Friday’s dismissal of the Department of Justice case against David Hearn for vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool came days after Hearn’s lawyers asked for transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictment. The lawyers noted that the government’s only witness testified that the pool was already damaged before Hearn went near it, and that the witness could not quantify the cost of any damage Hearn might have done over and above the cost of repairing the existing damage. The lawyers told the court there were “irregularities in the government’s presentation of the evidence to the grand jury” that “call into question whether the grand jury was misled.”
The Department of Justice has been caught repeatedly misleading grand juries or committing misconduct in getting indictments. Hearn’s lawyers were suggesting that the Department of Justice engaged in the same misconduct in the indictment of David Hearn for damaging the bottom of the reflecting pool.
In their filing, they noted that a judge and former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia had recently stated that “[g]enerations of presidential administrations and public officials” have reinforced the idea, called the “presumption of regularity,” that public officials do their jobs properly, operate in good faith, and follow correct procedures. But, the judge noted, “In just six months, the President of the United States may have forfeited the right to such a presumption.”
On July 28, J. David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala, and Carla Astudillo of ProPublica reported that judges across the country are calling out lawyers for the Department of Justice, questioning whether they can be trusted to tell the truth and whether they are operating according to centuries-old norms. Judges have called behavior by Department of Justice lawyers “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly,” and otherwise dishonest.
The degradation of the Department of Justice, which is charged with defending the rule of law for the American people, into an instrument of Trump’s political wrath has been illustrated in the fight over the confirmation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to attorney general.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
On July 29, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Secret Service agents who interviewed Comey in May 2025 were told to send a summary of that interview as quickly as possible to Trump on Air Force One. Trump’s close involvement in the case, the authors wrote, “is one of the most glaring examples to date of the degree to which Mr. Trump now directs federal law enforcement actions.”
On July 28, Comey’s lawyers filed motions to throw out on the grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution the federal charges Blanche brought against him. They noted that Trump had repeatedly made it clear he wanted Comey indicted, even going so far as to put his former special assistant Lindsey Halligan into office as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where she indicted Comey just four days later. (That appointment was later found to be invalid.) The filings from Comey’s lawyers appear to show that FBI officers engaged in warrantless surveillance of Comey.
Like the lawyers in the Hearn case, Comey’s lawyers suggested that “irregularities in the grand jury process influenced the grand jury to return an indictment.” Like Hearn’s lawyers, they asked the court to “disclose the transcripts and audio recordings of all proceedings before the grand jury in this case” or to review them himself to make sure they followed the law. In a previous case against Comey, they note, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick found that the government’s actions raised “genuine issues of misconduct” that were “inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation.”
Blanche’s indictment of Comey to please Trump colors another of his actions: he backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund but is clearly Trump’s main interest: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
That slush fund/nonprosecution deal has been a sticking point for Blanche’s Senate confirmation to attorney general, as two Republican senators—John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—want him to put in writing that the deal is as dead as he claimed it is in his confirmation hearing before they agree to support his nomination. But he has refused to do so. On Thursday, Trump suggested he was willing to withdraw Blanche’s nomination until Cornyn and Tillis are out of office, leaving him as acting attorney general.
Then, at 7:03 Friday morning, Trump threw a monkey wrench into this fight by posting that in fact, he emphatically supports the slush fund. He appears to reject the idea that it is dead, and seems to be counting on Todd Blanche to implement it, exactly as critics have said.
Trump seems to have been thwarted from getting his way quietly by putting Blanche in as attorney general without any promise to kill the slush fund and its accompanying promise not to prosecute Trump or his associates for crimes associated with their tax filings. And so, on Friday, Trump filed notice that he and the rest of the parties to the “agreement” will appeal the July 13 ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams. She said that the suit that led to the $1.776 billion slush fund and the accompanying nonprosecution promise was filed to “manipulate the judicial process.” Williams said the Justice Department could not claim the deal it made with the Trumps was a judicial agreement.
At 7:32 Saturday morning, Trump posted: “If Senators Cornyn and Tillis, both upset because I wouldn’t Endorse them (they lost, and quit, respectively!), aren’t going to approve Todd Blanche, one of the most respected professionals, according to everybody, in the Country, to be the United States Attorney General, then I will keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill, which takes care of those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration (I get nothing, although I was treated horribly!), PASSED. Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”
Yesterday, after publicly attacking his own U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, for dropping the Reflecting Pool vandalism case, Donald Trump launched into a remarkable posting spree on Truth Social. Over the next several hours he shared dozens of AI-generated images depicting himself as Elvis Presley, a Revolutionary War commander, and as a giant looming over Greenland. He also posted an image where he gazes lovingly across a table at a younger version of himself, and another where he appears to be walking with some FBI agents and an alien in shackles. Among this terrifying mess is one explicitly religious image that deserves attention: Trump holding a gleaming gold crucifix in front of an American flag, and kissing the head of the crucified Christ.
Now, it is true that Catholics kiss crucifixes all the time. On Good Friday in particular, Catholics around the world approach the cross during the Good Friday mass in order to venerate the crucified Christ on the cross. Some bow or genuflect. Many kiss Christ’s feet or his wounds. This kind of veneration can also happen in other contexts as well, as in the photo below taken on a Tuesday afternoon last month at the St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. Our tour guide informed us that the feet of this crucifix must be repainted several times per year because of how often it is touched and kissed.
While this practice—kissing or venerating a statue—may rankle those Christians who tend to worry about Catholics and idolatry, let me try and explain it a bit.
The crucifix is more than a religious symbol. In the Catholic sacramental imagination, it is a sign that mediates Christ’s suffering to the believer. It is not worshipped, but neither is it merely decorative. Through it, Christians are invited imaginatively and spiritually into the Passion itself. Many Protestants prefer the empty cross because it emphasizes Christ’s resurrection. But the crucifix is primarily about the incarnation and it insists that the resurrection cannot be separated from the suffering and death that preceded it
Importantly, the purpose of venerating or kissing a crucifix is not to express one’s affection for Jesus. AI Trump’s expression as he kisses the crucifix is identical to the one he has worn when he has affectionately (and bizarrely) kissed the flag.
