For decades, American presidents have relied on the expertise of foreign policy professionals to help guide them through tricky negotiations in high-stakes conflicts around the globe.
President Trump has taken a different approach toward such experts: He’s fired them.
Now, as Mr. Trump tries to navigate perhaps the trickiest negotiation of his presidency — ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine — he is doing so after having stripped away much of the infrastructure designed to inform him about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and to keep the United States from being outmaneuvered or even duped.
“They’re flying blind without the expertise,” said Evelyn N. Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. She said the kinds of people who had been fired “have seen all the intelligence relating to Vladimir Putin’s intentions. They have spies on the ground. They know all kinds of information that’s gained through technical means.”
Mr. Trump has gutted the National Security Council, the collection of foreign policy analysts who have helped guide U.S. foreign policy for decades, cutting the staff by more than half. He has purged experts from the intelligence agencies because of tangential connections to a nearly decade-old investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump has made it clear he believes that his personal connection with Mr. Putin can help him get a peace deal on Ukraine, not being surrounded by a coterie of experts whom he sees as part of a “deep state” out to thwart his agenda.
“I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds,” Mr. Trump told President Emmanuel Macron of France on Monday, in a moment caught on a hot mic.
As Russia continues to pound Ukraine with missiles and drones, Mr. Trump has chosen to rely mostly on himself and a handful of close allies, including friends from the business world. His actions are part of a broader pattern in which Mr. Trump has reshaped the administration to carry out his wishes, not to debate policy or offer him independent advice.
Mr. Trump has stripped away much of the infrastructure designed to inform him about Mr. Putin and to keep the United States from being outmaneuvered or even duped. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
And while Mr. Trump has characterized his recent flurry of diplomacy as extremely productive, neither a cease-fire nor a peace settlement looks any closer, at least publicly.
A White House official argued that Mr. Trump was producing results through direct leader-to-leader negotiations, rather than embracing the approach of previous presidents who relied on hundreds of researchers and advisers. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor whom Mr. Trump tapped to be special envoy, had spent hours speaking to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Trump has held a deep distrust for the National Security Council since the earliest days of his first term, in 2017, because he believed that its members were undermining him.
The Trump administration’s gutting of the N.S.C. was recommended by Robert O’Brien, who led the council as national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term and argued that its mission needed to be revamped to better carry out the president’s policy objectives.
“When we cut the N.S.C. policy staff that had become needlessly bloated under Obama by half in Trump 1.0, the N.S.C. became more efficient, stopped leaking and achieved big policy wins for President Trump,” Mr. O’Brien said.
The “rightsizing” efforts in the second term “have yielded similar results,” he said, citing Mr. Trump’s summits in Alaska and Washington.
The purge of expertise ramped up this week when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, announced she was stripping 37 current and former officials of their security clearances. At least three of the current officials had worked on Russian influence issues, though none were directly responsible for the conclusions Ms. Gabbard has derided as flawed.
After Ms. Gabbard revoked the security clearances, she announced that she would all but shut down the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was established by Congress to coordinate efforts across the intelligence agencies to monitor meddling by Russia and other countries.
During the last election, the center held briefings for the news media and state officials about a variety of foreign threats to the vote. But many Republicans took offense at suggestions their supporters were amplifying Russian propaganda, and the Trump administration has proceeded to dismantle most of the efforts to monitor and warn about foreign influence operations.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said expert intelligence professionals were being forced out and those that remained were “sent a clear message” on what they should say.
“Vladimir Putin is sneering with satisfaction as Donald Trump, aided and abetted by his director of national intelligence, guts the intelligence community in pursuit of his political vendettas,” he said. He added that the intelligence community’s ability to perform “objective collection and analysis” was being systematically dismantled, a process that he said would “inevitably make our country less safe and less free.”
Senior Trump administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly, disputed the contention that significant Russia expertise was being lost. They suggested that the focus on Moscow over other foreign policy challenges was misguided. The purge of officials was focused on people involved in analytic work that Ms. Gabbard believes was poor, the officials said.
Joel Willett, a former C.I.A. officer and National Security Council staff member, was among the 37 people who lost their security clearances this week. That meant he will no longer be able to work on classified government contracts.
