Today the Trump administration asked the United States Supreme Court to let it build Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be. Trump ignored Congress and its authority over government building projects when he tore down the East Wing and began construction of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the site. He claimed initially that there would be no cost to taxpayers for what he estimated to be a $200 million project; already estimates have risen to at least $900 million to be “covered primarily by taxpayers.”
The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to stop construction, and lower courts have agreed, saying the ballroom requires congressional approval, although they have permitted construction of an underground bunker to continue. On August 7 an appeals 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.”
Nonetheless, construction has continued, and now U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer is telling the Supreme Court the ballroom is critical for national security and that it is too late to stop the project. He claims it is “65% complete” and has “a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week to keep the Project ahead of schedule and under budget.” The administration wants the Supreme Court to step in to allow Trump’s vanity project to continue.
The timing of Trump’s request that the Supreme Court allow him to ignore Congress and the law in order to spend taxpayer money on a vanity project provides a dramatic contrast to the actions of the government ninety-one years ago.
On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.
The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a U.S. Cabinet position and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.
Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.
As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.
The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and flames, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.
The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.
Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.
It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn’t have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn’t stay long enough in any one place, they didn’t have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”
FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”
By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.
When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don’t know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”
With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.
In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”
On Monday, August 10, Todd Blanche took the oath of office as attorney general, administered by federal appeals court judge Emil Bove, another of Trump’s defense lawyers before moving to the Department of Justice, where he was Blanche’s top deputy. In that capacity, CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz recalled, he fired career prosecutors and pushed Trump’s takeover of the department.
Using Bove to swear in Blanche looked like a victory lap for the Trump team. Although the press was excluded, two other Trump loyalists, FBI director Kash Patel and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, attended Blanche’s swearing-in.
Retired conservative judge J. Michael Luttig told MS NOW: “Todd Blanche now becomes the symbol of Donald Trump’s corruption of the rule of law in America and the actual ruin of the Department of Justice of the United States. This is another shameful act of acquiescence, if not obeisance, by the Senate Republicans; they will bear this badge of shame the rest of their lives.
Never before in American history has an attorney general been confirmed who was as corrupt as Todd Blanche. The Department of Justice is already in shambles.”
“And,” Luttig added, “he will further ruin the Department of Justice.”
As soon as he took office, Blanche issued a memo dramatically expanding executive privilege, which he described as the authority of the president to “withhold certain sensitive information for the public good.” Executive privilege has enabled the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny with the logic that a president must be able to get a wide range of advice, given freely, by those in the executive branch.
Now, though, the Department of Justice under Blanche says the president can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.” The memo defines as a “private adviser” “anyone the President consults outside the Executive Branch.” As John Light of Talking Points Memo notes, this definition would enable the White House to defy congressional subpoenas for anyone to whom the president talks.
As Avery Lotz of Axios reports, Democrats had been planning to begin investigations of Trump’s corruption if they retake control of the House and/or the Senate. Recognizing that the White House would stonewall them, they intended to subpoena companies, college officials, and private citizens to testify. The memo, which is not legally binding but which indicates the administration’s position, would hamper that effort.
Lotz notes that the administration is already fighting a subpoena in a lawsuit filed by the American Bar Association that orders Trump’s senior personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, to testify about the deals the Trump administration struck with major law firms early in his second term.
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote: “This latest opinion should be seen as a partisan measure to insulate the president and his corrupt activities from Congressional subpoenas when the majority flips.”
Thursday was the day that Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held a status conference in the case of Phang v. Blanche. This is a lawsuit brought by independent journalist Katie Phang to force the Department of Justice to produce unredacted versions of documents from the Epstein files that she says were redacted against the explicit instructions in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With that law, Congress ordered the Department of Justice to release all the files gathered by the FBI investigation into sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, with redactions only to protect victims, no later than December 19, 2025.
Almost eight months later, the Department of Justice has refused to do so, probably producing about half the files, with many of the documents heavily redacted at the same time that it released some of the victim’s names, photographs, and identifying information.
As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in her Civil Discourse, Phang sued in April for access to an unredacted version of a handful of files, including emails about a “torture video” and sexual activity with girls, as well as notes from FBI interviews with a victim who claims Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13 and materials in foreign languages, which the Department of Justice has not produced at all. She also asked the Department of Justice to explain why they made the redactions they did, something the law requires but the Justice Department has not done.
In late June, Sullivan granted Phang’s request.
But the Department of Justice under then–acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who interviewed Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell shortly before she was transferred to a far less restrictive prison that should have been inaccessible to a sex offender, did not turn over those documents.
