Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Over the image, Trump’s social media post read: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The words were followed by three helicopter emojis, symbols the right wing uses to represent former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s goons’ disappearing political opponents by pushing them out of helicopters.
Although it has become trite to speculate about what Republicans would say if a Democratic president engaged in the behavior Trump exhibits daily, this open attack of the president on an American city is a new level of unhinged. Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo wrote: “The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents.” He added, accurately: “In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy.”
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker called attention to the gravity of Trump’s post: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” Under the words “Know your rights, Illinois,” and “Stay safe and stay informed,” the governor’s social media account posted information about Americans’ rights in both English and Spanish.
Trump’s threats against American citizens are outrageous, but they also feel desperate. Trump’s popularity is tanking, the economy is faltering, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing a chorus of calls to resign or be fired, and the American people are taking to the streets. Thousands of people turned out today in Washington, D.C., for the “We Are All D.C.” march to protest the presence of troops in the city, and in Chicago for the “Chicago Says No Trump No Troops” protest. The protests are notable for the seas of signs the peaceful protesters carry.
And then, with Congress back in session, there is the resurgence of the issue of Trump’s appearance in the Epstein files. Last week, the White House warned Republicans that voting to release the Epstein files “would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration.” Yesterday, Trump reiterated his claim that the agitation for the release of the files is a “Democrat HOAX…in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President.”
Also yesterday, lawyers for the Justice Department asked a federal judge to keep the names of two associates who received large payments from Epstein in 2018 secret. Days before the payments, the Miami Herald had started to examine the sweetheart deal Epstein got in 2008. One associate received a payment of $100,000, and the second received $250,000. As part of his plea deal, Tom Winter of NBC News reports, Epstein got a guarantee that the associates would not be prosecuted.
Last night, Trump hosted the inaugural dinner of what the White House is calling the “Rose Garden Club” in the newly-paved White House Rose Garden, telling those assembled that they were there because they are loyal to the president. “You’re the ones that I never had to call at 4:00 in the morning,” Trump told them. “You are the ones that have been my friends, and you know what I’m talking about.”
Yesterday, talking to reporters about the Epstein files, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that Trump was “an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.” The idea that Trump was secretly working to bring Epstein down is common fare among conspiracy theorists, but as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests, Johnson’s embrace of it might well be an attempt to spin material in the files before it becomes public.
Marshall notes that journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed Epstein at length during Trump’s first presidency, says that Epstein suspected it was Trump who told the authorities about his systemic sexual assault of girls. But if so, Marshall explains, this is damning rather than exonerating.
It’s pretty well known that Trump and Epstein had a falling out in 2004 after Trump went behind Epstein’s back to buy an estate in South Florida that Epstein wanted. But at the time, Trump was headed toward bankruptcy, and it was not clear where he was getting the money to buy the estate.
Marshall calls attention to a recent interview in which Wolff said that Epstein suspected Trump was laundering money for a Russian oligarch—and indeed, Trump did flip the property to a Russian oligarch for a profit of more than $50 million a few years after buying it—and threatened to sue Trump, bringing the money laundering to light. At that point, the Epstein investigation began.
According to Wolff, Epstein believed Trump had notified the police about what was going on at Epstein’s house, which he knew because he was a frequent visitor. Marshall speculates that Johnson mentioned that Trump was an informant because that information could well be in the files the Department of Justice has, and they’re trying to spin it ahead of time to make it sound like Trump was a hero.
But both Wolff and Marshall note that if indeed Trump turned the FBI onto Epstein, it shows he knew what was taking place at Epstein’s properties.
Johnson’s claim that Trump was an FBI informant suggests Trump’s team is worried that as more and more people get access to the files, it will be increasingly difficult to hide what’s in them. Trump's demand for Republicans’ loyalty suggests that at least some of them are starting to recalculate it. And that, in turn, might have something to do with why he is putting troops in the streets.