In a social media post, Laura Loomer, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, said she had flagged Mr. Willett for signing a letter calling for Mr. Trump to be impeached in 2019 and noted that he was considering a run for the Democratic nomination for the Kentucky Senate seat being vacated by Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader.
Mr. Willett said Ms. Loomer’s social media post contained falsehoods. But he said the bigger issue was that the purge of expertise on Russia and other national security matters would make it harder for the U.S. government to advise the president.
Mr. Willett served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, and has looked on with dismay as Marco Rubio, the acting national security adviser and secretary of state, has reduced the size of the organization.
“We live in an age of interconnectedness and rapidly evolving global threats,” Mr. Willett said. “I, for one, appreciate knowing that my government has deep experts, highly engaged, and that the president has access to those experts to help recommend policy. But I think what we’ve seen is an administration that truly doesn’t value expertise because the president feels that he knows best about everything.”
Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed concern that the administration was losing the very experts it needed at a precarious time.
“Russia remains one of our most dangerous adversaries — interfering in elections, unleashing relentless cyberattacks and carrying out a brutal war in Ukraine,” Mr. Warner said. “At the very moment we need our best experts on the front lines, this administration is purging them for political reasons, stripping their clearances and making Americans less safe.”
At the C.I.A. a senior Russia analyst, whose name was classified, was on the list Ms. Gabbard put out.
At the National Intelligence Council, a body that coordinates intelligence analysis at Ms. Gabbard’s office, the acting chair and his deputy were removed from their positions earlier this year, after a dispute over the intelligence community’s assessment of ties between a drug cartel and the Venezuelan government.
This week, over the objections of senior officials, Ms. Gabbard ordered the N.S.A.’s senior data scientist, Vinh Nguyen, fired.
Former officials said the firing of Mr. Nguyen would have profound implications for the N.S.A.’s ability to keep pace with China’s technological advancements in encryption, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
But Mr. Nguyen was fired simply because he worked in a senior intelligence job tracking cyberoperations in 2016, when the assessment of Russia’s influence operations on the presidential election was drafted. Mr. Nguyen had little direct role in the assessment, former officials said.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former C.I.A. officer who once led the agency’s clandestine operations in Europe and Russia, says beyond the exodus of people, the administration’s actions carry other problems.
“What is worrisome to me is the chill in analytic objectivity,” Mr. Polymeropoulos said.
Mr. Polymeropoulos said Mr. Trump did not want to hear intelligence reports about Russia’s bad acts and Ms. Loomer was seizing any excuse to try and get national security officials who worked on Russia ousted from the government.
“The whole idea of the intelligence community speaking truth to power is lost when it becomes so wildly politicized,” he said. “There are going to be real repercussions to all of this.”
Quote:{1}...also called for Republicans in the state legislatures to “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING” and “go to PAPER BALLOTS before it is too late.” “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote, “we will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over. God Bless America!!!”
...
{2} Experts add that strikes on Mexico would do little to stop the flow of drugs over the border and would increase violence in the region, intensifying pressure for the U.S. to provide asylum for migrants fleeing the country.
{3}... The Department of Justice was supposed to begin handing over documents from the Epstein investigation on Tuesday but missed that deadline. Now it says it will hand them over beginning tomorrow.
{4} According to Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post, Comer said that Barr had been “very transparent” and that he had never seen any evidence that Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes. Of the document release, he said: “I appreciate the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and efforts to provide the American people with information about this matter.”
{5} Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida today prohibited Florida officials from incarcerating any more detainees at the immigrant detention center in the Everglades that supporters have called “Alligator Alcatraz.” The government’s lawyers said the facility housed people only temporarily, so stopping the arrival of new inmates should empty the center. The judge ordered that after 60 days, officials must begin to dismantle parts of the facility because of the damage it was inflicting on an environment that has been protected since 1947.
“[S]ince that time,” she wrote, “every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
hcr
In these last days of August, with Congress on hiatus and the Epstein files looming, the Trump White House appears to be making a big move to consolidate power over the federal government, weaponize it against Trump’s opponents, and keep him in power indefinitely.
At around 7:00 this morning, FBI agents searched the home and office of Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who has been a fierce critic of Trump since leaving his first administration. Officials told reporters the search was part of an investigation into whether Bolton illegally retained classified information or leaked it to news media. But as J.V. Last of The Bulwark noted, an investigation into classified documents from several years ago—as opposed to a search of, say, a drug dealer—would normally mean the government officials would have a conversation with Bolton’s lawyers and arrange for a routine search to which Bolton agreed. Instead, agents stormed his house and office in an early morning raid.