Trump demonstrating his affection for objects.
And kissing or otherwise venerating a crucifix is also not about demonstrating one’s own piety. A Catholic who venerates, touches, or kisses a crucifix is focusing on Christ’s suffering, not on themselves. The action is an acknowledgment of Christ’s atonement and sacrifice which, for believers, has saved them from sin. So it’s not supposed to be about the person doing the kissing—it’s about the object of reverence, that is, Christ.
Pay particular example to Trump’s position in the AI image. In it, Trump does not lower himself before the crucified Christ. Instead, he grasps the crucifix, much as he grasped the flag at CPAC, and brings it to himself, remaining physically above Christ throughout. It may seem like a small compositional detail, but it fundamentally changes the theological meaning of the image. Height, gesture, and posture all communicate relationships of authority and devotion, and since Trump never lowers himself it is Christ who must appear beneath Trump—not the other way around.
Also, the kiss itself is significant. In the Good Friday liturgy, the traditional focus of veneration is the crucified body, especially the wounds of the feet. But here Trump affectionally kisses Christ on the head, like one would do to a pet or a child.
Clearly, while this image might initially resemble a Catholic devotional practice, it actually redirects all meaning away from Christ and toward the real focus: Donald Trump himself.
Gold crucifixes are not unusual in Catholic visual and material history. Below are several gilded medieval crucifixes from Siena, Italy. There are many Ottonian, Baroque and 17th century examples also. But those golden crucifixes exist within a rich liturgical world. They stand on altars or hang above them. They lead processions. This is of course because gold honors Christ, the Son of God. In Trump’s AI image the crucifix has been separated from the liturgical and devotional practices that have historically given it its meaning.
For Trump there is no liturgy—the crucifix is just one more prop pointing to him.
In Christian art, gold signifies divinity and glory. In Trump’s visual world, gold signifies luxury, branding, success and his own personal magnificence. This is what the AI crucifix signifies too—not religion, not suffering, not tradition. Just more Trump kitsch.
Also, the crucifix is universal. It has nothing to do with national identity. Catholics in Nigeria, Poland, Brazil, India, Mexico, and the United States all venerate the same crucified Christ. The cross belongs to no single nation because it points beyond them all. But the American flag marks the boundaries of a particular nation and a particular political community. So when Trump places the crucifix in front of theAmerican flag, he changes what it signifies. Instead of the nation standing beneath the cross, the cross is absorbed into the nation. The universal becomes national and is therefore part of a broader effort within Christian nationalism to recast Christianity as an American phenomenon rather than a universal one.
That is why this image matters. It borrows the outward appearance of Christian (Catholic) devotion while fundamentally reversing its direction. Instead of drawing the viewer into the suffering of Christ, every element of this AI composition returns us to not to Christ on the cross, but to the man holding this golden object.
Seen alongside Trump’s other AI fantasies—Elvis, George Washington, the Revolutionary War, Greenland—the meaning of this image also becomes clear. For Trump, the crucifix is not about Christ. It is just one more stage on which Trump casts himself as the central figure in his own endless self-mythology.
Just before midnight last night, news broke that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had rescinded the order of May 18, 2026, establishing a $1.776 billion slush fund for those who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had persecuted them. The fund was widely perceived to be a way to pay off those convicted of crimes related to their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
What Blanche’s order did not do was to change the terms of the nonprosecution order providing that the Department of Justice would not prosecute Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or their associates for crimes related to tax returns filed before May 19, 2026. Last night, Blanche reiterated that the nonprosecution order applies “only retroactively,” but that was always the case.
At stake is at least $100 million it appears Trump owes to the American people from previous tax shenanigans that turned up in audits. It’s possible there are other irregularities, but if so, under this order, we would not know: the order says that the IRS will not audit the tax returns of Trump and his associates before the May 19 date. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “Pretty convenient that Trump gets immunity from IRS audits for the year where he made, by far, the most money of his entire life in shady deals all over the globe.”
And, as legal analyst Barb McQuade noted, even the promise to kill the slush fund is hollow. Last week, the Department of Justice paid $1.2 million to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted in 2024 of violating the FACE Act, which bans “force or threat of force or… physical obstruction” that “intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with… any person… obtaining or providing reproductive health care services.” While Vaughn claimed he was arrested for praying, in fact he blocked the doors of a reproductive health care clinic in Tennessee.
Vaughn’s payoff shows that the Department of Justice will simply give out “individual settlements instead of one designated fund,” McQuade wrote.
Nonetheless, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who sit on the Judiciary Committee and were openly opposing Blanche, this morning issued a joint statement saying they will now support Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, allowing the nomination to move out of the Judiciary Committee to the full Senate.
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that “in their statement, Sen[ator]s Cornyn and Tillis refer to this one pager as a ‘binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury.’ But this isn’t an order nor does it bind anyone.”
The top-ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement titled “Blanche’s Empty Promises Do Nothing to Kill [the] Slush Fund, Stop the Flow of Money to Convicted J6 Felons and MAGA Allies, or End Trump Family Super Pardon.” He called for “six patriotic House Republicans” to join with House Democrats to pass a discharge petition that would force a vote on stopping the “unconscionable” deal.
Now the rest of Republican senators have to decide whether Blanche’s fig leaf gives them enough plausible deniability of support for paying off violent Trump supporters and Trump’s IRS immunity to confirm Blanche’s nomination to become the attorney general tomorrow. While the focus has been on Tillis and Cornyn, Semafor’s senior Washington editor Elana Schor told MS NOW on Sunday that other Republican senators were quietly cheering Tillis and Cornyn on. “If the Senate voted on this fund today there would be almost 60 votes to kill it, maybe 70,” she said.
In The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa, counterintelligence scholar Rangappa suggests the Republican senators have gone so far down the road of enabling Trump that they will simply rubber-stamp Blanche. If “you’ve confirmed Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem, you’ve funded ICE, you’ve stood by while Trump hollowed out the [intelligence community], fired thousands of people, drained the U.S. Treasury, hijacked the country’s semiquincentennial, trashed the White House lawn for a WWE event, and drained the reflecting pool. Twice…. Is Todd Blanche really going to be THE LINE?” she asks. “Come on.”