Signs bearing President Trump’s name have gone up at major construction projects financed by the 2021 law, which he strenuously opposed ahead of its passage.
In southern Connecticut, the federal government is replacing a 118-year-old bridge along America’s busiest rail corridor. The $1.3 billion project was largely funded by the 2021 infrastructure law that was championed by then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and strenuously opposed by Donald J. Trump.
These days, however, motorists cruising by the construction site might be forgiven for thinking that a certain famous New York developer was responsible for it all.
“PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” a sign by the road declares. “REBUILDING AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE.”
In recent months, a number of similar signs have popped up in front of major infrastructure projects financed by the bipartisan 2021 legislation, a $1.2 trillion package that Mr. Trump, who left office in January of that year, had passionately railed against. He called the bill “a loser for the U.S.A.,” and warned that Republican lawmakers who signed on could be thrown out of office by angry primary voters. “Patriots will never forget!” he wrote.
The signs bearing Mr. Trump’s name now adorn bridge projects in Connecticut and Maryland; rail-yard improvement projects in Seattle, Boston and Philadelphia; and the replacement of a tunnel on Amtrak’s route between Baltimore and Washington, according to W. Kyle Anderson, a spokesman for the company.
In an email, Mr. Anderson said the new signs “are a voluntary Amtrak initiative, updating outdated signage posted at the project locations listed previously, following the change in presidential administrations earlier this year.”
The signs note, in a smaller font, that the projects in question are “funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” the official name of the legislation that Mr. Trump tried to derail.
Still, the signs, in bold MAGA red, strike some as misleading.
Representative Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat who represents the area where the Connecticut River Bridge is being replaced, said seeing the sign with Mr. Trump’s name there “is just, you know, very odd to me.”
He added: “That bridge would never have gotten where it is today without that bill, which he opposed.”
It is hardly unheard of for a new administration to replace signage featuring the name of the previous president. But the 2021 infrastructure law has uncorked particularly intense debates over the granting of credit, perhaps inevitable given the size of a spending package that was roughly the size of the gross domestic product of the Netherlands.
Last year, in the midst of election season, Politico compiled a list of a number of House Republicans who voted against the bill but went on to take credit for bringing projects funded by the legislation to their districts. Representative Nancy Mace, who is currently running for governor in her home state of South Carolina, called the bill a “socialist wish list,” but did not protest the millions of dollars it allocated to public transit upgrades in the Charleston area.
“What do you want me to do, turn my back on the Lowcountry when we get funding for public transit?” she said, when asked about the apparent contradiction, according to a local newspaper.
A number of infrastructure projects formerly featured signs name-checking Mr. Biden, said Mr. Anderson, the Amtrak spokesman. (“Project funded by President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure law,” some of them stated). Those, too, drew backlash.
In June 2024, Senator Ted Cruz complained about them to the Office of Special Counsel, arguing that they amounted to campaign signs for Mr. Biden, and thus violated the Hatch Act, which limits federal employees’ political activities.
“These displays are nothing more than campaign yard signs courtesy of the American taxpayer,” Mr. Cruz wrote at the time.
The special counsel’s office investigated the matter, disagreed with Mr. Cruz and closed the case.
This week, Mr. Cruz’s office did not respond to an email asking whether the Trump signs might also violate the Hatch Act.
Infrastructure questions are sensitive for Mr. Trump, who ran for president in 2016 reminding voters that he was one of the nation’s great master builders, promising an infrastructure rebuilding program to rival the New Deal era. But he never quite pulled it off. In fact, his administration’s repeated efforts to hold an “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke during his tumultuous first term.
In April, three months after Mr. Trump began his second term, the Federal Railroad Administration stripped language from its grant agreements that had required signs about projects made possible by the 2021 legislation to say they were “funded by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”
The Connecticut Department of Transportation took this as a signal to remove signs with Mr. Biden’s name, said Josh Morgan, a department spokesman.