The raid seems a pretty clear warning to those Trump perceives as enemies that he will bring the full weight of the United States government to harass them. Bolton has been a thorn in Trump's side for years because he is a well-known right-wing figure who has not been shy about speaking out against Trump. As recently as last week, Bolton told CNN that Trump had “achieved very little” by meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and that “Putin clearly won.” He also noted that Trump “looked tired.”
Earlier this month, when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Bolton if he was worried Trump would come after him as part of the president’s “retribution campaign” being waged through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Bolton pointed out that Trump had already come after him by removing his Secret Service protection despite specific Iranian threats against his life. Bolton added: “I think it is a retribution presidency.”
Targeting Bolton has been a goal of FBI director Kash Patel, whom Trump appointed after Patel made it clear he intended to use the power of government against Trump’s opponents. “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in 2023 on Trump associate Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
Indeed, Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House Intelligence Committee that broke the story of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to smear Trump’s 2020 political opponent Joe Biden; New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud; and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who suggested on August 6 that the revision of the last few months’ jobs numbers might signal a turning point in the economy.
Those investigations come after another Trump loyalist, William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that the three committed mortgage fraud years ago. All three have denied the allegations, and Allan Smith, Steve Kopack, and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News note that accusation of mortgage fraud “has long been a common tactic in opposition research on political campaigns. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, pointed out that the administration does not appear to be investigating Trump loyalist Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who, divorce filings released this July show, claimed three different properties as his primary residence, thus securing lower-interest mortgages on them.
Earlier this week, bodycam footage released from a court filing by Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has charged with assaulting federal agents during the chaotic arrest of Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka on May 9, shows that the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general Todd Blanche personally ordered Baraka’s arrest. The case was later dismissed.
And yet Trump loyalists are not just targeting people in order to intimidate opponents. They seem determined to rewrite history to suit Trump.
In July the Department of Justice launched investigations of former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan, alleging they had made false statements to Congress about the investigation into the attempt by Russian operatives to help Trump’s 2016 candidacy. After all these years, Trump continues to come back to the scandal that he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
Yesterday, Russia bombed a U.S. factory in Ukraine, wounding at least 15 people, and today, Russian officials made it clear they would not even entertain the bilateral summit with Ukraine Trump called for. Nonetheless, today in a bizarre session in the Oval Office, at what was supposed to be an announcement about next year’s FIFA World Cup, wearing a cap with the words “Trump Was Right About Everything,” Trump showed reporters a photograph of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him from their meeting in Alaska last week, and expressed sadness that Putin, who has murdered more than a million people and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, can’t attend the FIFA games. Trump said he planned to sign the photograph as a gift for Putin.
The administration’s crusade against the U.S. intelligence agencies that uncovered the relationship between Russian operatives and Trump’s 2016 campaign is continuing as part of the administration’s power grab. On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced she will cut 40% of her office, with cuts coming from the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which, as Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico note, “collects and analyzes data on foreign influence operations seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.”
Today Hegseth fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Air Force Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse. The Defense Intelligence Agency provides intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to U.S. military personnel in the field.
The crackdown in Washington, D.C., seems to have far less to do with combating crime in a city where crime rates are at a 30-year low than it does with demonstrating that the administration controls the capital, the seat of the U.S. government. As conservative lawyer George Conway, who helpfully videoed the FBI raid on John Bolton’s house this morning, put it: “If you want to have a coup against the constitutional order, you want to control the capital city. And if he has control of the policing in the city of Washington,... how do you stop him? Who's gonna tell him to leave the White House?"
Trump has rewarded those who fought to steal the 2020 election for him, pardoning or commuting the sentences of more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 riot designed to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Biden president, and yesterday he demanded that Colorado officials release former election officer Tina Peters, whom a jury found guilty of four felonies for breaching election equipment to supporte Trump’s lies about election fraud after that election. Trump posted on social media: “She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election [sic]…. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”
Now Trump and his allies appear to be cementing control of the capital. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement today from the Pentagon that the 2,000 National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., will begin to carry weapons. More National Guard personnel are on the way. At the same time, FBI Director Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino appear to be turning the FBI into a national police force: dropping the requirement for a college degree, reducing training hours, and focusing on street crime rather than the bureau’s traditional expertise in white collar crime, corruption, and so on.
