The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

President Trump makes no secret of his displeasure over the cost of renovating the Federal Reserve headquarters — around $2.5 billion, or even higher by the president’s accounting.

But getting the White House to discuss another of Washington’s expensive renovation projects, the cost of refurbishing a “free” Air Force One from Qatar, is quite another matter.

Officially, and conveniently, the price tag has been classified. But even by Washington standards, where “black budgets” are often used as an excuse to avoid revealing the cost of outdated spy satellites and lavish end-of-year parties, the techniques being used to hide the cost of Mr. Trump’s pet project are inventive.

Which may explain why no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles.

In recent weeks, congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a “transfer” to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation of the new, gold-adorned Air Force One that Mr. Trump desperately wants in the air before his term is over. (It is not clear if the entire transfer will be devoted to stripping the new Air Force One back to its airframe, but Air Force officials privately acknowledge dipping into nuclear modernization funds for the complex project.)

Qatar’s defense minister and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the final memorandum of understanding a few weeks ago, paving the way for the renovation to begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. The document was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

Mr. Trump’s plane probably won’t fly for long: It will take a year or two to get the work done, and then the Qatari gift — improved with the latest communications and in-flight protective technology — will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in 2029, the president has said.

Concerns over the many apparent conflicts of interests involved in the transaction, given Mr. Trump’s government dealings and business ties with the Qataris, have swirled since reports of the gift emerged this spring. But the president himself said he was unconcerned, casting the decision as a no-brainer for taxpayers.

“I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” the president said in May. “I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”

It is free in the sense that a used car handed over by a neighbor looking to get it out of his driveway is free. In this case, among the many modifications will be hardened communications, antimissile systems and engine capabilities to take the president quickly to safety as one of the older Air Force Ones did on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda attacked the United States. And there is the delicate matter of ridding the jet of any hidden electronic listening devices that U.S. officials suspect may be embedded in the walls.

Then, of course, it has to be stuffed with the luxuries — and gold trim — with which the 47th president surrounds himself, whether he is in the Oval Office or in the air. The jet’s upper deck has a lounge and a communications center, while the main bedroom can be converted into a flying sick bay in a medical emergency.

So it’s no surprise that one of Washington’s biggest guessing games these days is assessing just where the price tag will end up, on top of the $4 billion already being spent on the wildly-behind-schedule presidential planes that Boeing was supposed to deliver last year. It was those delays that led Mr. Trump to look for a gift.

Air Force officials privately concede that they are paying for renovations of the Qatari Air Force One with the transfer from another the massively-over-budget, behind-schedule program, called the Sentinel. That is named for the missile at the heart of Washington’s long-running effort to rebuild America’s aging, leaky, ground-launched nuclear missile system.

The project was first sold to Congress as a $77.7 billion program to replace all 400 Minuteman III missiles, complete with launch facilities and communications built to withstand both nuclear and cyber attack. By the time Mr. Trump came back into office, that figure had ballooned by 81 percent, to $140 billion and climbing, all to reconstruct what nuclear strategists agree is the most vulnerable, impossible-to-hide element of America’s nuclear deterrent.

And that was the number before the Air Force announced a few months ago that it would have to dig all new silos across Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota, because the old Minuteman silos were leaking and crumbling.

The first of the Minutemans were installed 55 years ago, when Richard Nixon was president and Leonid Brezhnev was inside the Kremlin. Washington and Moscow had a combined total of more than 30,000 nuclear weapons pointed at each other. (Today it is closer to 3,100.)

The good news is that in the first Trump administration, the Air Force got rid of the command-and-control systems that still used 8-inch floppy disks, proving that the so-called deep state can get something done when it digs, well, deep.

Some nuclear strategists argue that the ground-based nuclear weapons do not need to be replaced at all; they are far more vulnerable than weapons traveling under the sea on stealthy submarines, or that can be loaded on bombers. But the Pentagon doesn’t want to part with a third of the nuclear “triad,” and the silos and their command posts are big employers in the rural West.

They serve another function in the second Trump administration. The modernization program has proved to be the perfect thing if you were determined to hide how much you are spending on an airplane, especially one equipped to order up a nuclear strike, if needed.