Rangappa is probably right that Senate Republicans will vote to confirm Blanche. But the cost of enabling Trump has risen as his job approval ratings have tanked. Only about a third of Americans approve of his job performance, numbers that rival those of President Richard M. Nixon just before he resigned. Confirming Blanche, who clearly works for Trump alone, carries with it the fact that Blanche appears to have been the person most responsible for ignoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act. According to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, Blanche essentially admitted he had violated the law when he failed to address allegations brought by independent journalist Katie Phang, who sued for access to documents she claimed were unlawfully redacted.
The judge is now reviewing those documents to see if the redactions were proper. If not, their exposure after Republican senators have put Blanche in the position of the top law enforcement official in the country would make the senators appear complicit in the Epstein files cover-up. While that issue has fallen out of the headlines since Trump began his war on Iran, it is an issue MAGA Republicans elected Trump to expose and could easily reignite.
And then there is the increasingly erratic behavior of Trump himself. This morning, he posted: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been, and why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers EVER, the biggest outside Investment in America in World history, a totally secure Border, a giant Victory in Venezuela, the Denuclearization of Iran, unparalleled respect and success throughout the World, and much more? Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”
This version of Trump’s America is as fantastical as his post yesterday of an AI image of himself writing on a map of the U.S. with presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or of himself dressed as a svelte Elvis the day before.
Indeed, Saturday was quite a day of posting on social media for the president of the United States. In addition to portraying himself as Elvis, he posted a flattering picture of himself with the caption: “President Trump ages in reverse!,” himself as a Continental Army officer, a split portrait with his face as one half and George Washington as the other, and a “Trump 2028” poster.
Trump has given Republican senators little reason to give him cover. He has been openly feuding with Republican senators over things he wants Congress to do for which Republican leadership can’t find enough votes.
Those include the SAVE America Act, which would dramatically rework voting in the U.S. and which Trump seems to think would enable Republicans to win the 2026 midterms. But even if the Republicans nuke the filibuster so they could pass it without any Democratic votes—something they don’t want to do—it’s not clear they have enough votes for a simple majority. To get his way on the SAVE America Act, Trump hamstrung Republicans by refusing to sign a popular housing bill, which had to become law without his signature, hurting Republicans’ ability to claim credit for the measure.
Trump also wants a major supplemental funding bill for the enormously unpopular Iran war, which the Republicans would prefer not to pass before the midterms.
Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris of CNN reported yesterday that Trump is barely communicating with Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) except through the media. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on July 23 that Trump’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and Raju and Ferris note that Senator Lindsey Graham’s death on July 11 hampered communication as the South Carolina Republican was close to both Trump and Thune.
Now the infighting appears to be getting worse. “We need to be talking up the wins, talking about how crazy Democrats are, and instead we are knifing each other,” a Republican senator told the CNN reporters.
The infighting between Trump and Republican senators was muted this weekend compared to the fighting between Trump and cabinet members. After U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, both Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to social media to challenge her.
Trump repeatedly posted on social media that “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro” and posted a video of the reflecting pool in broad daylight, with the workers skimming algae in it and people around it, focusing on what seemed to be a young man briefly kneeling by the pool as “proof” the “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!” Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious with Pirro and is considering firing her.
Pirro blamed the Interior Department for the mistaken indictment, and Burgum fought back, supporting Trump’s version of events. He posted that the “evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” Unlike Pirro, Burgum did not have to defend his statements in a court of law. He did, though, get corrected by community notes, which pointed out that the Department of Justice had stated that damage to the pool came from a “botched contractor installation.”
And the fight between cabinet members paled in comparison with the extraordinary fight playing out between Republican federal lawmakers from Ohio, where Representative Max Miller on Sunday took to social media to post a twenty-minute video he apparently thought would exonerate him from well-supported stories that he abused his baby daughter and wife. The video delivered such eye-poppingly classic examples of abuse that it seemed to prove his guilt rather than his innocence. Documents he posted to accompany the video also supported the stories.
After Miller released the video, his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno, who had remained silent about the stories, finally made a public statement on social media calling Miller’s behavior “increasingly erratic and dangerous” and saying the representative—who is running for reelection—“needs serious psychological help” and “should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
Miller responded with what seemed to be a reference to stories that MAGA Republican Moreno is gay: “You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus,” Miller wrote. “This is all political.”
Fundamental realignments in the way Americans vote are rare, but predictions that they have occurred are not. Nearly as soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race in November 2024, people started saying the election represented a new era. “Trump just realigned the entire political map. Democrats have ‘no easy path’ to fix it,” announced NBC News.
The election had been very close. Trump won slightly more electoral votes than Joe Biden had in 2020 (312 to 306), but he also won fewer total popular votes and a smaller percentage of the vote. This was still significant because it was the first time in three tries that Trump had captured a plurality of the electorate, but the case for realignment hinged less on raw numbers than on demographic breakdowns. The Republican Party had strengthened its grip on the white working class and had done historically well with young voters—young men in particular—and Hispanic voters.
Writing in The Atlantic in May 2025, the pollster Patrick Ruffini argued that a new era of politics had dawned, in which Trump had broken Democrats’ solid grip on minority voters. “The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters,” he wrote. “In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous.”
The Democratic Party’s problems remain very real, but for the moment, Trump and the GOP have more serious ones. The most glaring one is Trump’s deep personal unpopularity. In the current polarized and dyspeptic political environment, all presidents seem to be unpopular, but Trump is in a different league. A CNN poll released last week measured Trump at 34 percent support, matching the low he reached in that poll following the January 6 insurrection. Still, that was better than his showing in the AP-NORC survey, which found his approval at 33 percent, just one point above a 2017 low. Quinnipiac University found Trump at 32 percent, the lowest ever in that poll.
These broad strokes are ugly enough, but digging into polling results shows particular deterioration with the particular groups that were supposed to be at the center of the Trump 2024 realignment.
Consider young voters. Kamala Harris won a slim majority of them in 2024, a huge drop from the 25 percent margin that Biden enjoyed four years earlier. The Yale Youth Poll found in May that 68 percent of voters ages 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters ages 23 to 29 disapproved of Trump. Echelon Insights also found that younger voters disapprove of Trump more than the general population—the number has fallen 37 percent since the start of this administration. Polling from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that young voters are especially skeptical of expanded presidential power and claims of “national emergency”—two staples of Trump’s approach to governance.