Trump said yesterday he wants to extend the deployment for more than the 30-day limit the law allows, and today he warned that he would take over the city “with the federal government.” Today, in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that his administration would invade Chicago, which he called a “mess,” next. He said that “African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’”
On August 18, Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias warned that Trump is “stationing the military and other federal law enforcement in blue areas so—when the time comes—he can pivot their mission to suppressing voting rights and undermining free and fair elections.” On Tuesday, Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his webcast War Room: “They're petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there's going to be ICE officers near polling places. You damn right.”
Last March, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote that those who fantasize about a strongman make the terrible mistake of thinking “that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't,” Snyder wrote. “In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something.” But he doesn’t, Snyder explains: your support makes you irrelevant.
Those who supported Trump from a belief that he would protect American business from state interference received yet another example of Snyder’s point today when Trump boasted that the government has taken a 10% stake in Intel, which builds semiconductors and chips. Trump says he intends to take similar stakes in other companies.
In the midst of the day’s firestorm of news, the administration released several pieces of the transcripts of Todd Blanche’s interview with Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. In them, she is recorded as saying, among other things: “[A]s far as I'm concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I…admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I've always liked him.”
Trump apologist lawyer Jonathan Turley suggested the Maxwell interviews would lay the story of the Epstein files to rest. But the interviews were always a distraction from the Epstein files themselves. Prosecutors at the Department of Justice itself called Maxwell a serial liar, and as Erica Orden, Josh Gerstein, and Kyle Cheney of Politico note, she is now angling for a pardon after her conviction on sex trafficking charges.
In Illinois today, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson called Trump’s threat to take over the city an illegal abuse of power.
On X, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Things People are Begging for: 1. Cheaper groceries 2. No Medicaid and SNAP cuts 3. Release of the Epstein Files.” He added: “Things People are NOT begging for: 1. An authoritarian power grab of major cities.”
Damn, we live in such a ridiculous timeline.
“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”
It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.
It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.
The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.
It was not always this way.
After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.
As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.
But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.
Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.
Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.
Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.
Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”
In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government. That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.
By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.
If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.
A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.
When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.
They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.
At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census. They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.
Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.
But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base. After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.
In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color. Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did. Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.
Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.
From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.
Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”
Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”
Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”
Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”
Didn't think I would ever see this day.
Unfortunately, there is much to suggest (and there are plenty of studies on this) that there is no single explanation for the right-wing populist offensive.
Sure, a lot of this is happening because the US has a two-party system.
Just like the UK. But there, the far right has now managed to establish itself as a separate party (Nigel Farage's Reform UK) and has made big gains in English local elections, cementing its position as a prime challenger to Britain's traditional main parties.
Of course, I don't think that's a good thing either, but why don't people in the US dare to do the same? I think traditional Republicans would also have a chance.
Right-wing populists see themselves more as an excluded and chosen minority. Unlike conservatives, many of them are not interested in genuine opposition, but in torpedoing the system from the outside.
Unfortunately, there is much to suggest (and there are plenty of studies on this) that there is no single explanation for the right-wing populist offensive. Furthermore, in my opinion, we are only at the beginning when it comes to analysing the phenomenon and, above all, finding effective counterstrategies.
Trump’s Stunning Attack on Mail-In Ballots
By Barton Gellman
Mr. Gellman is a senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law.
At first glance, President Trump’s Truth Social post alleging voting fraud did not look especially alarming — not, anyway, by this president’s singular standards. Mr. Trump’s long-debunked lies about stolen elections are no less malignant in 2025 than they were in 2020 and 2021, during his concerted effort to overturn his loss at the polls. Still, by now, persistent repetition has diminished the power of those lies to shock.
And yet something quite shocking did emerge from a second journey through the mangled syntax of Mr. Trump’s diatribe against “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”
Buried in the long harangue was an announcement: The president had a plan to “get rid of” election procedures that he alleged were scams. He intended to dictate, apparently by executive order, how states should count and tabulate the votes.