So, in July, Sullivan ordered the government to turn over the unredacted documents to him so he could review them himself to see if the decision by the Department of Justice not to release them was correct. Once again, the Department of Justice refused. As for an explanation for why the department hadn’t explained the decisions to redact, the Justice Department lawyer told the judge the process was “underway” but couldn’t say when it would be done or why translating documents in foreign languages wasn’t practical. He claimed the materials the department is withholding are simply duplicates of things that have been released, but offered no proof of that assertion.
Ultimately, as Vance explains, Sullivan asked: ““So you’re saying I’ve learned everything I’m going to learn from the government?” The lawyer for the Department of Justice, Andrew Block, answered: “That’s right.”
Sullivan wasn’t satisfied. “The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case. The victims have a right to know. The court has a right to know. The law is still in full force and effect. The court is just ensuring compliance.”
To make it clear he was being reasonable, in expectation of a review from a higher court, Sullivan repeatedly told Block he was willing to work with the department, but warned that he had held prosecutors in contempt of court in the past. Sullivan gave Phang’s lawyers 10 days to propose an order to deal with the failure of the Department of Justice to comply with his orders to produce the files Phang requested.
The administration is also undermining another popular law. This week, under Trump, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the Treasury Department not only ended the registry Congress set up in 2021 over Trump’s veto to make shell companies identify their owners, but also destroyed all the data it has already collected.
FinCEN combats money laundering. Congress set up the Corporate Transparency Act after documents leaked to BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020 found that between 1999 and 2017, banks had flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money, moved by criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria through shell companies. These are legal entities that don’t have physical plants or operations, but can be used for holding and moving money.
Shell companies also meant that the political system in the U.S. was awash in secrecy. “It’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” one Democrat reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.” One of the documents flagged how much Russian money was flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.
The U.S. was the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company enabling them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes—Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from taking the story of her sexual encounter with Trump public before the 2016 election. So Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act to undercut the shell companies that enabled money laundering in America.
The act required the owners of any company that was not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, would go to FinCEN. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.
The plan was to pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. The measure passed on a bipartisan basis; then-senator Marco Rubio of Florida, now secretary of state, co-sponsored it, calling it the “most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades.”
Now the Treasury Department says it will not collect the information the law requires, raising the question of whether the Trump administration is openly refusing to implement a law.
On Meet the Press yesterday, Todd Blanche — our newly confirmed attorney general, Trump’s personal lawyer from spring 2023 onward, and the lawyer for several people in Trump’s orbit before that, including Rudy Giuliani, Paul Manafort, Igor Fruman, and Boris Epshteyn — refused to say he would act independently of White House control. He followed that up with a claim that Trump has never demanded he prosecute specific people, which is a fascinating claim for anyone who has spent time on Truth Social. Try not to be one of those people; leave that to those who are paid to rot their brains. Trump is constantly yelling about individuals who need to be prosecuted. Maybe Blanche means Trump never said so in a formal memo — I could believe that. Trump prefers unscripted ranting at rallies and all-caps social media posts to the formal work of governance.
The direct quotes from the Meet the Press interview: “There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case and acting independently of the White House.” When Blanche was pressed by Kristen Welker to pledge his independence from Trump’s edicts, he replied: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.” He said Trump has never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical, and that reports of White House meddling in the Department of Justice were overhyped.
This, again, seems to be a question of which means of communication he’s counting. Trump repeatedly demanded the prosecution of people on social media — including tagging his former attorney general (and former defense lawyer during his impeachment trial) Pam Bondi, before firing her in April. As the New York Times described at the time: “The firing of Ms. Bondi, 60, and a turbulent 14-month tenure as Attorney General, in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so. In the process, Ms. Bondi surrendered much of the department’s historic independence and oversaw the exodus of experienced career officials, leaving the department’s public corruption and national security units, along with many local U.S. attorneys’ offices, weakened and demoralized. Yet Mr. Trump remained annoyed by Ms. Bondi’s inability to secure indictments of people he referred to as scum during a speech in the department’s Great Hall about a year ago.”
A lot of us get frustrated with the New York Times fairly often, because of their editorials and the way they frame certain issues. But they’re risk-averse enough that we should think through the implications here. This is almost assuredly correct: if Bondi was fired for not going far enough — even while surrendering most of the department’s independence — then Todd Blanche refusing to even make the pretense of independence is a problem.
I think we sometimes look at these moments purely through the lens of corruption, and that matters — this is the most corrupt administration in a long time; we might have to look back to the Gilded Age to find worse. Having Trump’s personal lawyer serve as Attorney General has enormous implications for what happens in Trump world over the next couple of years. Rule of law and custom already don’t apply, as Trump and his family pillage the coffers of the country. I expect that to get significantly worse. Blanche, after all, is responsible for disbanding the national cryptocurrency enforcement team — to the benefit of not only his own holdings, but Trump and Melania’s individual cryptocurrencies.