One reason Trump’s numbers have sunk so much among young people is his poor performance among young men. A popular explanation was that a feminized, woke Democratic Party had driven them away and into the arms of Trump and a growing manosphere of influencers. To the extent that that was true, it was ephemeral. These voters are still wary of the Democrats, but they’ve soured on Trump as well. The Yale Youth Poll found that men under 30 were one of the two groups that had turned the most against Trump since last fall.
Trump is also bleeding support among Black and Hispanic voters, and especially men, as Bloomberg Government reports. In 2024, Trump won almost half of Hispanic voters, but polls show Republicans drawing 27 to 35 percent support in the midterms, which would be their worst performance with the group since the Democratic-wave year of 2018. Equis, a pollster focused on the demographic, finds Latino approval of Trump is lower than that of non-Latino voters. A May poll found that a quarter of Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 wouldn’t do so again.
The decay has even reached Trump’s core supporters. A New York Times review of polling data found in June that white working-class voters’ views of the president’s handling of the economy were tanking. During the first two years of his first term, these voters rated him higher than the overall population; now they rate him much worse. In February 2016, Trump boasted about his backing among the least-educated voters, saying, “I love the poorly educated.” They don’t love him back: Echelon finds his approval down to 41 percent among those with a high-school education or less. Polling from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism finds a shrinking Trump base and less personal connection to Trump, which is a particular problem for a personalist leader and movement. Republican strategists are now worried that even consistent GOP voters might not turn out in November, according to The Washington Post.
As the poll analyst G. Elliott Morris has written, several convincing explanations existed for Trump’s 2024 victory that didn’t involve realignment, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and the peculiar dynamics of Biden’s ill-advised decision to run and his late exit from the race. But the foremost was inflation. Americans were angry at the Democratic Party because of persistently higher prices. Now Trump is losing support for the same reason. Not only has Trump not ended inflation, as he promised—in June, it ran at 3.5 percent—but his decisions, especially the Iran war, have driven prices higher. Voters were willing to give Trump a chance because of their disgust with Biden. Now they’re seeing the results, and they don’t like them.
This was perhaps foreseeable. Although some observers believed a sea change had occurred, the Brookings Institution scholar (and Atlantic contributor) Jonathan Rauch concluded on November 9, 2024, that the result did not represent “a pro-MAGA realignment or a sweeping repudiation of Democrats. Rather, this was an ordinary election.” He added, prophetically, “While the Republicans undoubtedly scored a clear victory, they may be tempted to claim a stronger mandate than the voters intended to deliver—and they may respond with policies that are more extreme and disruptive than the public wants or expects.” Now the realignment looks nearly as moribund as GOP chances in the midterms.
On Friday night, a court filing from Capital One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Instead, it stated, the accounts were closed “for anti-money laundering reasons.” It said “transaction patterns” had triggered the review.
President Donald J. Trump has maintained that banks refused to do business with him after January 6, 2021, for political reasons. As Allison Morrow of CNN reported yesterday, Trump and his supporters, including cryptocurrency ventures, have used the idea that they were being “debanked” because of their political beliefs to claim they are victims. Last year, Trump and the Trump Organization sued Capital One in federal court in Florida, saying they had sustained “considerable financial harm” after the bank closed about 385 of their accounts.
Observers note that the story of Trump wanting immunity from IRS audits and the revelation that his bank activity mirrored that of money launderers might well be the same story.
That story recalls the work of national security specialist Natasha Bertrand in 2018, when she reported in The Atlantic that Trump’s rabid attacks on FBI and Justice Department officials centered on those with extensive experience in investigating money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they interfaced with Russia.
Trump went after officials he claimed were “Democrats” who were part of a “witch hunt” against him as they examined the ties of his 2016 campaign to Russian operatives. But Bertrand pointed out that his primary targets—Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Andrew Weissmann, Andrew McCabe—all specialized in investigations into organized crime and money laundering. She noted that the probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives was primarily a counterintelligence investigation and that Russia’s criminal syndicates and intelligence services had become increasingly intertwined.
In July 2017, Trump told the New York Times that it would be unacceptable for those investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia to look at his or his family’s personal finances. That would be a “red line,” he said. “I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia.” (This denial contradicts Donald Trump Jr.’s 2008 statement that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” and Eric Trump’s 2014 boast, “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”) Bertrand noted that Trump’s links to “Russian oligarchs and mobsters” were “documented” and that his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “was repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.”
Financial irregularities surrounding Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein are also in the news today. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is famous for following money trails doggedly, released a report saying that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank held off on filing required suspicious activity reports in transactions associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
The report, titled “Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking,” came out of a multi-year investigation. Investigators “found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase (JPMC), Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated anti–money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner.”
It describes how top banks enabled Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation by ignoring suspicious financial transactions by those associated with him, appearing eager to use Epstein’s connections to other wealthy individuals. The report explains that Epstein’s lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller “executed thousands of suspicious cash withdrawals and wire transfers, potentially in furtherance of human trafficking. Disturbingly, federal prosecutors have never even questioned them in connection with criminal investigations.”
Federal law designed to prevent money laundering requires banks to notify the Treasury with a suspicious activities report (SAR) within 60 days of detecting activity that raises red flags. The investigators found that the three banks most closely associated with Epstein put off reporting suspicious activity for years, filing reports of more than $1.4 billion retroactively only after Epstein was arrested for the second time in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking. The suspicious transactions included “thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls, and correspondent banking in high-risk foreign jurisdictions (including Russia). They also include tens of millions in payments to his conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.”
The report concludes that “top executives at major Wall Street banks were aware of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity for years but withheld information from the U.S. government, protecting Epstein from federal scrutiny” as they sought access to his money, which generated millions in fees every year, and to the money of his friends.
Top of the list of those friends was billionaire Leon Black, the former chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management Inc. The report concludes that Black “was overwhelmingly the largest source of funding for Epstein’s sex trafficking,” providing Epstein’s primary source of income between 2012 and 2017. Those payments amounted to about $166 million.