This was stunning. The only modern president who had refused to concede a certified election defeat now proclaimed his authority over election rules nationwide. Mr. Trump vowed that he wanted nothing more than to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” Having tried his best once to undermine our constitutional system, Mr. Trump is the last American — literally or near enough — who should be entrusted to supervise the integrity of the vote.
As widely noted, the executive order that he described would be nakedly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 explicitly directs that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” The same passage grants Congress the power to override those laws. The president has no lawful role, save to sign any new legislation.
Later that day, Mr. Trump told reporters that “the best lawyers” were drafting his executive order “right now.” But the next day the White House appeared to backpedal. Without saying anything concrete, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, left reporters with the impression that the president was shifting focus to making the changes he wants in collaboration with Congress and state governments.
It is tempting to write all this off as another story of chaos in Trumplandia. But even if Mr. Trump abandons his plans for an executive order, the episode illuminates some disturbing features of his presidency.
To begin with, the surprise announcement and the sudden, if ambiguous, turnabout suggested once again that Mr. Trump is governing in his second term without advisers who can or even try to help him discipline his impulses. The episode exposes, as well, his renewed obsession with exerting control over election machinery. And it offers a vivid glimpse of his inclination to regard his powers as all but limitless.
No competent lawyer could have counseled Mr. Trump in good faith that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” as the president asserted in his post. Nor would such a lawyer have dreamed of advising him that state election officials “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Who, if anyone, told Mr. Trump that he could take command of state elections this way? Possibly he made up the authority himself. Some former Trump staff members believe he may not engage at all with questions about whether something he wants to do is lawful or something he wants to say is true. Those questions, they tell me, do not even occur to him.
Others who have worked for Mr. Trump say he seems to believe sincerely, if that is the word for it, that anything is permitted to him. Still others insist that he knows very well when he is crossing a line but presses on until obliged by an opposing force to stop.
Whatever the origins, Mr. Trump has now staked out a fundamentally illegitimate claim to authority over the conduct of American elections. He has yet to repudiate it. If he continues to press the claim, then the foundational mechanisms of our democracy may be in genuine danger. It is more than hypothetically possible that Mr. Trump, when frustrated, will try to compel the obedience of state election officials by throwing the weight of the executive branch against them.
Mr. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington and active duty Marines in Los Angeles, accompanied by threats that he might do the same in other Democratic urban strongholds, suggests another risk. Could he use some pretext to take control of voting machinery? If he dispatches troops or federal law enforcement agents to disrupt blue-city voting or ballot counting in swing states — Atlanta, say, or Milwaukee or Philadelphia — the midterm elections could be in real peril.
With or without the deployment of force, Mr. Trump’s fusillade of baseless claims about election fraud shakes public confidence in the integrity of the vote — and provides excuses for his dishonest efforts to delegitimize the outcomes. For all his political life, he has waged war against the proposition that he or his party could ever lose a legitimate election. He and his allies are preparing the ground for their next battle, in 2026.
From the earliest days of his second term, the president and his lieutenants have pursued an unprecedented assault on the machinery of free and fair elections.
By pardoning or commuting the sentence of every member of the mob charged in connection with the effort to stop certification of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump signaled clearly that crimes committed for his benefit would largely go unpunished. By ordering a criminal investigation against Christopher Krebs, a former federal agency chief, on grounds that expressly included that Mr. Krebs had “denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen,” Mr. Trump signaled just as clearly that contradicting his claims could put a person in prison.
More recently, after Trump said in March that people behind the “crooked” 2020 election should “go to jail,” the Justice Department reportedly created prosecution task forces in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., to look into bringing criminal charges against state officials who fail to secure their elections against foreign tampering, ineligible voters or noncitizens casting ballots. Federal prosecutors have sent intimidating demands for information to several states.
Mr. Trump has also sought to disenfranchise some voters. In March he issued an order to require that anyone who registers to vote with a federal form must show a passport or a comparable document that proves U.S. citizenship. Only about half of U.S. citizens hold a passport. Some 21 million Americans have no ready access to any form of proof of their citizenship. Mr. Trump’s order would have prevented new registrations using the federal form for something like 10 percent of the lawful electorate. Multiple lawsuits, one of them brought by my colleagues at the Brennan Center, persuaded judges to block Mr. Trump’s order.