In testimony before Congress in June, Troy E. Meink, the Air Force secretary, said that he thought the cost of the Air Force One renovations would be manageable. “I think there has been a number thrown around on the order of $1 billion,” he said. “But a lot of those costs associated with that are costs that we’d have experienced anyway, we will just experience them early,” before Boeing delivers its two Air Force Ones. “So it wouldn’t be anywhere near that.”

“We believe the actual retrofit of that aircraft is probably less than $400 million,” he said.

If so, that would be a bargain. But engineers and Air Force experts who have been through similar projects have their doubts that it can be accomplished for anything like that price. Members of Congress express concern that Mr. Trump will pressure the Air Force to do the work so fast that sufficient security measures are not built into the plane. When asked last week, the Air Force said it simply could not discuss the cost — or anything else about the plane — because it’s classified.

(For collectors of such bureaucratic evasions, yes, the Air Force is willing to discuss the cost of building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, but not the cost of renovating the president’s aircraft.)

Only at the Pentagon could someone reprogram $934 million and expect no one to notice. The coffers were refilled with the passage of the budget reconciliation bill several weeks ago, budget officials say.

“The more we learn about this deal, the more disturbing it becomes,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who serves on the Armed Services Committee. “The security implications of accepting a private plane from a foreign nation as Air Force One and the resulting ethical concerns a gift of that sizes creates were already significant.”

But it was more worrisome, Ms. Shaheen said, that “this administration is diverting funds from the nuclear modernization budget to finance costly renovations to this plane.”

In doing so, she said, “we’re weakening our credibility to fund a vanity project for President Trump.”

On July 23 the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled American Progress. Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track behind her.

Over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

From the time Gast painted it, American Progress has been interpreted as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny: the mid-nineteenth-century notion that God had destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least the North American continent, and possibly South America as well. A number of people who saw the Homeland Security post saw it as the Trump administration’s embrace of that ideology.

Magazine editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in the July 1845 issue of Democratic Review, a magazine dedicated to defining what it meant to live in a democratic republic. O’Sullivan’s concept of manifest destiny was different from the constant expansionism of Euro-Americans before his time, in part because he was defending a specific partisan policy: Congress’s annexation of Texas in March 1845 and the apparent determination of Democratic president James K. Polk to seize more territory from Mexico. The Democrats’ political opponents, the Whigs, opposed the land grab, and Democrats justified their position on the grounds that they were simply honoring God’s plan.

The spread of democracy—and, with it, American greatness—was both the right and the duty of Americans, they claimed, overriding the despotisms of monarchs. Along with that democratic system would travel an economic system that developed resources for private owners, the Protestant religion, and a cultural system that privileged white people. Such a system was best for everyone, even those people whose land, lives, and culture would be absorbed by the movement. Democrats constructed a strong sense of U.S. nationalism around this idea and its corollary: the extension of human enslavement.

Manifest destiny both reflected and fed the era’s greed and racism. But there was a key political element in it that adherents to today’s right-wing political movement appear to reject. At the heart of manifest destiny, beneath the language of “civilizing” other peoples and the embrace of human enslavement, was the concept that the lands the U.S. acquired would become states equal to the older states in the Union and that the people in the lands the U.S. absorbed would eventually become Americans equal to those who had been in the United States for a generation or more.

“New territory is spread out for us to subdue and fertilize,” Daniel S. Dickinson of New York told the Senate; “new races are presented for us to civilize, educate and absorb; new triumphs for us to achieve for the cause of freedom.”

In the 1840s—indeed until the last few years—Americans accepted that the United States was based on an idea. Even in that era of crabbed racism that excluded Black Americans and women and circumscribed others, lawmakers embraced the idea that the U.S. could expand to include new people. In the immigration boom of the 1840s and 1850s, that was no small thing.

Rather than advancing the concept of manifest destiny—as deeply problematic as that would be—the Trump administration’s reposting of American Progress seems designed instead to harness American traditional symbols in order to advance the idea of “blood and soil” citizenship popularized in 1930s Germany.