Bank of America took five to seven years to report those transactions even though bank officials thought they had “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose.” Black told the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee that he paid that money to Epstein for “tax, estate planning and other related services” and was not aware of Epstein’s “nefarious activity.”
The report concludes that “Bank of America likely violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to properly screen and report” those payments.
The report also covers already-released SARs from JPMorgan Chase, showing that the bank waited years to file those SARs despite the fact that bankers flagged more than $1 billion of transactions as suspicious, including payments to women in many countries and large cash withdrawals. It explains how Deutsche Bank AG, as well, delayed for years reporting more than $250 million in suspicious transactions tied to Epstein.
The report notes that JPMorgan Chase cut ties to Epstein as a client in 2013 out of concerns he was engaged in money laundering. This is an interesting mirror of the recent news from Capital One, since Trump also sued JPMorgan Chase and its chief executive officer Jamie Dimon for $5 billion, alleging they “debanked” him after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Wyden, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, chastised Republicans for not working with him on this project. He noted that Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who is currently running for governor, refused to join him in subpoenaing records in the Epstein banking matter even as she publicly complained that Democrats were hampering the investigation into those records.
The report also pointed out that Republicans have blocked Wyden’s measure that would require the Treasury Department to produce copies of all suspicious activity reports related to Epstein and his co-conspirators for congressional committees, and it singled out U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for refusing to produce those records to the Senate Finance Committee.
The report called for the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Comptroller of the Currency to “conduct thorough investigations of the activities laid out in this report and…levy fines or criminal penalties, as appropriate.” The report emphasized that such an investigation should include looking at the behavior of individual bankers, as well as the banks themselves.
“Investigations into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein have thus uncovered an important finding that extends beyond Epstein himself: Wall Street banks have been willing to turn a blind eye to the suspicious transactions of ultra-wealthy clients, even if the failure to scrutinize and report these transactions runs directly afoul of federal law,” the report said. “If federal prosecutors are serious about preventing the next Jeffrey Epstein, they must hold Wall Street accountable.”
Congress passed federal securities laws and banking regulation in the 1930s after it became clear that a small group of wealthy investors had manipulated the markets and misused bank funds. Pressure to clean up Wall Street came from entrepreneurs and small investors, who knew they could not do business or make gains in the market if the system was rigged against them. A healthy economy depended on a level playing field for everyone.
Now, it appears, we are watching the dismantling of those protections and not only the long-term skewing of our system toward the very wealthy, but also a dramatic skewing in real time. On Saturday, Trump began selling access to his social media posts to Wall Street trading firms milliseconds before they go public, permitting them to buy and sell with insider information. The cost for this service, according to Marina Dunbar of The Guardian, is up to $100,000 a month.
Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, an expert in government conflicts of interest rules, told Bernard Condon of the Associated Press that this scheme is “yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”
On August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a new tax to help fund the United States government during the Civil War. Far more than writing a traditional revenue act to address the catastrophic war that had demonstrated its horrors just two weeks earlier at the Battle of Bull Run, Congress deliberately constructed the law to shift ownership of the American government away from the bankers who had previously provided Treasury funds, to the American people.
Over the next four years, the Republican Congress would put taxes on virtually every product in the country and then, to guarantee that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it, they invented the nation’s first income tax.
In 1861, Congress levied a 3% tax on income over $800; in 1862, concerned that the level of taxation necessary to pay for the war would be too much for most Americans to bear, Congress placed a general tax at 3% and created a progressive income tax. It taxed income over $600 at 3% and income over $10,000 at 5%.
“The weight must be distributed equally,” Representative Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) said, “not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.” In 1864, Congress revised those numbers upward. They put general taxes at 5% and raised the income tax brackets to 5% for income from $600 to $5,000 and 7.5% for income from $5,000 to $10,000.
Morrill thought it was important for the federal government to collect the tax directly to illustrate that people were supporting the United States of America, not individual states, as they might think if states collected the taxes. The federal government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent necessity, he said. When the nation required it, “the property of the people…belongs to the Government.”
Indeed, the new taxes did cement loyalty to the United States. With their money behind the war effort, Americans became more and more committed to their cause. As the war costs mounted, far from objecting to taxes, Americans asked their congressmen to raise them out of concern about the growing national debt. In 1864, Senator John P. Hale (R-NH) said: “The condition of the country is singular…I venture to say it is an anomaly in the history of the world. What do the people of the United States ask of this Congress? To take off taxes? No, sir, they ask you to put them on. The universal cry of this people is to be taxed.”
Enlisting more than 2 million soldiers and sailors into the war effort, moving them, equipping them, and arming them eventually cost the United States more than $5 billion. Taxes paid for about 21% of that cost.
Although Republicans invented the American income tax, party leaders in the modern era have turned against it.
In 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan won the White House by promising that tax cuts would create such dramatic economic growth that Americans would be able to continue to fund popular programs despite those cuts. During the presidential campaign, Reagan’s rival for the Republican nomination, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency George H.W. Bush, called this promise “voodoo economics,” and he was right: the promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would pay for themselves never materialized. Instead, the national debt rose dramatically.
But the idea that tax cuts were a reliable solution to slow economic growth became Republican dogma.
Rejecting the principles Republicans laid down in the 1860s, Republican leaders ever since have taken the position that taxes do not build the country, but destroy it. Despite the rising national debt, that ideology continued into the modern era. In 2017 the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered income tax rates across the board and offered most tax relief to the wealthy and corporations, became President Donald J. Trump’s signature law.
Those tax cuts eroded the revenue base of the U.S. government, sending the debt soaring. Nonetheless, in July 2025, Republicans passed Trump’s signature economic measure for his second term—the law they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—making permanent the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations they passed in Trump’s first term. They offset some of the costs of that measure with dramatic cuts to programs that help the American people, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Even with those offsets, economists estimate that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add more than $4 trillion to the national debt in the next ten years. And now, Trump’s war on Iran is adding yet more strain to the national budget. But, rather than restoring the tax base Republicans have cut away—or even passing a wartime tax—the Trump administration maintains that cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” will solve the problem of the growing debt.