Mr. Trump ordered the same month the Election Assistance Commission to rescind all existing federal certifications of state voting equipment, which could leave states scrambling to replace billions of dollars’ worth of machinery. The effect and likely intent was to cast doubts on machine tabulation, which extensive research has shown to be faster and more accurate than counting by hand. Those doubts, fed by conspiracy theories, would in turn make it harder for state officials to resist the kind of pressure Mr. Trump put on them in 2020 to change election results.
There are reasons to hope Mr. Trump will fail to subvert next year’s midterms. Election officials of both parties have, by and large, withstood years of relentless threats, violence and disinformation. They can’t do this alone. Ahead of the last elections, police officers across the country trained to protect the polls in partnership with election officials and carried pocket legal guides tailored to their jurisdictions.
Some state attorneys general and other lawyers are organizing to push back against illegal or illegitimate federal demands for sensitive records. Security experts, some of them former federal employees, are stepping in to fill the gaps that the president left when he gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, by helping states to defend voting and tabulation machinery against sophisticated hackers. State courts have asserted their primacy in interpreting state election law, beyond the president’s reach.
The ultimate safeguard of constitutional government is the great mass of citizen voters who decide by the tens of millions what kind of government they want. We hold the power, whatever our partisan preferences, to defend checks and balances and the rule of law. We cannot lose that power unless we surrender it.
I have always wondered: How could millions of Germans from all walks of life, who were neither above nor below average in terms of criminality before or after, become active, indifferent or simply passive members of a criminal community?
You didn't need a special background to become a National Socialist; Hitler's followers came from all walks of life.
Hopefully, something like this will never happen again, anywhere.
I do not wish to compare the present day with the Nazi era in Germany and Hitler. (But we must not forget: without democracy, there would have been no Hitler.)
However, the Nazis relied on violence, disruption and speed to assert their power. Hitler secured his rule by destroying the separation of powers, the independent judiciary and the free press – the same thing can currently be observed in the USA.
The only difference is that Trump sets a different agenda every day and creates high tension with deliberate sensory overload. Hitler did something similar, but much more intensively.
As the administration of President Donald Trump is using loopholes in the nation’s laws to claim the right to use the military against American citizens, Democratic governors are pushing back.
The administration has taken control of the Washington, D.C., police under the 1973 Home Rule Act, which permits that takeover if “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.” Although the Department of Justice itself reported that crime in the city is at a 30-year low, Trump declared a crime emergency in the District of Columbia on August 11 to take control of the police.
The Home Rule Act limits the president’s takeover to 30 days unless the House and Senate pass a joint resolution to extend that time. On Friday, Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) introduced a bill to extend the takeover for about six months and to make that time the default for all future “emergencies.”
Tonight, California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account posted: “Trump’s militarization of Los Angeles seems to have been just the start of an authoritarian takeover of American cities. This is not leadership. This is a scary, unlawful grab for power, and we should all be deeply concerned.”
Newsom has been calling attention to Trump’s erratic behavior and mental incapacity by imitating the president’s disjointed all-caps social media posts and mimicking the president’s merchandise. He recently replaced Trump’s name with his own on ball caps, for example, to say “Newsom was right about everything” after Trump appeared Friday with a cap saying “Trump was right about everything,” and has offered flags that say “Make America GAVIN Again” to troll Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.
On Saturday, Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that for weeks the Pentagon has been planning a military deployment of National Guard members and possibly active-duty troops to Chicago. The president cannot send National Guard troops unless a governor requests them, but Trump deployed troops in Los Angeles with the argument that the soldiers were protecting federal buildings and personnel, an argument that could apply almost anywhere he sends Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention. The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority. There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the [Illinois National Guard], deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders. Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he's causing families. We'll continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect Illinoisans.”
This morning, Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore, Maryland, after Maryland governor Wes Moore invited him in what Trump called “a rather nasty and provocative tone,” to join him on a walk through the streets of Baltimore. Trump wrote that “I gave Wes Moore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge. I will now have to rethink this decision???” Trump appeared to be referring not to his own money, but to federal funds supporting the rebuilding of Baltimore’s Key Bridge, which collapsed after a container ship hit it on March 26, 2024. The collapse stopped operations at one of the busiest ports in the nation.
In another post, Trump suggested that Moore, who served in Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star, awarded for acts of valor in combat, had lied about getting a Bronze Star.
