops at a time. Leaders who deal with incredibly complex situations every day. Leaders who in no way need to be lectured on “warrior ethos” by a cable news talking head.More significantly, he was also talking to assembled senior enlisted leaders: Army and Marine Corps sergeants major and their Navy and Air Force equivalents. The generals and admirals will process what they heard in one way; the senior enlisted men and women will process it in their own way. It hardly needs noting that sergeants major are not susceptible to the phony posturing or BS that characterized so much of the Conclave at Quantico.To anyone with a passing familiarity with Hegseth’s turn on Fox News (I’m guilty), most of what he said would have been very familiar. There was little, if anything, that he said that he had not already said on tv or written in his book (which he plugged during the performance.) There most certainly was nothing that he said that justified the expense, security risk, and opportunity cost of bringing these incredibly busy men and women from their critical jobs so that the Secretary of War (SOW) could flex.Hegseth’s obsession with “woke culture” has ironically created a mirror image. He is so concerned with eradicating his bugaboo that he has little time or apparent intellectual capacity to deal with matters of real importance to national security. He has not shown ability or interest in dealing with matters more complex than beards on servicemembers. Every time he presents himself he reminds us that he is the most stunningly unqualified and incompetent Secretary of Defense (sic) in recent history. Hegseth showed no apparent sense of irony when saying over and again that promotions and positions will be based on merit.If that were really the case he would be a platoon leader.Michael Eiland is a retired Special Forces officer. He has known some warriors. He is a member of The Steady State. Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 300 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions..More On U.S. Government ShutdownThe Bulwark,Political Opinion: The Silence of the Generals, Andrew Egger, William Kristol, Oct. 1, 2025. And the searing words of a veteran on the bench.Well, here we go: The federal government has shut down. Senate Democrats have vowed to oppose any spending measure that doesn’t restore some of the healthcare cuts of this summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; meanwhile, Republicans are refusing to negotiate point blank, while continuing to lie that what Democrats are really after is free taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants.And Donald Trump has pledged to use the shutdown as a pretext slash and burn the federal government to unprecedented levels. The Contrarian,Opinion: No Wonder We Have a Shutdown, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 1, 2025. Trump’s abject ignorance and narcissism made this inevitable. Trump’s abject ignorance and narcissism made this inevitable.With Donald Trump in the White House and congressional MAGA Republicans afraid to cross him, no one should be surprised that the federal government has shut down. Aided and abetted by MAGA Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (who sent his members out of town rather than stick around for a vote and risk swearing in the new Democratic representative…who would be 218th vote for a discharge petition to release the Epstein files), Trump made no effort to keep the government open.Trump cannot fathom that Democrats would resist his commands. In a belated meeting on Monday with congressional leaders that predictably went nowhere, Trump appeared clueless about how his own big, ugly bill would affect healthcare. (But he also does not seem to know what was going on in Portland.) It’s difficult to reason—let alone negotiate—with someone so willfully ignorant.Operating in a narcissistic fantasy that he is beloved by voters and clueless about what is at stake, Trump naturally cannot imagine that Democrats would deny him their votes to take away healthcare from millions of Americans. Republicans have ceded their Article I powers and the Supreme Court has blessed his unilateral power grasp, so he naturally expects to keep undercutting congressional authorization deals with unilateral rescissions. Democrats’ insistence that he actually respect Congress’s power of the purse must flummox him. Whatever Trump believes, his hand is weak.SubscribedFirst, he is overwhelmingly unpopular. As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently recounted:The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump’s approval at an abysmal 38 percent, while 54 percent disapprove. The new Associated Press poll has him at 39 percent approving to 60 percent disapproving. The new Gallup poll has him at 40 percent to 56 percent. Reuters has him at 41 percent, and the new Economist/YouGov poll has him at 39–56.Those numbers are not just rotten; they are historically rotten for a president at this point in his term. Presidents who prevailed in shutdowns have not been so widely disliked.The assumption that the side “causing” the shutdown is destined to lose is faulty when the president is underwater on every issue, the economy is in decline, and he seems obsessed with everything but the shutdown issues (e.g. attacking Jimmy Kimmel, invading another peaceful city, persecuting his enemies, and politicizing the military).Moreover, the latest Navigator poll shows that by a 49 to 34 percent