The replacement of the Connecticut River Bridge, which connects the towns of Old Lyme and Old Saybrook, is expected to generate up to 300 jobs. According to Mr. Courtney, the existing bridge was found to be structurally deficient in 2006. Trains must now slow down to 45 miles per hour to cross, he said. They will be able to cross the new bridge, he said, at 70 miles per hour.
At the dawn of the second Trump administration, Amtrak had good reason to worry about its future. In March, when Elon Musk was deeply involved in slashing federal government programs, the billionaire said that the company was “embarrassing” and should be privatized.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat whose Seattle district includes a rail-yard project festooned with some of the signs, speculated that Amtrak might be posting them to remain in Mr. Trump’s good graces. “Look, I think that what we’re seeing is Trump is demanding loyalty from every single government agency,” she said.
Whether or not that is the case, Amtrak appears to be on a more secure footing in the early months of the Trump administration.
Sean Jeans-Gail, vice president of policy for the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy group that seeks to improve passenger rail service, said that after the scare of Mr. Musk’s call for privatization, the administration ended up releasing a presidential budget for passenger rail that is “very measured” and “allows Amtrak to keep running the trains and make some key investments.”
Asked about the signs, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Transportation said in a statement that Amtrak was recognizing the Trump administration’s “swift action” in clearing a backlog of roughly 3,200 grants that the Biden administration had allocated but not awarded. The process had been sped along, the statement said, by “cutting unnecessary DEI and climate mandates from the grant process.”
Amtrak news releases show that construction on some projects featuring the Trump signs began in the Biden era, including the Connecticut bridge project and the $2.7 billion replacement of the Susquehanna River Bridge in Havre de Grace, Md.
Mr. Anderson, the Amtrak spokesman, praised the Transportation Department’s “hard work,” which he said had helped address the backlog.
He added: “We appreciate the Trump administration’s strong support for Amtrak’s historic infrastructure investments.”
In about three weeks, the government’s funding will run out. Democrats will face a choice: Join Republicans to fund a government that President Trump is turning into a tool of authoritarian takeover and vengeance or shut the government down.
Democrats faced a version of this choice back in March. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, was chain-sawing its way through the government. Civil servants were being fired left and right. Government grants and payments were being choked off and reworked into tools of political power and punishment. Trump was signing executive orders demanding the investigation — I would say, the persecution — of his enemies. He had announced shocking tariffs on Mexico and Canada. We were in the muzzle velocity stage of this presidency. And Democrats seemed completely overwhelmed and outmatched.
I often heard people complain that Democrats lacked a message. What Democrats really lacked was power. They didn’t have the House or the Senate, but they did have one sliver of leverage: To fund the government, Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes. And not just one or two. They needed at least seven Democrats to reach that magic 60-vote threshold. House Democrats wanted a shutdown. But Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, didn’t. He voted for the funding bill and encouraged a crucial number of his colleagues to do the same. The bill passed.
To many Democrats, this seemed insane. Some began openly calling for Schumer to resign or face a primary challenge. This was Democrats’ first real opportunity to fight back against Trump, and they had folded. What were they good for?
During this period, I talked to Schumer, to House leadership, to members of Congress with different theories of what should be done. I didn’t think it was an easy call. The House’s argument — Hakeem Jeffries’s argument — was that a shutdown creates a crisis. A crisis creates attention. And attention gives Democrats the chance to make their case, to be heard by the American people.
The argument Schumer made was threefold. First, Trump was being stopped in the courts. There were dozens of cases playing out against him, and he was losing again and again and again. Shut down the government, and you might shut down the courts.
Second, DOGE was trying to gut the executive branch. When the government falls into a funding crisis, the executive gets more authority to decide where the money the government does have goes. In that chaos, DOGE could go further and faster.
After all, it’s Democrats who want the government to work. It was Trump and DOGE looking for every opportunity to dismantle it. A shutdown wasn’t leverage against Trump. It was leverage against the Democrats’ own priorities.