“Blood and soil” ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walther Darré reflected those ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values. Elevating those who had lived in Germany for generations, he suggested that German blood was mystically connected to German soil. “[T]he German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it,” Darré wrote. To maintain that soul, he wrote, Germany needed to preserve racial purity and reject foreign blood. To that end, it needed to protect pure marriages and encourage the right people to have lots of children: the main job of a wife was to produce children. Unless the country took drastic measures, he wrote, the German “race” might become extinct.

The details of the “blood and soil” ideology might not be clear to MAGA today, but its adherents definitely get the concept: at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, white nationalists shouted, “Blood and soil.”

Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.

He continued: “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.” America, he said, “is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

Vance claimed that “Democrat politicians” and “corporate oligarchs” want to import “millions and millions of low-wage serfs,” and he hailed Trump’s immigration policies as “the most important part” of Trump’s first six months. He said “citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship, but also the obligations that we all share with our fellow Americans. You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged…. “[T]his is a distinctive moment in time with a distinctive place and a distinctive people.”

Attacking “the left” as driven by hatred, Vance rejected the statement of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” Vance said Mamdani’s statement shows “no gratitude” and “no sense of owing something to this land.” “I wonder,” Vance said, “has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?... Who the hell does he think that he is?”

The use of American iconography to push blood and soil showed in another post by the Homeland Security account from earlier this month. On July 14 it posted a painting of a white man with a white woman holding a baby in a covered wagon, an image the artist, Morgan Weistling, titled A Prayer for a New Life. The HHS account posted the image without Weistling’s permission, retitling it “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage: New Life in a New Land.”

The new name and capitalization are significant. Just as in the words in the post about John Gast’s painting, the two Hs are capitalized, evoking “HH,” accepted in right-wing circles as a way to write “Heil Hitler.”

On his web page, Weistling posted: “Attention: The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.”

“Blood and soil” ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walther Darré reflected those ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values.

Today’s theme seems to be Republican leadership digging into positions that are directly contradicted by facts.

On Sunday, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the price tag for renovating the “free” Boeing 747-8 President Donald J. Trump accepted from Qatar appears to be close to a billion dollars of taxpayer money. The reporters explored a “mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds” from a program to modernize the country’s ground-based nuclear missiles to an unnamed classified project. Air Force officials told them privately that the transfer is for upgrading the plane for use as Air Force One.

Yale historian Joanne Freeman posted: “He’s using our money to buy himself a gift. A billion dollar gift.”

Over the weekend, Trump called for musician Beyoncé to be prosecuted for breaking the law by taking $11 million for endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in October 2024, and for Harris to be prosecuted for paying that sum. But this simply never happened.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale explained yesterday that this is a made-up story Trump apparently got from social media. The Harris campaign covered $165,000 of the costs connected to Beyoncé’s appearance, as required by law, but a spokesperson said they did not pay celebrity endorsers (although there is no federal law prohibiting such payments). Dale says there is no evidence for Trump’s $11 million claim.

And then there is the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Sunday, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and repeatedly insisted that it was the Obama administration in 2009 that allowed sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to avoid serious federal charges by agreeing to a “sweetheart plea deal.” But it wasn’t.

As CNN’s Jake Tapper reminded him, the agreement was drafted in 2007 and signed in 2008, under President George W. Bush. Mullin continued to try to rope the Democrats into the story of the deal, but Tapper reiterated: “the point is, the ‘sweetheart deal,’ which was completed in 2008, was under the Bush administration.” Tapper also reminded Mullin that Trump made Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who backed the extraordinary leniency for Epstein, his secretary of labor during Trump’s first term.

Today, at a press opportunity in Scotland, where Trump is opening a new golf course on one of his properties, Trump told a reporter that he hasn’t “been overly interested” in the case…it's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this, those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by [former FBI director James] Comey, they were run by [former attorney general Merrick] Garland. They were run by [former president Joe] Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen. Those files were run for four years by those people.” Then he suggested that Democrats have doctored the Epstein files with fake information to smear him.

Far from quieting questions about his involvement with Epstein, this line of argument seems to confirm that he knows there is something bad in the files and is trying to spin it before it might come to light.