margin voters in battleground states say “Congress should let the government shut down to hold the line against funding cuts for healthcare programs and keeping tariffs in place,” rather than “keep the government open, even if it means funding cuts for healthcare programs and keeping tariffs in place.”Meanwhile, a Morning Consult polls shows “45% of voters say they’d blame Republicans in Congress for a government shutdown, while only 32% say they’d blame Democrats in Congress.” In short, voters’ negative assessment of Trump is likely to color how they view the shutdown.Second, Trump’s excuses are easily debunked and/or unintelligible. He ranted on Truth Social: “[Democrats] are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors […] allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody.” When he has no colorable argument to defend his conduct, Trump is reduced to such babbling.Government healthcare has never and will not be available to undocumented people. And, needless to say, Democrats’ concerns (Medicaid cuts, subsidies for the Affordable Care Act exchanges, and an end to illegal rescissions) have nothing to do with any transgender issue. Getting other Republicans who face the voters next year to parrot these pathetic attacks may be difficult.Third, Republicans are exceptionally vulnerable on the underlying issue at the heart of this.The core of the MAGA agenda—taking away healthcare to pay for tax cuts for billionaires—is indefensible.Even Republicans have tried to rebrand the “big, beautiful bill.” It remains a loser with voters. In August, Pew Research Center found it was 14 points underwater. KFF in late July found only 36% of adults held a favorable view while a jaw-dropping 63% has an unfavorable view. So long as the shutdown is about healthcare—and it is—Republicans are in deep trouble.Fourth, Trump’s threat to conduct huge permanent layoffs during the shutdown has landed with a THUD. He has already unilaterally fired tens of thousands of workers (blessed by the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court by lifting stays on his executive power grabs). Even if Democrats managed to pass a “clean” continuing resolution, he would likely continue slashing away at the federal workforce and at vital government services.Trump might well try to continue his lawless destruction of the federal government, but the shutdown would not make that any easier. Having abused his authority so frequently, his threats now ring hollow.Suffice to say, government shutdowns are highly undesirable. They hurt government workers and the Americans who depend on “non-essential” services. However, ripping away healthcare from millions of Americans and facilitating Trump’s illegitimate confiscation of the power of the purse are even more destructive—and even more unpopular. It will be Democrats’ task over the ensuing days and weeks to lay out the stakes clearly to the American people. Do millions want to lose healthcare insurance? Do they want Trump to keep ripping up government no matter what Congress decides?If Democrats do their job, Republicans may regret forcing through an agenda Americans detest and abdicating their role as the first branch of government.New York Times,News Analysis: Democrats See No Need to Capitulate, Nor Republicans to Cut a Deal, Carl Hulse, Updated Oct. 1, 2025. The last time Senate Democrats found themselves taking the blame for a government shutdown, they quickly caved. That’s less likely to happen now.The last time Senate Democrats found themselves taking the blame for a government shutdown, they quickly caved and raced to reopen federal agencies in 2018, as their more moderate members demanded a fast resolution after only three days.This shutdown could be different.The Democrats from red states who decried the shutdown strategy as a foolish miscalculation and pressed for an immediate reversal in the showdown with President Trump seven years ago are long gone.The ideological makeup of the party has shifted to the left, and Democrats are now bracing for an extended confrontation with the White House and congressional Republicans, despite the clear political risks. The same dynamic is at play in the G.O.P., which has lurched to the right under Mr. Trump and no longer sees room for compromise.Democrats believe they have a powerful message on health care, with some Americans set to face soaring premiums unless Republicans agree to extend federal subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. They shrugged off Mr. Trump’s threat to engage in the wholesale firing of federal workers, saying he would do so regardless of the status of government funding.And Democrats do not see much benefit in providing the votes for a temporary spending extension, since Mr. Trump and his budget czar, Russell T. Vought, have already demonstrated that they are willing to spend federal dollars — or not spend them, as the case may be — however they want, no matter what Congress says.They have so far done so with little pushback from Senate Republicans.