Third, the market was quaking at the threat of Trump’s tariffs. Trump had promised a strong economy and low prices, and instead he was creating chaos. If Democrats triggered a shutdown at the exact moment Trump was creating an economic crisis, they would confuse who was to blame for the chaos — was it Trump or them? It’s the first rule of politics: When your opponents are drowning, do not throw them a lifeline.
And I thought there was a fourth argument: Democrats had not prepared for a shutdown. They had not explained why they were shutting the government down or what they wanted to achieve. They had no strategy. They had no message. The demand I was hearing them make was that the spending bill needed more bipartisan negotiation. It was unbearably lame.
If you had forced me to choose, I would have said Schumer was probably right. It wasn’t the time for a shutdown — in part because Democrats weren’t prepared to win one.
But the bill that passed back in March funding the government runs out at the end of this month. And so we’re facing the question again: Should Senate Democrats partner with Senate Republicans to fund this government?
I don’t see how they can. (...)
the orange turd playbook:
1. create a problem
2. fix that problem
3. take full credit for fix
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGGKLBd2n84&pp=ygUZbWVpZGFzdG91Y2ggbmV0d29yayB0b2RheQ%3D%3D[/youtube]
Mcconnell enabled this disaster to happen and now he's warning us about it?.
What piss's me off is it's all Trump this and Trump that, what about the 70 million pieces of **** that voted for him and the other Republican scumbags
They knew well what he and the rest of them were like.They knew he was going to pardon the Jan 6th traitors, who are now probably going to get a small fortune in claims paid for by the tax payers.
They knew he was going to attack his allies and suck up to his hero Putin.
They knew he was going to impose tariffs which yet again the American consumers have to pay.
They knew he'd enrich himself, his family (bigly) and his rich buddies.
They knew he was going to go after immigrants on a industrial scale.
They knew he was a sexual deviant closely linked to Epstein.
They knew he was going to go after Medicaid.
And so now we have masked and unidentified thugs kidnapping people off the streets, not gang bangers, just ordinary workers.
We have US aid to the poorest people on the planet stopped.
We have idiots ******* up the Educational system, the Health service and the Judicial system.
We have the army on the streets.
The army and ICE are massing outside of Chicago ala Putin/Ukraine style.
While the orange turd is threatening to send the army into other blue states, not red ones of course.
We have Miller (Nazi scumbag) delaring Democrats terrorists.
I could go on.
And all you Trumpers, MAGA, Republican scum it's down to you.
You ******* traitors.
Don't often see that much honesty and passion when discussing the Turd-in-Chief here in A2K.
On Friday, September 5, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell told Southern Baptist pastor and Newsmax host Tony Perkins that Trump may try to declare that “there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States" in order to claim “emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward,” overriding the Constitution’s clear designation that states alone have control over elections. Mitchell has long called for voting restrictions and was on the infamous January 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in which Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that would give the state’s electoral votes to him rather than the victorious Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.
Democracy Docket, the media organization founded and run by voting rights and election lawyer Marc Elias, has been tracking the administration’s assault on democracy and has repeatedly called out both such language and Trump’s attempts to monkey with the machinery of our democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and now the use of the military in Democratic-led cities.
In August, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket explained that through intimidation, harassment, and delays, troops could keep large numbers of voters from casting ballots. The administration might even claim fraud to seize voting machines, as Trump contemplated doing in 2020. Today in Mother Jones, Ari Berman noted the administration has dismantled efforts to promote election security and is working to stack state elections boards with loyalists.
MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon recently said: “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’re damn right.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, speaking of Trump’s threatened military incursion into Chicago, observed: “This is not about fighting crime. This is about the President and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”
Yesterday the administration announced a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Boston, and today it announced a surge into Chicago. Although Trump has been threatening to send in federalized National Guard troops, at least so far the announcement appears to be limited to ICE agents, who are part of the country’s regular law enforcement systems. Pritzker noted that the administration had made no effort to reach out to state officials as it would have if it actually wanted to combat crime. Instead, Pritzker said, “we are learning of their operations through their social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show.”
