“Some people believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative,” the physician Robert Malone wrote on June 9. “I do not — I view it as high praise.”
During the pandemic, Malone campaigned for treatment with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and against mRNA vaccines, which he described as “causing a form of” AIDS, though he has also admitted he received the Moderna vaccine to treat his own long Covid. In 2021, Malone circulated a 2013 video of a high school athlete collapsing on the football field, blaming coronavirus vaccination for the death before he was served with a cease-and-desist letter from the family. More recently, he dismissed as “misinformation” news reports attributing the deaths of two girls in Texas to measles, blaming not vaccine refusal but “medical errors,” and last fall published a book, “PsyWar,” claiming that between the C.I.A. and Department of Defense, the United States maintains “reality-bending information control capabilities” and that much of federal government’s business is conducted via sexual favor. “The term ‘anti-vaxxer,’” he continued on June 9, “it is not a slur, but a compliment.”
Two days later, he was appointed to the advisory board that steers America’s vaccine policy.
Richard Nixon conducted his “Saturday night massacre,” back in 1973, when one after another federal prosecutor refused to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate prosecutor. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, staged his night of the long knives a week ago Monday, firing all 17 members of the vaccine advisory board, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, in one fell swoop — a historically unprecedented action and one that broke an explicit promise he made to Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a physician, as a condition of his confirmation as secretary. The epidemiologist and immunologist Michael Mina called Kennedy’s move a “code red” for vaccines in America.
Reportedly, none of the A.C.I.P. advisers were warned or had their firings explained; they had to read the news in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay. The next day, Kennedy accused them of “malevolent malpractice.” Cassidy, who dodged questions from reporters on the subject, was left sputtering on X: “Of course, now the fear is that the A.C.I.P. will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.” Malone, whose appointment to the board hadn’t yet been announced, posted proudly, “Promises made, promises kept.”
The new appointees are not all fully committed skeptics — though, beyond Malone, they include people who have served as expert witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, as well as a board member for an anti-vaccine nonprofit and an M.I.T. business-school professor who has described coronavirus mRNA vaccines as causing “an unprecedented level of harm.” (The choices also include a nutritional neuroscientist focused on fatty acids and a “serial C.E.O.” who has served on the boards of several private health care companies.)
When the names were announced, Mina tried to take a glass-half-full view of the appointments but had to acknowledge that the group didn’t include any actual experts in vaccines. “We’ve taken people who had expertise and fired them for a bogus reason,” says the University of Pennsylvania vaccinologist Paul Offit, a former member of the A.C.I.P. and a co-creator of the rotavirus vaccine. In their place have been installed what the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, also of the University of Pennsylvania, described to me as “vaccine skeptics.” Offit calls them, more pointedly, “purveyors of disinformation.”
“The consequence will be people will lose trust in the panel and its advice,” Offit went on. “In fact, I think it’s already happened.” Emanuel agreed: “I don’t think we’ll be able to trust the A.C.I.P. operation anymore,” he told me. “It begins to make people distrust the U.S. government as a whole. Or distrust it even more.” One result, he suggested, was that Americans would start to treat vaccine recommendations like the State Department’s travel advisories — mostly ignoring them.
The immediate fallout from what Jess Steier of Unbiased Science called the “A.C.I.P. purge” may prove relatively limited. Removing vaccine recommendations would probably take time, most likely requiring some fig leaf of research cover, and would kick an awful lot of responsibility to insurance companies, which are required to cover the cost of shots recommended by the A.C.I.P. Today uninsured children can get them thanks to the federal Vaccines for Children program, which covers nearly half of American children. But that program is administered by the C.D.C., which has no director at the moment. (Trump’s initial nominee was torpedoed, presumably for being too outspoken an anti-vaxxer.)
In the coming months, alternate advisory bodies will most likely spring up — Emanuel tells me there are several groups already organizing themselves — so that parents and providers won’t find themselves shut off from vaccines or information about them. Instead, they’ll be served with contradictory guidance, forcing them to navigate the new landscape somewhat as individual consumers and make their own risk-benefit assessments, rather than as constituent parts of a social whole. And in the medium term, they may have to pay out of pocket for shots, which aren’t as expensive as, say, cancer treatment but aren’t exactly cheap either (about $100 each for many of the vaccines, like M.M.R. or DTaP/hepatitis B/I.P.V.).
So far, so grimly familiar: bad players weaponizing post-pandemic distrust to blowtorch institutions of public health in the name of restoring trust, but winning in the short term only small victories that leave Americans not exactly barred from health care but simply much more on their own.