“How could we negotiate a bipartisan agreement and then have the president unilaterally through impoundment, or the Republican Party through rescissions and the president unilaterally through pocket rescissions, undo it all without any input,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, asked as he explained Democratic resistance.New York Times,Trump Administration to Withhold $18 Billion for N.Y.C. Transit Projects, Matthew Haag, Oct. 1, 2025. Funds for two of the nation’s largest infrastructure projects, the Second Avenue subway and Hudson River tunnels, are being held up in apparent attempts to pressure Democrats amid a government shutdown.The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it would withhold $18 billion in federal funds previously awarded to New York City for two of the largest infrastructure projects in the country.The two projects — the expansion of the Second Avenue subway line and new commuter rail tunnels under the Hudson River — have been in the works for years and are aimed at alleviating bottlenecks and improving travel for millions of people and daily commuters in New York City and beyond.Both are already underway after numerous starts and stops, with construction advancing on the tunnels, a $16 billion project known as Gateway that sits at the center of the busy Northeast Corridor.Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said in a statement that funds for the two projects would not be distributed while the Transportation Department reviewed what it described as New York State’s “discriminatory, unconstitutional contracting processes.”The review was in response to President Trump’s executive orders earlier this year targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Mr. Duffy said, and following a rule issued by the department on Tuesday that forbids recipients of federal transit funds from mandating race- and sex-based contracting requirements.The substantial funding freeze targeting the two projects also appeared to be intended to pressure Democrats to join Republicans in reopening the government. With Department of Transportation employees furloughed, the review could not begin, and federal funds could not be released for work already underway.While federal funding for transit projects across the country could now be at risk, the department chose first to single out projects in the backyards of Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, who have sparred with President Trump over the shutdown.As the Trump administration has begun carrying out its threats to freeze and claw back federal funds from states and cities that promote diversity initiatives or do not cooperate with it on federal immigration enforcement, New York has been a main target, with hundreds of millions of dollars withheld.But this funding freeze is the largest yet in New York and could have potentially widespread effects, disrupting a regional economy dependent on the movement of residents and commuters.Like other efforts by the Trump administration to withhold or delay federal funding to New York, the decision is likely to be challenged in court.The decision has caused confusion among the agencies overseeing the projects, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is managing the subway extension project that was expected to be open in 2032.“The federal government wants to immediately ‘review’ our compliance with rules they told us about moments ago,” John J. McCarthy, the chief of policy and external relations at the authority, said in a statement. “We’re reviewing their tweets and press releases like everyone else. For now, it looks like they’re just inventing excuses to delay one of the most important infrastructure projects in America.”Despite the Transportation Department’s announcement, work on both projects is still moving forward, for now. In a letter to the Gateway Development Commission, which oversees the tunnel project, a department official said the pause would “temporarily impact disbursements.”New York Times, Hakeem Jeffries called Trump’s deepfake post ‘racist.’ JD Vance said it was ‘funny,’ Staff Report, Oct. 1, 2025. The vice president said Americans can recognize the posts are fake.Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday brushed off President Donald Trump’s posts of vulgar AI-generated videos of top Democratic leaders as “funny,” and an example of his boss “joking and having a good time.”After meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this week, the president posted a video depicting the two Democrats speaking to reporters with fake audio of Schumer saying Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and that “if we give all these illegal aliens health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”In that deepfake post, and another, Jeffries was depicted in a sombrero while mariachi music played in the background.The crude memes are a reference to a Republican shutdown talking point — that Democrats are fighting to reverse health care provisions enacted in the GOP tax and domestic policy law earlier this year, including provisions aimed at excluding noncitizens from public benefits. Federal law already makes most undocumented immigrants ineligible for federal health coverage under Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies.“I think it’s funny. The president is joking and having a good time. You can negotiate in good faith while poking fun at the absurdities of the Democrats’ positions, and poking fun at the absurdity of the Democrats themselves,” Vance said to reporters in the White House briefing room. “I will tell Hakeem Jeffries right now, I make a solemn promise to you that if you help us reopen the government, the sombrero memes will stop. And I’ve talked to the president of the United States about that.”Jeffries has slammed the videos as “racist” and “bigoted” and said Trump needs to be “focused on doing his job.” He later posted a photo of Trump with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Schumer, for his part, said: “If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate. You can only throw tantrums.”Vance also shrugged off Jeffries’ response, and said Americans can recognize the posts are fake.“Is he a Mexican American that is offended by having a sombrero meme?” Vance said. “Give the country a little credit. We are all trying to do a very important job for the American people.”