Election results from yesterday suggest that the era of tax cuts as a solution to economic concerns may be coming to an end.
Voters in Missouri resoundingly rejected a Republican proposal to eliminate the state income tax and to replace missing revenue with a higher sales tax. The vote was not close: 83.3% of voters opposed the measure while only 16.7% were in favor, despite the fact that groups in favor of eliminating the tax—many of which kept their donors secret—outspent those in favor of keeping it by a margin of more than two to one.
I want to talk today about the idea of canceling Thanksgiving, and why I don’t think that’s a very good idea. Now, that might not sound like the most controversial take — but we’re actually talking here about a candidate named Francesca Hong. She’s 37, a state representative from Madison, Wisconsin, and she’s currently running for governor in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin.
Who Is Francesca Hong?
Francesca Hong is the daughter of Korean immigrants who has had a pretty impressive life. She was born and raised in Madison and spent most of her career as a chef. She became an executive chef at 23, then co-owner of a ramen restaurant that got shut down during COVID — and that’s what drew her into politics. She was elected to the state assembly in 2020, the first Asian American in the Wisconsin legislature. She’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and part of the Assembly’s Socialist Caucus.
The Democratic governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, has chosen not to run again, and the race for the nomination has become chaotic on both the Republican and Democratic sides. The lieutenant governor’s campaign imploded over campaign finances. The Milwaukee County executive dropped out, then jumped back in. Mandela Barnes, a very popular figure in Wisconsin politics, exited the race just last week. Hong has outlasted all of it. She’s the clear front-runner heading into the primary on Tuesday, August 11th, leading by roughly 30 points — with plenty of undecided voters still in play.
But the primary isn’t really what people are concerned about. People are thinking about the general election. Tony Evers, the current governor, has not endorsed Hong — he’s endorsed one of her rivals, David Crowley, and said publicly he doesn’t think she can win in November. Prediction markets flipped over to favoring Republicans in the general election just within the last week. The most likely GOP nominee is Representative Tom Tiffany, endorsed by Donald Trump, who is already framing the race as a battle between socialism and common sense — clearly anticipating a matchup against Hong. Wisconsin is a swing state, narrowly divided, where statewide races are typically decided by one or two points.
The Tweet
That’s the context for why a tweet Hong sent in November 2020 has suddenly resurfaced and become a five-alarm fire in American politics. She wrote:
"Cancel Thanksgiving, we should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original super-spreader event that killed indigenous folks and women, so be it."
That tweet is very 2020, if you have any recollection of that period — referencing COVID and the debates over whether people should gather for the holidays. If the tweet were just about COVID, it would be a debatable point: should you forgo gathering with family and friends in the specific year before a vaccine existed, as the pandemic ravaged the country? But she goes further, arguing we should have done this in 1621, and that we should stop celebrating colonialism and an event that killed indigenous people and women.
Things really got crazy when Hong, after the tweet resurfaced on social media this past week, sat down with Kaitlan Collins on CNN Monday night and was asked whether she disavowed the tweet — whether she wants to cancel Thanksgiving. Right-wing media has gone completely nuts over that interview. One tweet of the clip alone has gotten more than 11 million views on X this week. Hong is still probably going to win the primary; it’s unlikely this unseats her front-runner status. But Republicans are going to have a field day with it, and Tom Tiffany — a MAGA election denier who participated in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election — now has a powerful rhetorical weapon. If he becomes governor of a swing state like Wisconsin, he will have a role in certifying results there in 2028. That’s dangerous, and we need somebody like Hong to stand up against him. But she has just handed him a huge argument to help him win.
The Actual History
If this were a liberal arts seminar, it would be a worthwhile discussion — the kind of theoretical reckoning with American history that belongs in a well-rounded education. If Hong wanted to turn this argument in as an undergraduate paper, she might get a good grade, because it’s genuinely an interesting conversation. There are Christian nationalist roots to the American Thanksgiving holiday, going back to Puritan New England.
The Puritans developed two paired practices: days of thanksgiving and days of fasting and humiliation, both proclaimed occasionally by magistrates rather than annually, and neither originally a harvest festival. Their theology held that the colony was a covenant people, akin to Israel in the Hebrew Bible — God’s favor or judgment was legible in events. A good harvest, a safe voyage, a military victory: all were evidence of divine approval. In 1621 in Plymouth, there was a harvest feast described in Puritan sources as a celebration of plenty — though the participants likely wouldn’t have called it a “Thanksgiving.” That’s the loose link to the holiday invented later.
What Hong actually seems to be referencing — the killing of indigenous people — happened later, in 1637, when English forces burned a fortified Pequot village at Mystic and killed hundreds, including women and children. The Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots and for the soldiers’ safe return, folded in with some good news from Germany at the time.
The uncomfortable point isn’t that Thanksgiving commemorates a massacre, which the tweet implies — the history is more convoluted than that. The real point is that Puritan theology couldn’t tell the difference between a good harvest and a successful slaughter. Both counted as God vindicating them. That’s Christian nationalism in its seed form: God is on our side, and every advantage we have proves our superiority. That is true, and it matters. Since 1970, Native activists have observed a National Day of Mourning in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day as part of this same critique.
Even in the founding era, George Washington proclaimed national days of Thanksgiving and prayer, especially in 1789. Thomas Jefferson stopped the practice, believing in separation of church and state. James Madison revived it, then later regretted it, concluding it wasn’t constitutionally proper for presidents to proclaim days of Thanksgiving. So even the objection about church-state overlap is as old as the nation itself.
The form of Thanksgiving we celebrate today actually comes from the Civil War. A magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for decades to nationalize it, and Lincoln finally agreed in October 1863, setting it as the last Thursday in November. His proclamation leaned fully into covenant theology, describing the nation’s blessings as “the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, has nevertheless remembered mercy” — a day of “thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” Christian nationalists today point back to proclamations like Lincoln’s as evidence that America is, and always was, a Christian nation. Their use of the holiday is about those declarations, not about the meal itself.