The apparent plan of the Trump administration reflects the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there's just power.”
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since taking office he has operated under emergency powers. On August 22, Karen Yourish and Charlie Smart noted in the New York Times that since he took office, Trump has declared nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. The journalists report that since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term. Trump declared that many in his first month back in office, although experts say no such emergencies exist.
Under normal constitutional provisions and laws, Trump’s actions would have required congressional approval or long regulatory review, the journalists note. Instead, he has enacted sweeping immigration measures, deregulated energy, launched a tariff war that is crushing the U.S. economy, and now put troops in U.S. cities, all on his own hook.
Even when Trump didn’t announce a new emergency, he has cited crises to justify new extreme actions, as when he (or someone; he told reporters he did not sign the order) invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify rendering undocumented Venezuelan immigrants to the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador and when he justified the cuts billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” made to congressionally-approved funding because such cuts addressed “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Although the administration continues to insist voters wanted what Trump is doing, his poor job approval rating and the popular dislike of his policies across the board say the opposite. Perhaps more to the point was this weekend’s social media post from J.D. Vance, who pushed back on widespread concern that the administration’s strike against a boat in international waters last week was illegal. The administration claims that the 11 men in the boat were gang members smuggling drugs, but even if it offered evidence for such an assertion, which it has not done, the U.S. cannot legally kill civilians of a nation with whom we are not at war.
This weekend, Vance posted on social media: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” Political commentator Brian Krassenstein replied: “Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Vance replied: “I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”
The federal courts are working overtime to hold the administration to the rule of law. As Jay Kuo noted on September 3 in The Status Kuo, just last week saw courts invalidating most of Trump’s tariffs, stopping the administration from deporting unaccompanied children to Guatemala, and declaring his cuts to Harvard University’s funding, his use of troops in Los Angeles, and his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act illegal. Today an appeals court upheld the $83.3 million judgement a jury rendered last year against Trump in a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
But the Supreme Court has been overruling lower court decisions, deciding in favor of Trump’s expansion of power. Today it allowed Trump to ignore the decision of a lower court that he could not fire the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter, while her case was in the courts. Since 1935, the court had said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress.
It also said today that the administration can use racial profiling, including personal appearance, language, or type of employment, to stop people in order to check their immigration status, even though that will necessarily mean that U.S. citizens and legal residents will be swept up. Essentially, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, Latino Americans must now keep papers on them at all times to prove they are citizens or they can find themselves incarcerated.
The court decided these cases without hearings, briefs, or a written decision, under what is called the “shadow docket.” Traditionally, such unsigned, unexplained decisions are used for emergencies either to keep the status quo or to resolve a procedural issue, but under Trump the court’s use of them has exploded. The court, three of whose justices Trump appointed, has sided with him in shadow docket decisions more than 70% of the time.
On September 4, Lawrence Hurley of NBC News noted that this new practice of overturning lower court rulings with no explanation is undermining faith in the judiciary. It supports the administration’s narrative that the courts are trying to subvert Trump’s presidency. As the administration has attacked the courts, violent threats against judges have dramatically increased. Hurley notes that the lower courts painstakingly research the law to reach a decision, then administration officials criticize any that doesn’t support their actions, Then Trump appeals to the Supreme Court, which rejects the judges’ decisions with little or no explanation.
Under the control of Republicans, Congress has also declined to assert its constitutional power. Yesterday, Julian E. Barnes and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times reported how Republican leaders have accepted the administration’s unilateral cuts to programs Congress approved, launches of military strikes without informing Congress, and, last week, the Pentagon’s cancellation of a classified visit to the Virginia headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency by Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Far-right activist Laura Loomer had complained about the visit. The administration has already limited congressional oversight of immigrant detention centers; now the Pentagon says it is also imposing new limits to congressional oversight of intelligence facilities.