But what worries me more than that — and unfortunately, that remains small scale, it’s only billions of dollars after all — is what this means for the fascist part of Trump Landia’s agenda. Violating the rule of law isn’t just about Trump’s personal kleptocracy. It’s about punishment, vengeance, and rewarding the fascists who follow him no matter what.
I’m not going to talk about the Epstein case today — that’s a topic too big to drop in and out of. But I do want to talk about Blanche’s proposed anti-weaponization fund, even though he said again on Sunday on Fox News that it is dead, and that Trump knows it. The agreement he made with Tillis and Cornyn to secure their votes for his confirmation was to kill this fund. It was initially ordered in a May memo for $1.776 billion — yes, that number matters, a topic for another time — and it was created explicitly to start by paying off January 6th insurrectionists, and then anyone else Trump world felt was targeted by Biden.
Even if the fascist slush fund is dead — and I think that’s a real “if” — once Tillis and Cornyn are out of the Senate, the attempt to legislate something like it hits the perfect middle ground between personal corruption for Trump (like the lawsuit against the IRS) and support for far-right ideas outside the confines of the law. If the Department of Justice is run by a man who acts like Trump’s personal enforcer, not just his personal lawyer, is that not somehow worse?
The case study: Minneapolis
Let’s talk about this in a specific case: Todd Blanche’s role in Minneapolis, and in the actions happening there now. This is not just a past concern but a present one, and it goes beyond his response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this spring. Blanche was partially in charge when Minnesota officials were prevented from investigating Good’s killing, with the case handed over solely to the FBI. Bondi and Blanche openly blocked a civil rights investigation into Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Renee Good, and instead pushed conspiratorial investigations into her wife, Becca Good, and local activist groups. Six federal prosecutors resigned after the DOJ chose to investigate Becca Good instead of Ross.
This is not a small thing. Trump went on, of course, to rant about “anarchists” and “professional agitators” in Minneapolis, with his characteristic all-caps warnings that “the day of reckoning and retribution” was coming. The DOJ pushed forward with criminal inquiries into Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey for obstruction. These are all things we know — this was January of this year. I know that starts to feel like a decade ago some days. But these are all things Todd Blanche was intimately involved in, at a time when he had a boss who was apparently still somehow attempting to moderate Trump. Yes, I know how that sounds, but that’s apparently what happened.
The reason we need to keep talking about Minneapolis in the context of Blanche is that Trump isn’t done with it. Blanche isn’t done with it. And even if many of us have moved on to other stories, the federal government has not. If Blanche won’t make even the pretense of judicial independence — and Bondi at least pretended, and seems to have gotten fired for it — then the ways the law is being blatantly violated there still deeply matter. This is an ongoing concern.
The Justice Department just dismissed charges against James Patrick Lyons on Friday, whose case was set to go to trial today on five counts of making interstate threats to injure law enforcement officers, because prosecutors lacked evidence that he’d committed a crime. This is one of numerous cases dismissed over basic investigative missteps. Of roughly 560 charges brought for insulting immigration officers, the government has lost or dismissed nearly half. Normally the Department of Justice wins about 90 percent of its criminal cases. They’re losing because this was never about the law — it’s about the threat.
Operation Puppet Master
Newly released internal investigative reports from the Department of Homeland Security, reported last week, show that those threats — alongside blatant misconduct — go even further: a massive domestic spying campaign by the U.S. government on prominent labor unions and left-leaning organizations, in what was called Operation Puppet Master, aimed at trying to prove a criminal conspiracy against ICE.
We found out about this because the Department of Justice filed charges against 15 people in Minnesota over alleged interference with government activities. DHS used this operation to obtain financial records from unions like the Communications Workers of America and nonprofits including the Sunrise Movement — years of wire transfer data. They documented license plate information from attendees at an event at a church. They investigated the Democratic Socialists of America and similar groups.
This is a big deal because every piece of data they gathered came from First Amendment–protected activity: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. The government’s case against these people seems to rest on guilt by association, used to surveil massive groups of people who have pushed back against various Trump administration agendas. This is all framed as targeting people who were, according to the government, interfering with Operation Metro Surge — with an overwhelming focus now on the claim that Direct Action Minnesota is a so-called “Antifa” organization, and that consequently anyone associated with it needs to be swept into a large-scale conspiracy investigation against the federal government.