Moore responded: “President Bone Spurs will do anything to get out of walking—even if that means spouting off more lies about the progress we’re making on public safety in Maryland. Hey Donald, we can get you a golf cart if that makes things easier. Just let my team know.” He added: “Did Donald Trump, the President of the United States, lie about an injury to dodge the Vietnam draft?”
The AI feature of X, called “Grok,” helpfully added: “Trump received four student deferments during the Vietnam era, followed by a 1968 medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels, per official records. The diagnosing doctor's daughters later claimed it was a favor to Trump's father, with no actual spurs. [Trump fixer] Michael Cohen testified Trump admitted faking it. Trump denies this, saying it was legitimate but temporary. No medical records confirm or refute.”
On Face the Nation today, Moore said he was actively looking at redistricting in Maryland to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting in Republican-dominated states Trump is demanding. Moore said: “[W]e…need to make sure that if the president of the United States is putting his finger on the scale to try to manipulate elections because he knows that his policies cannot win in a ballot box, then it behooves each and every one of us to be able to keep all options on the table to ensure that the voters’ voices can actually be heard. “
The National Guard troops deployed to Washington, D.C., will begin carrying firearms tonight.
But Trump appears angry that he is not being given enough scope for his desires. Tonight he posted on social media that the tradition of blue slips, which enables senators to stop the appointment of objectionable federal judges in their own states, has made it impossible for him to appoint the judges he wants. He wrote: “I have a Consultational [sic] Right to appoint Judges and U.S. Attorneys, but that RIGHT has been completely taken away from me…. [T]he only candidates that I can get confirmed for these most important positions are, believe it or not, Democrats! [Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee] Chuck Grassley should allow strong Republican candidates to ascend to these very vital and powerful roles, and tell the Democrats, as they often tell us, to go to HELL!”
Trump is likely reacting to his inability to keep his attorney Alina Habba in the position of U.S. attorney for New Jersey after New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used blue slips to keep her from getting a Senate vote for confirmation. Trump appointed Habba acting U.S. attorney but after her 120-day interim period expired, a panel of judges skipped over her to appoint her assistant, Desiree Leigh Grace, to the job. Attorney general Pam Bondi then fired Grace, and Trump reappointed Habba. Last week, U.S. district judge Matthew Brann ruled that Habba was not holding the post lawfully.
There seems to be some tension in the White House tonight. As Trump’s poll numbers are in the low 40s on his job performance and underwater on every one of his policies, tonight he wrote: “Except what is written and broadcast in the Fake News, I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s. Thank you. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Trump followed that post up with another. “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!! MAGA”
This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.
Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.
At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”
Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”
Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”
This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.
He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”
Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”
“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”
Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”
If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”
Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”
Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”
The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”
Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”
But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.
Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”
He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”
“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.
“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”
Today, for the second time in as many days, President Donald J. Trump suggested that Americans want a dictator. In a meeting in the Cabinet Room that lasted more than three hours, during which he listened to the fulsome praise of his cabinet officers and kept his hands below the table, seemingly to hide the bad bruising on his right hand, Trump said: “The line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.’”
With Trump underwater on all his key issues and his job approval rating dismal, the administration appears to be trying to create support for Trump by insisting that the U.S. is mired in crime and he alone can solve the problem. The administration’s solution is not to fund violence prevention programs and local law enforcement—two methods proven to work—but instead to use the power of the government to terrorize communities.
There is a frantic feel to that effort, as if they feel they must convince Americans to fear crime more than they fear rising grocery prices or having to take their children past police checkpoints on their way to school.
Last night, speaking with personality Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the person behind the draconian immigration raids in the country, seemed to be angry that Washingtonians weren’t sufficiently grateful for Trump’s takeover of the streets. But Miller indicated that the administration is really focused on splitting Republicans and Democrats who disapprove of the administration's policies, demonizing the Democrats.
Miller asserted to Hannity that the “Democrat Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization…. The Democrat Party, Sean, that exists today,” he said, “it disgusts me.”
Now, with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker taking a stand against the deployment of troops in Chicago, Trump appears to be nervous about sending troops on his own hook and instead trying to pressure Pritzker to ask for them. In the Oval Office today, he complained that Pritzker wasn’t asking for troops, and on social media tonight he called Pritzker “an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.”