“Is congressional oversight dead?” Senator Warner asked. “Where does this end? If none of my Republican colleagues raises an issue, does this mean we are ceding all oversight?”
The administration appears to be in a rush to replace democracy with a dictatorship before the whole administration collapses. On Saturday, Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that 46% of Americans—almost half of them—“strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president while only 24% “strongly approve, a 22% enthusiasm gap.
That gap seems likely to grow. Tonight the Wall Street Journal published the 2003 birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s signature whose existence the paper revealed in July. The image in the article by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo was even worse than earlier reports of it: the image drawn over the words is not the outline of a woman, but of a girl. The text reads, in part, “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything. Donald: Yes there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.” Those words from “Donald” are outlined with pubescent breasts.
For a man openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump sure does love the rhetoric of violence.
On Saturday, the president posted an image of himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the Wagner-blasting cavalry officer in Apocalypse Now. “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” the meme said, paraphrasing the famous quote from the movie. In case the implication was unclear—little about Kilgore or Trump is subtle—the meme added, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The image replaced the film’s name with “Chipocalypse Now,” superimposing the city skyline on a fiery sky.
An American president threatening to unleash the U.S. military on—to make war against—an American city would have seemed unthinkable very recently. Although such behavior remains appalling, it is no longer unexpected. Violent language is the mother tongue of this Trump administration.
What Trump intends to do in Chicago is not clear. After deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles—where he also dispatched Marines—Trump began talking about sending troops to other cities, including Chicago. Amid fierce pushback from state and local officials, he seemed to cool on the idea last week. He’s now trying to disavow Saturday’s threat too. Although Trump posted it to his personal account on a social network he majority-owns, he called it “fake news” yesterday: “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities.”
Even if the president doesn’t want to go to war—he did obtain five draft deferments to avoid military service during the Vietnam War—he is attracted to the swaggering machismo he associates with the word. It’s the apparent inspiration for rebranding the Defense Department (passive, reactive) to be the Department of War. He can’t legally rename it without Congress’s permission, and the cost of changing the branding could reportedly run into millions or billions of dollars. Either he means it or he’s willing to light money on fire for a symbolic stunt. Neither is good.
Trump’s embrace of violent rhetoric is not new. During his first campaign, he encouraged rally attendees to beat up protesters. As president, he encouraged police to treat suspects brutally. As the runner-up in the 2020 election, he encouraged supporters to “fight like hell,” and they did, sacking the U.S. Capitol. Nevertheless, Trump has turned up the volume in his second term, with help from aides such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote last week, is obsessed with terms such as lethality and warfighters.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is now preparing to host a cage match for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the martial sport that proceeds from the premise that boxing is far too refined, nuanced, and rule-bound. UFC also happens to be run by—speaking of branding stunts—a major Trump supporter, Dana White. And this morning, Trump seemed to downplay domestic violence at an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime,” he scoffed. (The question is personal for the president, whose first wife, Ivana Trump, reportedly once accused him of marital rape in a deposition. She later said she didn’t mean the word in a “criminal sense.” Trump denied the allegation.)
In this atmosphere, no wonder that some members of the administration are nearly coming to blows with one another. According to Politico, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, nearly threw hands at an exclusive MAGA social club in Georgetown last week. “Why the **** are you talking to the president about me? **** you,” Bessent reportedly told Pulte. “I’m gonna punch you in your ******* face.” He also invited Pulte to “go outside … I’m going to ******* beat your ass.” (Bessent and Pulte declined to comment on this to Politico.) This is the same Secretary Bessent who previously dropped a series of F-bombs on Elon Musk, my colleagues Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker reported in May. Perhaps part of his success in the administration is that he’s mastered its distinctive patois.