This is “Make America Healthy Again” as public-health libertarianism. But while you may think the country has turned against vaccines in the aftermath of the Covid emergency, vaccine refusal, while seemingly growing, is far from a mass phenomenon. Routine childhood vaccinations have fallen from 95 percent just before the pandemic to just under 93 percent — an epidemiologically worrisome drop but not a screaming signal of social outrage. Families in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024 are more likely to forgo vaccination for their children, Jeremy Faust and Benjamin Renton recently showed in a preprint analysis, but even there, barely one in 20 families decided to skip vaccination.
Perhaps one should want to carefully recalibrate the public-health approach to vaccination in the face of these declines, which are echoed elsewhere in the world.But this is not that. It is a war from above on public health — and public trust.
Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has withdrawn hundreds of vaccine-related research grants, canceled a Moderna contract to produce an mRNA bird-flu vaccine and disavowed C.D.C. recommendations about coronavirus vaccines for “healthy children” and “healthy pregnant women,” an announcement that Offit calls “testing the fence, like the velociraptors did in ‘Jurassic Park.’” It was only in April, he points out, that Fiona Havers of the C.D.C. presented data showing that of the children who were hospitalized by Covid last year, half were otherwise healthy. Even among children who required I.C.U. care, 41 percent had no underlying conditions. Overall, 152 children died of Covid last year. Havers quit the agency this week, writing, “I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions.” She was starker to The Times: “A lot of Americans are going to die.”
MAHA figures will often invoke what they call “shared clinical decision making,” Offit goes on — doctors and patients empowered to make health care choices independently. “But that’s not what they really mean,” he says. “What they really mean is that we want to make this more like what they’re asking for in Project 2025, which is that the C.D.C. is no longer a recommending body.”
There is also a bigger risk, Offit says — one that might sound like a worst-case scenario but is, to him, the most likely one. That is that Kennedy finds an excuse to add autism to the list of compensable vaccine injuries. This would be a kind of rerun of the D.P.T. vaccine scare of the early 1980s, when a flood of litigation drove the number of vaccine manufacturers from 18 to four and forced the government to step in and establish the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to minimize the exposure of manufacturers. Adding autism, Offit says, would break the program, making it immediately untenable for manufacturers to continue producing or delivering shots in the United States. The liability would be simply too much for drugs that offer the companies almost no profit. Suddenly, we would be faced not with problems of guidance or coverage but of simple accessibility — all those shots that brought such miraculous ends to centuries of infectious diseases in the second half of the last century no longer available in this one.
“I think we are on the verge of losing vaccines for this country, from this country,” Offit says. “And the reason is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold up a paper, in the next four or five months, that says it’s aluminum in vaccines that are causing a whole swath of problems, including autism,” he goes on. “I think he is about to destroy vaccines in this country. I do.”
Just a week ago, the Trump administration was preparing for a sixth round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled to be held in Oman on June 15.
In 2018, President Donald J. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 by President Barack Obama, under which the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran’s nuclear program. With the U.S. withdrawal, the agreement fell apart.
Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” of stronger sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA, which lasted throughout his first term. Back in office, Trump relaunched that campaign in February 2025. Then, in March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the assessment of the Intelligence Community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
In the same month, Trump said on the Fox News Channel that he had written a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Iranians to negotiate “because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not “enter any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.”
But Iran’s allied militant actors Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon have been badly hurt by Israeli strikes since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s major ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, fell in December 2024. Discussions began in April of this year, and negotiators met for five rounds by the end of May.
Israel was not included in the negotiations, and on Thursday, June 12, it launched strikes against nuclear and military targets in Iran. The strikes killed a number of nuclear scientists and senior military personnel. Iran retaliated, and the countries have been in conflict ever since.
After the strikes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also became the acting national security advisor after Trump fired his first national security advisor for inviting a journalist onto a Signal chat about a military strike against the Houthis, issued a statement distancing the U.S. from Israel’s attack on Iran. “Tonight,” he said, “Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
But by early Friday morning, Trump appeared to be trying to take credit for the strikes and demanded that Iran make a deal. The next day—Saturday, June 14—was the day of No Kings protests in which at least 2% of the U.S. population turned out to oppose his presidency, as well as the sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C., an embarrassing contrast for the president.
The U.S. possesses a 30,000-pound bomb that would perhaps be able to penetrate Iran’s underground nuclear sites, which are fortified against attack. According to Alex Horton, Maham Javaid, and Warren P. Strobel, the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (MOP) can penetrate the ground up to at least 200 feet. The U.S. B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the only Air Force aircraft that can deploy the heavy MOP.
On June 16, while at the G7 meeting in Canada, Trump posted that Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign.” He continued: “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” More than 9 million people live in Tehran, with more than 16 million in the metropolitan area.