Why this matters beyond Minnesota
This is one particular thread coming out of an attorney general we should already be concerned about. So why should you care about what’s happening back in Minnesota, and how do these things tie together?
Start with something basic: Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi both got fired for not going as far as Trump told them to. They’ve been replaced by two men, Mark Wayne Mullen and Todd Blanche, who have made it very clear they feel no compunction about restraint on this front. Blanche is busy saying he would not make even the pretense of independence from the White House’s agenda, and that he doesn’t believe Trump has ever asked him to do anything illegal or unethical in any way. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he genuinely believes that. How much worse is it that a true believer is running the Department of Justice arm-in-arm with Trump’s personal edicts to weaponize the government against its enemies? The “Antifa equals domestic terrorists” campaign is running through the courts yet again — pay attention to what happened recently in Texas. If Blanche carries on this way, with more power, no oversight, and even more help from other departments, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
I don’t have an action item. There’s no easy solution here. But media cycles tend to move on, and all eyes were on Minneapolis in January — and that made a difference. Trump hates failure, and he hates a negative media cycle even more. But we moved on to other topics, even though ICE and the Department of Justice never left Minneapolis.
The case unfolding in Minneapolis right now needs to be a bigger news story than it is. This is the government violating our rights on a massive scale in the name of Trump’s personal whims and hatreds. It’s also a test case — again — of how far the federal government can go in arguing that Antifa is both a real organization and a domestic terrorist organization that can be prosecuted. It was perhaps one thing to make these arguments in Texas, in a jurisdiction where they believed they had favorable judges. Trying it again in Minneapolis is an attempt to sow fear, to suppress any resistance to Trump’s actions, to the actions of ICE, to the Department of Homeland Security.
It is up to all of us to pay attention — to make sure this doesn’t happen quietly in the dark, to show up for it, to argue against it, and to keep talking about it. Because negative media attention seems, unfortunately, to be the only thing that gets this president to back down from his worst excesses. And it only works if the pushback is loud enough, and if it comes not just from the judicial system, but from the public sphere.
Trump has just threatened to bomb US ally Oman if it gets in the way of the Hormuz deal with Iran.
At the same time he is calling off military drills with South Korea, saying he has, "a very good relationship," with Kim Jong Un.
America no longer has allies.
Trump has autocratic chums.
That's the way the world is right now.
Today at work, I was washing dishes and said “Hey, I wonder what’s up with JD Vance.” So I listened to his appearance on Joe Rogan, and, while spending hours scrubbing ketchup stains in scalding water, quickly realized that Vance’s interview would be the most painful part of my day.
The best thing I can say about Vance is that he got thinner: Ozempic, maybe? My distinguished co-author once told me that whenever his then-girlfriend got mad at him, he would shave his beard, thereby creating some cosmetic distance from his alleged transgression. This was apparently Vance’s strategy, and he did not share in said co-author’s success
Joe Rogan will go down as a legendary figure in American media; through his powerhouse long-form podcast, he fundamentally changed how we consume and distribute information. And while he’s clearly sharp, he’s not exactly an intellectual heavyweight. Yet, over the course of the interview, he laid waste to JD Vance.
This interview was, to a lesser degree, the GOP’s Joe-Biden-2024-debate moment. Vance is in an administration whose popularity is, shall we say, questionable. But if you’re a Republican strategist, you might have had some hope for Vance: that he might pivot from Trump’s recent catastrophes and mobilize the populist base while establishing mainstream credibility through his clean-cut Midwestern manners. Like him or not, Vance was generally considered smart.
But this interview torpedoed all that. Rogan is known for being a gentle interviewer–in fact, he’s been heavily criticized for this. Moreover, he’s generally amenable to guests’ ideas; he’s happy to indulge in uncontroversial chatter, which usually revolves around MMA, steak, and animal impressions. And so if you’re JD Vance–the vice president of the man who Rogan himself voted for–you should be in friendly territory.
But Vance could not convince Rogan of a single thing. Around the 45 minute mark, Vance decides that it’s a good idea to ask Rogan what he thinks is the most ludicrous position of the Republican Party, and Rogan cites the Texas law to have the Ten Commandments displayed in public school classrooms. Vance has three easy ways out of this: 1) “It’s purely out of historical importance for the United States,” 2) “Is it such a crazy thing to hang a piece of paper that says ‘Thou shalt not kill?”’ and 3) “It’s up to the states.” Vance chooses 4), where he says, and this is a direct quote: “It’s not like they’re putting the Ten Commandments in front of these kids and saying you have to read this and write it 500 times a day.” He repeatedly advances some half-baked argument, has it swiftly parried by Rogan (Joe Rogan, Fear Factor host, MMA commentator, bear enthusiast), and is forced to backtrack. It was a sad day for Yale Law.