Speaking fluent violence comes with a price. During Trump’s first run for president, observers who should have known better were willing to believe that the real-estate mogul really was a peacenik. The delusion persisted in some quarters until his return to the White House this year, when he fully abandoned any claim to dovishness, aside from half-hearted attempts to end the war in Ukraine. Initially, Trump’s embrace of militarism was directed outward, in the form of semi-veiled threats of invasions to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. Threats became action when the United States bombed Iran, to the chagrin of some America Firsters. More recently, the military attacked and destroyed a boat leaving Venezuela whose crew members the administration has said, without offering evidence, were drug smugglers.
Pressed to legally justify the killing, the administration has offered little explanation. “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X, later adding, “I don’t give a **** what you call it.” That drew a rebuke from Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican. “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,” Paul posted.
Implicit in Paul’s comments is the fear that brutal rhetoric and tools of repression that a government uses overseas will eventually be turned against a domestic population. This idea is called the “imperial boomerang,” and it’s attributed both to the poet-statesman Aimé Césaire and the philosopher Hannah Arendt. You don’t have to look very hard to see this happening today. For the first two decades of this century, the United States waged a “global war on terror.” Now it has withdrawn most of its troops from these conflicts and instead has held a Soviet-style military parade and deployed uniformed, armed soldiers to intimidate a District of Columbia electorate that voted overwhelmingly against Trump. Or, to choose another example: The president is taking a film that dramatized the senseless imperial violence of the Vietnam War and using it to threaten war against Chicago.
As Joe Perticone outlines in The Bulwark today, Republican lawmakers are greeting the release of the lewd letter in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book depicting the outline of a child and apparently signed by Donald Trump either by saying they don’t care or by denying the signature is Trump’s. For this to be true, someone would have had to have slipped the letter into the book when it was bound in leather in 2003, a story that makes no sense at all. But, as J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, Trump and his loyalists, including White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, are insisting the letter is a hoax.
Last speculates this is the route they’re taking because claiming proof that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016 was a “hoax” mostly worked, because claiming the letter is a hoax is a loyalty test, or because Trump knows what else is out there and is setting a marker to declare any more revelations a lie.
Or, perhaps, all three.
As Last writes, the material in the 238-page book reveals that the friends of the convicted sex offender described him as a “super-rich” man who liked “having sex with very young girls.” But rather than recoiling from his predatory habits, they celebrated those crimes. As Last writes: “Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle knew. They knew that Epstein was a predator. They believed that his pathology defined him. And they joked about it, encouraged it, and egged him on.”
An in-depth article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg detailed how top bankers at JPMorgan Chase ignored the many red flags around Epstein’s financial activities to keep the wealthy and well-connected man as a treasured client. It was only after Epstein was arrested the second time, federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, and he died in his jail cell that JPMorgan filed a report retroactively flagging 4,700 transactions totaling more than $1.1 billion as suspicious.
According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), that money included hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions involving women in Belarus, Russia, and Turkmenistan, and two Russian banks.
Epstein’s story personifies a cultural system in which wealthy white men can laugh about the horrific and illegal abuse of children—female children—comfortable in the knowledge the system will never hold them to account.
Retired Navy captain Jon Duffy encapsulated where this kind of thinking leads in an op-ed published today in Defense One, which covers issues of national security. Examining the administration's strike against a small vessel in the Caribbean last week, Duffy warned that “[t]he United States has crossed a dangerous line” into “lawless power,” operating without regard to the law.
Duffy reminded readers of the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling in Donald J. Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed while exercising official duties. At the time, he notes, experts warned that the decision would “give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder,” but a majority of the court waved those concerns away. “Now,” he writes, “the president has ordered killings in international waters. Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.”
“This is no longer abstract,” Duffy writes. “The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.”
Duffy notes that Trump has already used the exact same logic when he sent National Guard troops into U.S. cities: “redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first tool.” He warned that “the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law.”