And yet, for all their talk of dispatching soldiers to combat crime, National Guard troops today were picking up trash in Washington, D.C., and working on dozens of “beautification and restoration" projects.
The administration’s focus on crime to win back support for the president is going to have to overcome increasing uneasiness with Trump’s attempt to take control of the nation’s monetary policy.
In a letter posted to social media last night at 8:02 Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump announced that he was removing Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook from her position “for cause.” That cause, he claimed, was the allegation from Trump loyalist William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that Cook had made false statements on a mortgage years ago. With Pulte’s help, the administration has gone after a number of Democrats with such allegations. Cook has not been charged with any crime. Historically, “for cause” has meant corruption or dereliction of duty.
Trump has been at war with the Federal Reserve for months. The Fed is an independent institution that oversees the nation’s economy and manages the nation’s monetary policy, which means the Federal Reserve sets interest rates for the country. Trump wants it to lower interest rates to make it easier to borrow money. Cheaper money will goose the economy, but it is also likely to spur inflation, which is already on the rise thanks to Trump’s tariff war and massive deportations of migrant workers. Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates or, failing that, to resign.
Trump has mused about taking control of the Fed himself, but the politicization of the nation’s monetary policy so it responds to the whims of Trump rather than actual economic conditions makes economists and most elected officials recoil. Today in his newsletter, economist Paul Krugman wrote that if Trump’s illegal firing of Cook is allowed to stand, “the implications will be profound and disastrous. The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent. And,” he added, “the damage will be felt far beyond the Fed. This will mark the destruction of professionalism and independent thinking throughout the federal government.”
In May the Supreme Court suggested it would overturn an almost century-old precedent saying that the president cannot remove the heads of independent agencies created by Congress. But even then, it protected the independence of the Fed, writing: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
Trump administration officials appear to be trying to find a way around that ruling by going after Cook on trumped-up charges. After serving as a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University and on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Cook has been on the board of governors since 2022. She is the first Black woman to sit on the board and might have drawn Trump’s ire as well when she noted publicly that the jobs report earlier this month could signal an economic turning point.
Cook responded to Trump’s letter in a statement saying: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”
The administration’s apparent persecution of undocumented immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it unlawfully deported to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March and then refused to return despite court orders to do so, is a more immediate illustration of the lawlessness of authoritarian rule.
The government finally returned Abrego to the U.S., only to announce that it had secured an indictment against him in Tennessee for allegedly conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants for financial gain, charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop for which Abrego was not charged with anything. He was jailed in Tennessee, and a judge ordered that he remain in jail to protect him from the government, which threatened to deport him again if he were released. He was finally released on August 22 and went home to his family in Maryland, but when he attended a mandatory check-in at the ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland, on Monday, August 25, he was arrested.
Members of the administration routinely describe Abrego, who has no criminal convictions, as a gang member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser, and child predator who is terrorizing the United States. Trump referred to him yesterday as “an animal.”
Now, as Jeremy Roebuck, Maria Sacchetti, and Dana Munro of the Washington Post explained yesterday, Abrego’s lawyers say the government is trying to coerce him into pleading guilty of human trafficking, offering to send him to the Spanish-speaking Latin American country of Costa Rica if he does, but threatening to deport him to Uganda if he does not. As legal analyst Harry Litman notes, deportation would enable the government to avoid “having to show their hand on what seems to be a very threadbare case.”
The official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet-level department of the United States government—trolled Abrego, whom the media often identifies as a “Maryland man,” by posting: “Uganda Man.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, whose order to return Abrego to the U.S. the government ignored for months, indicated she had no faith that the government would obey the law. She temporarily barred the administration from deporting Abrego until she can make sure the government follows the law, making Department of Justice lawyer confirm he understood that “[y]our clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States.”
Tonight, Democrat Catelin Drey won a special election for the Iowa state senate, breaking a Republican supermajority and flipping a seat in a district Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024. Drey won the seat by 10.4%, showing a swing of more than 2o points to the Democrats. And in a seven-way race in Georgia for the state Senate in a deep red district, the lone Democrat, Debra Shigley, came in first with 40% of the vote. Since no candidate won 50% of the vote, Shigley will face whichever Republican candidate comes out on top—the top two are currently hovering around 17%—in a runoff on September 23.