Then Trump abruptly left the G7 and on the trip home told reporters on Air Force One that he didn’t care what Gabbard said, and thought Iran was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. When France’s president Emmanuel Macron suggested Trump left to work on a ceasefire, Trump posted: “Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay tuned!” Later that day, he posted that “[w]e”—a word suggesting U.S. involvement—“now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and he credited U.S. weaponry with that dominance.
About a half-hour later, he posted: “We know exactly where the so-called “Supreme Leader” is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”
As Trump’s “Stay tuned!” suggested, his hints that he could bring the U.S. into the conflict monopolized the news. It has pushed the No Kings Day protests and the military parade to the background, putting Trump back on the front page.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo interpreted Trump’s shift to back Israel as a typical Trump branding opportunity: “Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it.” In the short term, that product offers a quick way to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program, which has long been a U.S. goal.
But Trump’s flirting with joining a Middle East war has badly split his supporters. Led by Steve Bannon, the isolationist wing is strongly opposed to intervention and suggests that the U.S. will once again be stuck in an endless war.
In contrast, the evangelical MAGA wing sees support for Israel as central to the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in the end times. Earlier this month the U.S. ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said the U.S. was abandoning its longstanding support for a Palestinian state. Huckabee is a strong supporter of the expansion of Israel’s settlements. After the Israeli strikes, Huckabee messaged Trump to urge him to listen to the voice of God. In an apparent reference to Truman’s decision to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan at the end of World War II, Huckabee told Trump: “No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Harry Truman in 1945.”
At the unveiling of two 88-foot-tall (30.5 meters) flagpoles at the White House yesterday, Trump told reporters who asked what he planned to do about Iran: “I mean, you don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” He added, “Nothing’s finished until it’s finished. You know, war is very complex. A lot of bad things can happen. A lot of turns are made.”
He told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final—I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due, you know, because things change.”
Meanwhile, in a hearing yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) pointed out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the $1 billion mission he led against the Houthis—who do not have a navy—has not restored the ability of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels to go through the Red Sea. Instead, it cost the U.S. two F18 Hornets, which cost $60 million apiece, and seven Reaper drones that cost another $200 million. Duckworth accused Hegseth of “blowing through money” and said: “Your failures…since you've taken office, have been staggering. You sent classified operational information over Signal to chest thump in front of your wife, who, by the way, has no security clearance, risking service member lives in the process…. You’ve created such a hostile command environment that no one wants to serve as your chief of staff or work with you in other senior lead [Department of Defense] leadership roles.”
“But what we should all be talking about more than all of this,” she added, “is that you have an unjustified, un-American misuse of the military in American cities, pulling resources and attention away from core missions to the detriment of the country, the war fighters, and, yes, the war fighting that you claim to love.”
Warren P. Strobel, Alex Horton, and Abigail Hauslohner of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Hegseth and Gabbard have been sidelined in discussions of whether the U.S. will get involved in the conflict. The White House is also operating without a full complement of professional staffers at the National Security Council, since Rubio fired many of them when he took over from Waltz, apparently with the goal of replacing the think-tank mentality of past NSCs with a group that would simply implement the president’s ideas.
Talking Points Memo’s Marshall noted Tuesday that “there is really, literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all.”
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing back on the idea that Trump can unilaterally decide to take the United States into a war. On Monday, Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a measure to reassert Congress’s power over the authority to make war. The Constitution explicitly gives that authority to Congress, not the president, but presidents have chipped away at that power for decades. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced another measure to bar the use of federal funds for military force without authorization by Congress.
Today, after Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital, Trump seemed to change direction. He issued a statement through White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, falling back on his usual tactic of promising something “in two weeks.” “Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”
Stay tuned.
Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted today: “A through-line through the last five months is that uncertainty is Donald Trump's personal comfort zone, where he feels *his* power is maximized. But in basically every domain in which he operates uncertainty *in itself* is damaging to everyone else involved.”
For all the panic in Washington about inflation, the federal deficit, and the mounting cost of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the United States has been quietly racking up exorbitant costs that the administration would prefer nobody tally. In the 12-month period ending on May 1, the U.S. spent an estimated $1 trillion on disaster recovery and other climate-related needs, according to a new analysis released on Wednesday by Bloomberg Intelligence.