Duffy urged military leaders to stand firm. “A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution. The oath is clear,” he wrote. “Unlawful orders—foreign or domestic—must be disobeyed. To stand silent as the military is misused is not restraint. It is betrayal.”
A world in which a few rich men run the federal government for their own benefit and according to their own whims looks much like the late nineteenth century.
Already, the cost of such a system to the American people is ramping up. Yesterday, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Maeve Reston of the Washington Post reported that states are facing cuts because of the Republicans’ sweeping tax and spending plan, which forces many of the responsibilities the federal government used to assume onto the states. The sudden shift of financial weight means states are cancelling infrastructure projects and scaling back benefits, even as new requirements in the law will mean increased staffing to oversee work requirements, for example.
In Maryland, Governor Wes Moore said the legislature has cut its budget by the largest margin in 16 years. He told the Washington Post journalists: “And now the federal government continues to lay off federal workers in historic numbers, slash rural health care, slash food assistance and then say to our states: ‘Now you all have to be the ones to pick up the pieces.’”
In North Carolina, Republican senator Ted Budd says that the policy of Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that she must sign off on all expenditures over $100,000 has badly delayed recovery aid to the state after Hurricane Helene that Congress approved back in December. He says he will place holds on all Department of Homeland Security nominees until the process speeds up.
In Ellabell, Georgia, an immigration raid by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security on an electric vehicle battery plant has destabilized the project altogether. The plant was under construction by the South Korean carmaker Hyundai and the battery supplier LG Energy Solution. Federal agents swept through last week and arrested 475 people, 300 of whom were South Korean nationals. South Korean leaders are angry, and LG Energy has pulled most of its employees out of the United States. The detained workers are supposed to be repatriated tomorrow.
As Farah Stockman and Rebecca Elliott of the New York Times note, the plan was billed as the biggest economic development project in Georgia’s history. Electrive reported today that LG Energy Solution is suspending construction of the factory.
But as the Trump administration’s authoritarianism hurts Americans, state governments led by Democrats are stepping up work for their people. Today is the anniversary of the day in 1850 when California became a state, and this evening, Governor Gavin Newsom noted on social media that “[t]he Trump Administration is once again failing to do its job—and California is cleaning up their mess.”
“We're deploying state resources to protect the 2,000-year old sequoias on FEDERAL LANDS from the wildfires the federal administration are supposed to handle.”
Democratic-led states are also joining forces to address the health issues the federal government is now dropping. In the western U.S., Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii are coming together in a new West Coast Health Alliance to coordinate vaccine guidelines; on the East Coast a similar joint effort is underway with representatives from every New England state except New Hampshire, along with New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, declined to participate, saying she doesn't want to politicize health care.
In New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the Union, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will be the first in the nation to offer universal free child care, expanding a program that lifted 120,000 of the state’s residents out of poverty by enabling them to stay in school and to work. The program also raised wages for childcare workers.
“Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”
In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey announced today that she would tackle the high cost of housing in the state by cutting environmental review for certain new housing construction projects down from more than a year to 30 days. Katie Lannan of GBH News notes that this plan is designed to deliver the 222,000 new housing units Massachusetts will need in the next ten years.
Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll said: “The bottom line is we can maintain our strong environmental standards and build housing and also have nature-based solutions to address…rising climate needs and mitigation.”
In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker visited with immigrant community leaders who focus on protecting constitutional rights as Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan warns of more of the ICE raids that have been sweeping in citizens and legal residents. “Many families who have lived in Illinois for years are fearful to pick up their kids from school, go to work, and live their lives freely,” the governor said. “At such an uncertain moment for our immigrant communities, it is more important than ever that people know their rights and have someone looking out for them.”
Tonight, Democrat James Walkinshaw easily won the special election to replace the late Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA). According to Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, the district has swung 16 percentage points toward the Democrats since the 2024 election.