Today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded that the Department of Justice produce all the recordings and transcripts of the July 24 and 25 meetings between DOJ officials and convicted sex trafficker and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. He also demanded that the DOJ commit that it would not offer either a pardon or to commute Maxwell’s sentence of 20 years in exchange for information she offered.

Today, Vice President J.D. Vance assured an Ohio audience that the Congressional Budget Office was wrong in predicting that the cuts in the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed and Trump signed into law on July 4 would push 10 million people off health insurance. “Don’t believe every false media report that you’ve heard,” he said, “because our explicit goal in the Trump administration is to protect people’s healthcare.”

On July 18, health policy tracker KFF reported that health insurers have asked state regulators to approve the highest premium increases in more than five years. Just as Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted in the Washington Post four days ago, insurers point to the end of the enhanced premium tax credits that provided financial assistance for people enrolled in healthcare through the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) as the main culprit in higher prices. The insurers predict that healthcare costs for those who took advantage of the tax credits will go up by more than 75% starting in January 2026. This will drive healthier enrollees out of the market, causing prices to rise for those left in the risk pool.

As Sperling pointed out, while Republicans claimed that the tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations was “current policy” whose extension didn’t count as a tax increase, they did not apply the current policy standard to the enhanced premium tax credits.

Insurers also point to Trump’s tariffs as a cause for higher premiums. They expect those tariffs to send drug prices higher.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have relied on their voters believing the worldview leaders projected, even when the facts told a different story. It is not clear they can continue to rely on that blind loyalty.

Jason Hancock of the Missouri Independent reported today that Missouri Republican lawmakers have inspired a backlash by resisting or overturning measures approved by voters to end puppy mills, expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana, create nonpartisan redistricting, expand paid sick leave, and amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. Now a bipartisan group of organizations is trying to stop the Republican supermajority from ignoring or overturning the will of voters.

In response, some Republican lawmakers have claimed that out-of-state money swayed the votes on the measures they dislike, and are trying to change the process of initiating voter-led petitions, further silencing the voters. Others disagree. Veteran Republican consultant James Harris, who is from the state, told Hancock: “The legislature doesn’t really seem to understand, they’ve kicked the hornet’s nest. We may be about to cross the Rubicon…where the legislature loses a lot of its power.”

In North Carolina today, popular former governor Roy Cooper announced he is running for the North Carolina Senate seat currently held by Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who announced his retirement after Trump turned on him for opposing the budget reconciliation measure that threatened healthcare in his state. When he was governor, Cooper expanded Medicaid to more than 650,000 North Carolinians.

Cooper’s announcement message focused on shoring up the middle class, meeting today’s moment by calling out billionaires. “[F]or too many Americans, the middle class feels like a distant dream,” he said, while “the biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense. It's time for that to change.”

Cooper told of growing up in North Carolina, raising his family, teaching Sunday school, and helping small businesses as a lawyer. “When you made me your attorney general, I prosecuted criminals and took on scammers, big banks, and drug companies,” he said. “When you made me your governor, we balanced the state budget every year and worked with Republicans to raise teacher pay, recruit thousands of better paying jobs, and expand Medicaid…. I never really wanted to go to Washington,” he said. “I just wanted to serve the people of North Carolina right here, where I've lived all my life.”

“But,” he continued, “these are not ordinary times. Politicians in D.C. are running up our debt, ripping away our health care, disrespecting our veterans, cutting help for the poor and even putting Medicare and Social Security at risk just to give tax breaks to billionaires. That's wrong, and I've had enough. I've thought on it and prayed about it, and I've decided, I want to serve as your next United States Senator.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, called Cooper “far-left.”

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a key architect of Project 2025 will challenge Senator Lindsey Graham for the Republican nomination for Graham’s Senate seat. “This is a battle for the future of MAGA,” Paul Dans said. “This is really the turning point election that asks whether MAGA will sink back into the swamp and be subsumed, or whether this great movement will continue to grow, and the waters of the swamp retreat in Washington, and swamp critters like Lindsey are left to bake in the Palmetto sun.”

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.

So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.

Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.

Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”

On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”

The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.

Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”

EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.

As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.

Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.

When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.

And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.

Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”

Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.

And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.