Those costs aren’t just federal budget line items, but escalating monthly expenses borne by millions of people who may not have personally experienced weather disasters. Much of the burden comes from rising insurance premiums. Homeowners’ insurance rates have risen more than 40 percent in the last six years, according to a separate study published last week by the online lender LendingTree. While Florida and California tend to grab the most attention for their insurance troubles, the highest rates and increases have been in Midwestern states, which are racked by tornadoes, wind, and hailstorms. Rates in Nebraska have climbed by more than 70 percent, and homeowners there now pay an average of $5,912 for an annual policy—more than twice the national average and the second-highest average in the nation after Oklahoma. That’s thanks in large part to an uptick in weather disasters that are often exacerbated by climate change. Through the 1990s, Nebraska experienced just four weather-related disasters that cost more than $1 billion. In the last five years, there have been 17. (That data is compiled in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tally of billion-dollar disasters, which the Trump administration has decided to end, along with a slew of other climate and weather–related research.)
This nationwide spike in insurance premiums—which rose by 11.4 percent last year, 11 percent in 2023, and 5.4 percent in 2022—has similarly come amid an onslaught of weather-related disasters. Insurers have pleaded with statewide regulators to allow them to raise rates because of larger than usual payouts, citing mounting losses from wildfires and hurricanes and in some cases threatening to even pull out of some states entirely. As they’ve raised premiums, though, U.S. property casualty insurers have quietly raked in record profits. Property casualty insurers earned a record $169 billion in profits last year—a 90 percent increase over 2023 profits and a 333 percent increase from 2022. According to the credit-rating agency AMBest, property casualty insurers collected more than $1 trillion in premiums for the first time ever in 2024, reflecting both rising home insurance and auto premiums, which rose by an average of 26 percent last year.
Insurance companies aren’t the only beneficiaries. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts identified 100 companies—including insurance companies, engineering firms, and building materials sellers—that stand to benefit from disaster-related spending and that collectively outperformed the S&P index by 7 percent in each of the last three years.
As climate-related costs continue to rise, the Trump administration is attempting to mandate that state and local governments take on more of that burden. That’s the idea behind the White House’s plan to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Administration after this hurricane season. FEMA has already nixed programs that could offset costs, like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, and ended trainings and critical federal funding streams for state and local emergency-management operations. Rising insurance costs are already blowing holes in municipal budgets, forcing school districts in storm-ravaged states to make cuts and avoid repairs in order to be able to afford property insurance.
Whether the Trump administration admits it or not, the price tags of climate-related disasters are continuing to rise. Ignoring those costs, making other people pay for them, and opting not to keep track of the damages won’t make them go away. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell—who’s been adamant that the Fed shouldn’t address climate change—acknowledged in March that insurance companies pulling out of “coastal areas” and “areas where there are a lot of fires” will mean that “if you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage.”
Global warming isn’t some far-off worry or a problem relegated to low-lying island states. For millions of people in the U.S., it’s already costing them thousands of dollars a year, at least. That homeownership could soon be impossible for all but the extraordinarily wealthy across entire regions of the United States is a looming crisis to be measured in dollars and cents, not fractions of a degree Celsius of warming above preindustrial averages. Republicans whining about the federal deficit, meanwhile, are only interested in showering the people profiteering off the climate crisis with more tax breaks.
President Donald Trump is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election, which he has baselessly claimed for years was rigged against him, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Nevertheless, six months into his second term as president, Trump is still relitigating the race he lost to Democrat Joe Biden — and is now calling for a special counsel to investigate his claims of fraud that have already been rejected by the courts dozens of times.
In a social media post Friday, Trump alleged it was actually Biden who “lost the 2020 Presidential Election by a ‘LANDSLIDE!’ and that the election was “a total FRAUD!”
“The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!” Trump wrote.
Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage, ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024 and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” ICE would not provide evidence for their claims.
Bump concludes: “[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” After Bump’s article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations.”
Bump noted that ICE “has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators,” and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued: “Make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end.”
The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.
On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.
Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.
The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest.
U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests “a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.”
But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.
President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.
Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration's deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.
Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.
There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation, in 2023 a grand jury, made up of American citizens, indicted Trump for engaging in “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials. “Despite having lost,” the indictment reads, Trump “was determined to remain in power.”
Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans’ budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump’s job performance, while 54% disapprove.
This week’s Economist/YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42% approve, and that Trump’s job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump’s supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes.
So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who, exactly, is giving orders that either are or might be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making lawbreaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It is possible at least some of the drive to hide agents’ faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s.
There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration's defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to “reform” governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves, permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were “socialists” and had no idea how to run a government.
On June 12, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
When California senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, tried to ask Noem a question, he was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “public safety is not the point; the spectacle is.” Trump “is testing the boundaries of his power,” Padilla wrote, “[a]nd he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.”
“If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.”
But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. “If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question,” he wrote, “imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do.”
Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump’s administration is “cracking down on Democrats.” Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator “José Padilla,” using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism.
The vice president’s press secretary said the vice president “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”