President Donald Trump’s minions adorned the U.S. Labor Department headquarters with his portrait, shown at far left, along with that of Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, right as part of Labor Day celebrations in 2025, a nearly unprecedented effort by a current president to use public buildings for self-glorification (Justice Integrity Project photo).New York Times,Opinion: American Women Are Leaving the Work Force. Why?Jessica Grose, Oct. 1, 2025. A journalist and novelist offers her perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we live now.By any metric, America’s working women are doing poorly compared to men. Since January 2024, women’s employment rates are down about 2 percent from where men’s are, according to Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute. Put another way — as Time magazine did — 212,000 women left the work force between January and August of this year, while 44,000 men entered. The gender wage gap is widening, notes the economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, and, she said, “There is no racial group or educational class within the working population in which women outearn men.”The picture is even worse for specific subsets of women. The share of mothers of young children in the labor market fell almost 3 percentage points in the first half of the year. Unemployment for Black women has risen disproportionately over the past two years, and cuts to the federal work force have hit Black women particularly hard. According to analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, as of 2023, 45 percent of mothers overall and 69 percent of Black mothers were breadwinners for their families. When women lose their jobs, they, their families and the broader economy suffer.This administration seems unconcerned about these statistics, and they’re certainly not shy about signaling how they see the American worker.A series of posters advertising a website for apprenticeship opportunities put out by the Department of Labor on X depicts a brawny, blond man in retro work clothes against a backdrop of cranes and construction sites. The text across his torso reads: “Make America Skilled Again!” and “Build Your Homeland’s Future!” (I usually refuse to be trolled into Nazi comparisons — because these posters are a deliberate provocation — but sometimes it’s impossible to ignore the similarity to fascist propaganda.) More On Trump ‘Enemy Within Threat’ABC-TV: Jimmy Kimmel Live, Trump & Hegseth Lecture Generals About Being Fat and a Visit from Gov Gavin Newsom & Seth Meyers!Sept. 30, 2025. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy, above, are simultaneously guests on each other’s shows tonight, Guillermo makes his big entrance as a pizza chef, we are moments away from a government shutdown, all the top military leaders were pulled together for a mandatory meeting with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Trump showed up to lecture the generals. The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Qualms From Quantico, Bill Kristol, right, Oct. 1, 2025. There was little that was surprising in yesterday’s speeches at Quantico from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. We already knew that Trump is a demagogue whose clownish solipsism shouldn’t mask the danger of his authoritarianism. We already knew that Hegseth is a Fox & Friends personality whose pathetic desperation to want to appear tough shouldn’t overshadow the damage he can do to our military.Their speeches were predictably depressing and dangerous. My fellow Bulwarkians and I discussed them here and here. And JVL analyzed some of the implications of Trump’s speech here.So I won’t dwell today on how alarmed we should be by Trump’s wish to deploy the military to fight a “war” against the enemy “within.” And I won’t dwell on how repulsed we should be by Hegseth’s apparent yearning for armed forces that resemble the Soviet military more than the American.Instead, I want to mention a couple of aspects of yesterday’s news from which we can take some hope.First, the general and flag officers at Quantico rose to the occasion. They listened in dignified and even stone-faced silence to Hegseth and Trump. Retired Army general Mark Hertling wrote ahead of the gathering that he hoped “the loudest message” the senior officers send “is no message at all—only that they have the quiet, disciplined silence ofprofessionals who know their oath is to the Constitution, not to a man.”That was the message they sent. It was impossible not to see it. And it was impressive.I was also impressed by the many younger veterans who stepped up afterwards on social media to express disapproval of what Trumpand Hegseth had to say. I was particularly struck by this post from a leader of the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, reacting to Hegseth’s boast that “America’s warriors . . . kill people and break things for a living.”This is a disgraceful message. There was a soldier that I served with in the army that later was killed in Mosul, Iraq that said the reason he joined the military was because he believed that it was the greatest force for good that the world has ever known. He said the military not only taught its soldiers to be lethal, but it also taught us to be compassionate and empathetic and care about not only the American people but also freedom-loving and -seeking people from all over the globe. This is the true warrior ethos that so many of us veterans know and love. I’m thinking about him a lot tonight and will be damned if sons of bitches like Trump and Hegseth will transform our great military into something resembling the Russians.’ His memory and service must not be in vain.Obviously, there are post-9/11 veterans who have been sympathetic to Trump and Hegseth. But I’m confident that many understand, especially after yesterday, that Trump’s vision of America—and Hegseth’s of the military—is not what they and their comrades-in-arms signed up and sacrificed for.Yesterday also saw a notable contribution to our public discourse from a veteran of a different generation, a man who served a tour in the Army over six decades ago and then continued his public service with a distinguished career as a U.S. federal district court judge.William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench in Massachusetts now a senior judge, wrote a long and careful opinion in American Association of University Professors et al. v. Marco Rubio, finding that in one of the early ICE arrests this year the Trump administration had trampled on the free speech rights of an immigrant.But Young chose to go beyond his important legal analysis of free speech jurisprudence to discuss the larger meaning of “our magnificent Constitution.”And so he addressed the practice of ICE agents’ wearing masks:Can you imagine a masked Marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.This remark was especially striking in the context of the speeches by Trump and Hegseth. For what they want, in a way, is to turn the U.S. military into an institution more like ICE: an internal police force, unconstrained by many laws or norms, bullying and intimidating people here at home on behalf of the current administration in Washington.I have considerable confidence that the current crop of general and flag officers do not want a kind of a military that looks like or behaves like ICE, and that they would resist it.But what of the military leadership three years from now? The Washington Post recently described efforts by Hegseth to shape the next generation of senior officers. “Even at the one- and two-star level, the secretary’s team is scrutinizing old relationships and what officials have said or posted on social media, as they determine whom to send forward for a higher rank or assignment,” the paper reported.What will the officer corps look like in three years? Can we be confident that Trump and Hegseth won’t succeed in turning the U.S. military into something more like ICE? The thought seems incredible. But that ICE would be doing what it is now doing on our streets would have been shocking just a year ago.The opinion of Judge Young and the silence of the generals at Quantico offer some grounds for hope. But military officers and district court judges alone won’t save us. And it’s perhaps worth noting that neither the judge nor the senior officers were elected to their offices.At the end of the day, free government can’t be preserved without the commitment and courage of elected officials. So the question is: Can more of our elected officials rise to the occasion? Which means, can more of the American people rise to the occasion? That’s the question with which Judge Young concludes his opinion:I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.Is he correct?IThe Atlantic,Commentary on National Security: Hundreds of Generals Try to Keep a Straight Face, Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan, Pete Hegseth gathered commanders from around the globe to unveil new physical-fitness standards.In the days before Pete Hegseth stepped onstage to address the hundreds of generals and admirals he summoned for a mysterious meeting outside Washington, D.C., officials at the Pentagon joked that the defense secretary could have saved a lot of time and money by making his remarks via email instead. As it turns out, what Hegseth delivered at Marine Corps Base Quantico could very well have been a copy of his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, which offers an exhaustive rebuke of the military he left in 2021 with the National Guard rank of major.Hegseth’s speech, which required yanking commanders from posts dotting the globe and whisking them to Washington at taxpayers’ expense, marked a new phase in the former Fox News host’s campaign to transform the military in his image and align it more closely with the MAGA agenda. All of the pathologies diagnosed in his book—diversity initiatives, facial hair, accommodations for women, systems to hold “toxic” commanders accountable—were struck down on the spot, ending what Hegseth depicted as a long journey through the wilderness for what should rightfully be known as the War Department. “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading, and we lost our way. We became the ‘Woke Department,’” Hegseth told an auditorium packed with senior brass. “Not anymore.”