And yet, in practice, the holiday has been thoroughly desacralized. What’s emerged is maybe the least creedal thing in American civil religion. Even though it began as a day of thanksgiving to God, there’s no required deity, no liturgy, and it’s celebrated across every faith — and by plenty of people with no faith at all.
Why This Was a Political Mistake
Hong’s tweet, and her refusal to disavow it, is a bad idea on several levels. YouGov, which tracks public approval of holidays, finds Thanksgiving is the most popular holiday in the United States — more popular than Christmas, with roughly 81% approval. And 96% of Americans say they celebrate it. It is not just popular; it is nearly universally practiced.
Partisan politics is not a college seminar. It’s about uniting people and proving you care about what they care about. There is no hue and cry from the American public to cancel Thanksgiving. You don’t win general elections by saying you’d like to cancel a holiday that 80% of the country loves. What is the constituency, in either party, for that? This plays straight into the hands of Trump and the Republicans — it hands them a simple caricature: these people don’t like America, and they don’t like God, and they want to take away the things you love.
Thanksgiving is the least sectarian thing in American civil religion. No creed, no required denomination. In practice, it’s celebrated by Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and atheist Americans, by recent immigrants, and by descendants of the enslaved. It’s a meal and a word of gratitude — one of the rare national observances that actually functions pluralistically, rather than merely claiming to. Many Native Americans object to it, and that objection matters too; it’s part of the story. But the list of genuinely shared American practices is short and getting shorter, and burning down one of the few that remain is not a strategy.
Thanksgiving can hold both things at once. It’s good that the holiday and the National Day of Mourning coexist on the same day — that’s part of how we live in the tension of American history, and it’s appropriate to help people understand how complicated that history is. But if we go around stripping out everything connected to Christian nationalism or to harm done to different populations, pretty soon there won’t be any holidays left. This is our history and our culture, and facing it honestly doesn’t require eliminating it.
The Fights That Actually Matter
There are real threats from Christian nationalism in the United States right now — I spend my day-to-day life cataloging them. The ongoing practice of Thanksgiving is not one of them. The real threats include: misogynistic, Christian-supremacist theology fueling an ideological takeover of the U.S. military high command under Pete Hegseth; state-mandated religious curricula and classroom displays of the Ten Commandments tearing at the separation of church and state; the dismantling of church-state jurisprudence, including IRS policy changes allowing pastors and churches to endorse political candidates; extremist networks embedded in and advising the White House; the dehumanization of migrants and refugees; and a rising tide of Christian antisemitism on the far right.
These are the actual fronts in the conflict we’re having with authoritarianism — fights over power, theology, and who counts as a legitimate American. None of them is a fight over a meal. Those are the fights we need to have.
Why the Margin Matters
Democrats do not merely need to win majorities in the elections ahead. Trump and the MAGA coalition have already shown their willingness to contest, obstruct, and rig outcomes. Even a narrow 51% victory can be litigated, decertified, delayed, or simply refused. What’s needed is a margin so wide it cannot be argued with or overturned — something closer to a supermajority.
Supermajorities are built out of supermajority issues: things that benefit and inspire the vast majority of Americans. Thanksgiving is a supermajority issue. Eighty-one percent of Americans say they like it. Ninety-six percent of us celebrate it. So the question for any candidate, any staffer, any very-online activist drafting the next tweet, if they’re considering political office someday: when 81% of Americans tell you they like something, and that something is a meal shared with family and friends, why on earth would you attack it?
I genuinely hope Francesca Hong wins the primary next week, and I hope she can win the general election in November. But I have my doubts. I hope she finds a way to change her talking points on Thanksgiving and states unequivocally that she’s not out to cancel it — that will only help her campaign. These are serious times, and we should approach them with sober-minded, practical strategy aimed at uniting a coalition that can defeat the authoritarian movement currently gripping national power. The more we’re talking about old tweets and canceling Thanksgiving, the harder that task becomes.
Washington-Rabat ties under scrutiny as questions swirl over what led to deadly influx into tiny Spanish territory
Trump has denied that there's a weapons shortage, and that the 'information leakers,' will be 'hunted down.'
If there is no weapons shortage, then anything that says there is clearly isn't an information leak, but nonsense.
Every time this idiot makes an announcement he could start with, "If you thought I was stupid before just wait until you hear this old bollocks..."
Sixty-one years ago, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”
In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.
All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.
With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.
In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could only be paid for with tax levies.
The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had voted, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.
Southern states always held elections. It was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.
Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.
During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.
Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.
Those interested in advancing Black rights turned, once again, to the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws. Spurred by lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, judges used the due process clause and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the protections in the Bill of Rights applied to the states, that is, the states could not deprive any American of equality. In 1954 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, used this doctrine when it handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.
White reactionaries responded with violence, but Black Americans continued to stand up for their rights. In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting Black voting.
In 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) began intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, organized under Bob Moses, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and, when discovered, laughed at the idea they would be punished for the murders.
That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. When Black Americans still couldn’t register to vote, on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, marchers set out for Montgomery to demonstrate that they were being kept from registering. Law enforcement officers on horseback met them with clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The officers beat the marchers, fracturing the skull of young John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress).
On March 15, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending Americans’ right to vote. It did. And on this day in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.
But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress voting by Democrats and, by extension, people of color. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.
On April 29 of this year, the Supreme Court continued the assault on the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais it rejected the longstanding interpretation that sometimes, in order to guarantee Black representation in government, states have had to create districts that are made up primarily of Black Americans. By a vote of 6–3, with the right-wing justices in the majority, the Supreme Court in April declared Louisiana’s construction of a majority-minority district unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. It was, they said, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.
In 1957, when he was Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson called for the protection of Black voting, saying: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
Upon signing the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he said to the American people: “I pledge you that we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
On Tuesday, August 4, Erin Banco, Mike Stone, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported that the U.S. has used “virtually all” of its highly accurate long-range missiles that can strike accurately from a safe distance. Sources told the journalists that the dwindling missile supplies could make it more difficult for the U.S. to deter Russia and China.
The journalists reported that the shortages contributed to President Donald J. Trump’s decision not to resume massive strikes against Iran.
At 12:34 on Thursday morning, Trump denied the story, posting that “[t]he U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types. Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed. Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history. The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!”