“No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate-change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit,” Hegseth told the officers.In a 45-minute speech that preceded an even longer one by President Donald Trump, Hegseth roamed the stage as though he were delivering a TED Talk. Speaking to a room full of career officers with far more experience than he had, he called out “fat generals,” decried the punishment of troops for minor mistakes, and promised to reverse what he falsely said was a lowering of unit standards to accommodate women and people of color. Vowing to rebuild a force worthy of his eldest son—he made no mention of his daughters—Hegseth said he would enact stricter fitness standards and a host of new regulations: no more exceptions, no more shaving waivers for “beardos,” no more adherence to “stupid rules of engagement.”The Pentagon shared no information in the days leading up to the meeting about what Hegseth would do or say, fueling anxiety and speculation that he might fire generals en masse or escalate the administration’s nascent war against Latin American drug gangs.Hegseth appeared to relish the suspense, taking the trouble to comment on a retired general’s social-media post about a 1935 meeting in which Nazi generals were asked to swear allegiance to Hitler rather than the Weimar constitution. “Cool story, General,” Hegseth wrote.Politico,Hegseth uses rare meeting of generals to announce new military standards, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Oct. 1, 2025. He warned commanders who don’t support the changes could leave the service.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth outlined an overhaul of military standards and gender rules on Tuesday in an extraordinary meeting of top brass, an effort that could reduce the role of women in combat as he seeks to bolster an image of American might.“You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong, always, in polite society,” he said to hundreds of senior military leaders, who were ordered last week to gather at Quantico base in Virginia.Hegseth has made setting the military apart from civilian society a hallmark of his tenure as Defense secretary. And while he largely trod over familiar ground Tuesday, the Pentagon chief announced new orders that would codify the “highest male standards” in training, set specific grooming rules and further eliminate gender- or race-based programs.“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” he said.Hegseth’s speech, which resembled a TED talk and came hours before a likely government shutdown, called for restoring a throwback vision of the military — one that could win quick, decisive wars using overwhelming force. It marked a clear distinction from policy speeches by previous Pentagon leaders, such as Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin, who outlined Russia and China as explicit U.S. threats.At one point, Hegseth compared himself to the World War II-era Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine to the legendary Gen. George Marshall.The secretary also decried “fat generals and admirals” walking the halls of the Pentagon and lambasted Biden-era objectives to promote diversity in the ranks as actions of the “Woke Department.”Hegseth appeared to borrow from internet meme culture noting American adversaries threatening the country could “FAFO,” an acronym that stands for “fuck around and find out.”“If necessary, our troops can translate that for you,” he said.The new rules will put in place the “highest male standard” for fitness in combat roles, he said, which are “gender neutral.” But he acknowledged women may not be able to meet them.“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Hegseth told the assembled generals. “That is not the intent, but it could be the result.”He told officers that even generals and admirals would be required to pass two yearly physical tests. And he hinted that the Pentagon would overhaul inspector general investigations, just as the Defense Department watchdog is expected to release a report on Hegseth’s sharing of sensitive information on military strikes in a Signal group chat.Perhaps most ominously, the Defense secretary warned of additional firings to come — a year after he terminated Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti and several other top military officers.Global NewsNew York Times,Analysis: Blair, Tapped by Trump for Gaza Plan, Brings Expertise (and Baggage), Mark Landler, Oct. 1, 2025. After peace in Northern Ireland, Tony Blair’s reputation was tarnished by his role in the invasion of Iraq. Is he stepping into another quagmire?When Tony Blair, shown at right in a 2014 file photo, published a how-to book for newly elected leaders last year, one of his tips was to tend to their legacies while still in office — something he said he neglected in his 10 years as Britain’s prime minister.Now, Mr. Blair is seizing another chance to define his legacy, in a region that has preoccupied, even tormented, him since he backed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq 22 years ago. With a central role in President Trump’s new plan to end the war in Gaza, Mr. Blair could reshape a narrative that was tarnished by Iraq and unredeemed by a frustrating stint as a Middle East peacemaker after he left 10 Downing Street.His odds of success are perilously slim. Mr. Trump’s perseverance as a peacemaker is unpredictable. If Mr. Blair thrusts himself into Gaza as a kind of colonial viceroy, critics warn that it will only inflame tensions. Far from ending the war, he could find himself stuck in the middle of another intractable conflict.Much of Mr. Trump’s plan reflects ideas in Mr. Blair’s own 21-page blueprint for peace in Gaza, including a high-level transitional board, on which Mr. Blair will serve as a member. He drew up the plan over the past several months and had been a candidate for a leadership role, according to people familiar with the process. But in a last-minute twist, Mr. Trump took the chairman’s seat.“Good man, very good man,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Blair on Monday, after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He said nothing about Mr. Blair’s responsibilities or his contributions to the plan.Still, if the plan gains traction — a major if, given the unremitting hostility between Israel and Hamas — Mr. Blair would be one of those most responsible for delivering it. It is a striking turn for a 72-year-old retired politician, who has since built a lucrative business advising governments, banks and other clients on issues like the transformative power of A.I., and who remains a polarizing figure on Middle East issues.And yet, it is entirely in keeping with Mr. Blair’s statesmanlike ambitions.Ukraine Matters,BLACKOUT: Ukraine’s US Weapons Leave Russia in the Dark, Giorgi, Sept. 30, 2025. Zelensky: If Russia threatens a blackout in Kyiv, Moscow must be prepared for a response….Envoy Kellogg: Trump authorizes long-range stricks on Russia.New York Times,Moscow Indicates Retaliation if Europe Uses Russian Assets for Ukraine, Paul Sonne, Oct. 1, 2025. Amid a plan to lend $165 billion to Ukraine using Russian state assets, European officials are mindful of the possibility of Russian blowback.The Kremlin warned on Wednesday that it would seek the prosecution of individuals and countries engaged in the “theft” of frozen Russian sovereign assets in Europe, as European leaders convened to discuss a proposal to lend $165 billion to Ukraine based on the frozen funds.The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, made no distinction between stealing the frozen Russian assets and using them to extend a loan to Ukraine without seizing them, as top European leaders have proposed. “We are talking about theft,” Mr. Peskov said in a call with reporters.His comments came a day after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed a decree to accelerate the process of redistributing assets within Russia. Analysts say that Russia could respond to the European proposal by seizing the assets of foreign companies and individuals from nations backing the loan. Russia has already seized the operations of multiple Western companies, part of a broader redistribution of wealth during the war.Anton G. Siluanov, the Russian finance minister, said last year that his country had frozen an amount of Western assets equal to the Russian assets frozen by the West, adding that Moscow would respond symmetrically. Since the start of the war, Moscow has been distributing the profits from Western assets in the country into special bank accounts frozen by the Russian state.European officials have begun to eye Russian frozen money more intensely as American aid for Ukraine dries up under President Trump. The European Union’s executive arm is advancing a proposal to issue an interest-free “reparations loan” of 140 billion euros, or about $165 billion, to Ukraine, financially engineered to make use of the Russian assets without seizing them outright. The loan would be repaid only if Russia compensated Ukraine for the damage caused during the war. Britain is considering a similar plan.“We need a more structural solution for military support,” the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Tuesday. “This is why I have put forward the idea of a reparations loan that is based on the immobilized Russian assets.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.She said the loan would be dispersed in tranches and would not involve any direct seizure of Russian assets. The Group of 7 nations has already provided a loan to Ukraine using interest from the Russian assets as collateral.The idea to further exploit the assets has gained traction after an initial proposal by Ms. von der Leyen and a similar one last week by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz. He faces a rising far-right opposition at home that has attacked him for spending German taxpayer money on Ukraine. But the prime minister of Belgium, where most of the Russian assets are held, has opposed the idea, citing outsize risk for his country.“It’s a very interesting geopolitical turn,” said Maria Shagina, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Given Mr. Trump’s isolationist foreign policy, she added, “Europe needs to play ball and adopt another strategy.”The change in Europe is an unwelcome development for Russia, as Mr. Putin has invested heavily over many years in his nation’s financial stability.The roughly $300 billion of Russian sovereign assets frozen in the West, mostly located in the European Union and Britain, make up nearly half of the Russian Central Bank’s gold and foreign-exchange reserves, the country’s Finance Ministry said in 2022. Western nations froze the assets shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Russia appears to view the proposed European financial engineering of the loan, which would stop short of seizing the Russian assets outright, as a distinction without a difference. Read More …

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