Despite Trump’s protestations, Tara Copp, Natalie Allison, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported yesterday morning that Trump exploded at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the issue. Sources told the journalists that at the cabinet meeting Trump held at Camp David last Friday, Trump appeared to confront Hegseth with his concern that he had been misled about weapons shortages. The journalists reported that Trump is increasingly frustrated with Hegseth, who was enthusiastic about striking Iran and helped to convince Trump it would be a quick victory.
Hegseth allegedly responded by blaming Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, the private equity billionaire who is pushing Congress to pass a $1.5 trillion military budget while at the same time he is overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.
Yesterday Alexander Ward, Josh Dawsey, Lara Seligman, and Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has ordered investigations into who has been leaking information about the weapons shortages, and that Trump called Feinberg to talk about speeding up production. Hegseth joined the call. The journalists also reported that Vice President J.D. Vance talked to Republican senators on Thursday to defend the administration’s handling of the war on Iran.
Also yesterday, Seligman and Yoko Kubota of the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence assesses that the depletion of U.S. munitions has made it more likely that Russia will try to fracture the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance in the next few years by attacking a NATO nation.
Global affairs columnist David Rothkopf wrote today in the Daily Beast that replenishing the munitions stockpiles Hegseth and Trump have depleted will take years and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Rothkopf reports that experts in the military and former employees of the Defense Department consider Hegseth’s record “to be the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history. And,” Rothkopf wrote, “that’s saying something since this is the country that gave us the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, blank check support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, and drunken sailor levels of defense spending that have actually weakened us while, in so doing, strengthening our rivals worldwide.”
Numbers released by the Department of Labor this morning showed that the U.S. economy shed 23,000 positions in July, a significant drop from the 83,000 new jobs economists had predicted. The department also revised the jobs numbers from May and June down by more than 100,000 jobs. “That’s a big kick in the guts,” economist Justin Wolfers wrote. “[O]ver the past three months, the US economy created about -200K fewer jobs than we had thought.” “Revise down your views substantially,” he added.
The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% as nearly a million people stopped looking for work over the past two months. Carl Quintanilla of CNBC noted Schwab’s observation that “[t]he labor force participation rate has given up all gains since February 2021.” According to the National Women’s Law Center, women make up the vast majority of the labor force decline.
Republican senators have responded to the crisis in national security and the slowing economy by voting to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for invoking his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a Senate Homeland Security and Government Oversight Committee hearing on July 29. As the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, Fauci was part of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force.
As Chris Iorfida of CBC News notes, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has helped to lead those who blame Fauci for the origins of Covid, for masking protocols and shutting down churches and schools, and of exaggerating death tolls, attacking him to whip up their base. Paul has said repeatedly he would like to see Fauci behind bars. Before he left office, former President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci to prevent MAGA Republicans from vindictive prosecution.
Although Fauci has testified before Congress more than 200 times, including more than 20 times about Covid, he took the Fifth when Paul pulled him in front of the committee the Kentucky senator chairs last week. The day before Fauci’s testimony, Paul posted on social media: “If Anthony Fauci comes before my committee tomorrow and perjures himself, his pre-emptive pardon from Joe Biden will not protect him.”
In his statement before testifying, Fauci said, “Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
And so Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 100 times as Republican senators taunted and berated him. On Thursday, Paul led the Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a federal subpoena by refusing to answer their questions. All Democrats voted no.
Normally, a contempt vote would then go to the full Senate, where it would need 60 votes, but Paul likely knows there are not 60 senators willing to agree to the measure. So, as Sabrina Siddiqui and
Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal report, he is bypassing the Senate and asking Vice President J.D. Vance to certify the report and refer it directly to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist that vandals, not a poor installation, caused the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and to demand that Pirro prosecute the wrongdoers. He continues to insist that Olympian David Hearn, whom the Department of Justice indicted for the damage, be prosecuted, despite Pirro’s move to drop the indictment, claiming the problems came from the installation itself.
“U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should re-visit her hastily made decision, especially since it turned out that the ‘gentleman’ involved is a big player in ActBlue, a disgraceful fundraising SCAM, and is represented by a TRUMP DERANGED SLEAZEBAG, Political Hack Lawyer, Norm Eisen,” the president of the United States posted.
Trump was, perhaps, even more incensed by today’s ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Two of the three judges upheld a lower court’s decision that Trump cannot build his ballroom without congressional approval.
“Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence. The President has no—and claims no—constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people,” the court wrote. “We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.”
They noted that Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House with no review and no advance notice, and quoted the district court’s finding that the “government’s concerns regarding the safety and security of the White House…[are] a problem of the President’s own making!”
A judge Trump appointed dissented, saying the ballroom likely falls under the president’s authority to make improvements to the Executive Residence for security purposes.
The court stayed its decision in order to enable Trump to appeal to the Supreme Court, which he said he will do. On social media, he posted: “The Military and Secret Service are viewing this horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful ruling as a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents.”
He added that “the desperately needed, and totally secure Ballroom, which is being built ahead of schedule and under budget, is a Gift from President Trump and Great Patriots of the United States of America. There will be no expense to the American Taxpayer.” In fact, as Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell reported in the Washington Post in June, officials from the federal government have already committed taxpayer money for more than half of the cost of the ballroom.
Later, Trump posted again, saying of presidents: “We are not tenants, who pay rent and do all other things that a tenant must do, we are PRESIDENTS, elected by the people of the United States States of America, and have many rights, including the right to fix, renovate, secure, protect, and beautify the White House grounds.”
Then he posted AI images of himself with famous World War II–era generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur; two images with the caption “TRUMP 2028,” one saying “Just kidding!” and the other without comment; two images suggesting the roof of the ballroom would have the “great and very important military asset” of a drone port; two images claiming to show “Vandalism” at the reflecting pool; an article claiming he had “won the Iran War’; and an image making fun of Biden for allegedly having a poor golf handicap.
At polling website Fifty Plus One today, Cooper Burton and Mary Radcliffe noted that voters are even more concerned about inflation and prices now than they were in 2024, by a significant margin. In October 2024, 24% of Americans identified inflation as the nation’s most important issue. In a poll released this week, those numbers had jumped to 36%.