This is the kind of issue which appeared in West Wing, and somehow Religious Right arguments from the mind of Aaron Sorkin–arguments which were introduced for the sole purpose of being demolished by the show’s heroes–would have been way better than what Vance said. If you cannot beat the accusations of being a Bible-Thumper in 2026, you will not become president.
And the hits kept coming. Vance mentioned that he “Poured his heart and soul” into the Iran negotiations, which does not bode well for the state of his heart and soul. He stated that Trump made his decision to attack Iran independently of Israel, which directly contradicts Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He assured us that Trump was not involved in Epstein’s wrongdoing, dude (He actually said “Dude”). And, to round it off, he proposed a theory about aliens which Joe Rogan swiftly rejected. Joe Rogan rejecting your alien theory is like Joey Chestnut vociferously declining a hotdog.
What we’ve watched is essentially a scene where a father mows the lawn and his son pushes his toy mower and makes sputtering noises with his mouth: aww, that’s cute! He thinks he’s just like Dad! It’s clear that Vance has tried to imitate Trump’s somewhat sporadic interview style. But Trump’s antics, erratic as they may be, have their own implicit sort of logic which led him to the greatest political comeback of recent memory. But Vance simply does not possess this talent.
We’re watching the JD Vance psychodrama reach its third act in real time. Vance clawed his way out of desperate poverty, earned a prestigious degree and top-notch job, and was then faced with the difficult job of reconciling the two. On one hand, he’ll never forget the desperation, the stigma, and the feeling of being out-of-place in an unrecognizable world. But on the other hand, he feels the allure of Thielworld’s money, prestige, and connections. So is he a populist, common-sense man of the people? Or is he a shrewd political operator with tech and technocracy sympathies? The end result, it seems, is that he is not much of anything: he criticizes intervention but defends the Iran War, he uses liberal-arts phraseology to defend the working class, and he cannot even get Joe Rogan to consider that angels might actually be aliens.
When Trump destroyed the GOP of yesteryear, it meant that politicians no longer had to wait in line. They could kiss the ring and rapidly rise to political prominence. Yet key to Trump’s longevity is that he ultimately cannibalizes everyone who cozies up to him, thereby destroying the careers of any potential competitors. Vance’s predecessor made this bargain, and he was treated to chants of “Hang Mike Pence.” Vance made a deal with the devil, and now he’s lost his soul.
JD Vance has decided to shoulder the litany of failures of this past term–ICE, Epstein, tariffs, and now Iran. And he has neither the will nor the ability to break from Trump. The one chance he had was to go on platforms like Rogan, distance himself from Trump, sound shrewd and eloquent, and altogether position himself as a reasonable alternative to the current term. And he failed.
I hope he really did find religion. Come primary season, he’s gonna need divine intervention if he hopes to ever return to the White House.
The Supreme Court on Monday turned away President Trump’s longshot effort to deny a $5.6 million payment he was ordered
to make three years after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed the former magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.
From Friday through Sunday, Trump continued his now-habitual weekend flooding of social media with fantasies that he is smart, beloved, and powerful.
The post closest to reality on Friday touted the story by Steve Thompson, Federica Cocco, and Christoper Rowland of the Washington Post on Thursday, August 13, reporting that prescription drug prices have fallen 3.1% this year, the biggest rate of price decrease since 1963. While that drop is real, the journalists note, much of the drop reflects the falling price of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, whose price has dropped dramatically because of competition from generic versions.
For other drugs, experts say the price drop comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Democrats without a single Republican vote in 2022, during the Biden administration. That law permitted the government to begin negotiations with drug companies for lower prices on ten commonly prescribed drugs, with the lower prices going into effect this year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that taxpayers would save $6 billion from those first changes.
Health policy scholar Stacie Dusetzina told the journalists that Trump’s TrumpRx program covers “a limited number of branded drugs” that “may not be high enough volume to be included” in the new figures.
The desire to claim Biden’s success as his own may have been behind Trump’s resurrection of accusations that Biden was corrupt.
Trump’s morass in Iran also turned into fantasy on social media when he claimed the U.S. has built a “WALL OF STEEL,” complete with an AI wall through the water, of a blockade of Iranian ports. Trump then veered to declaring that “Pocahontas and ‘Abdul’”—Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whom he portrayed in stereotypical Indigenous garb, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from Michigan, “want to take your stuff, and Crash the Economy!!!” and that El-Sayed and women in hijab “are coming for your home and your belongings!”
Since an appeals court found that construction must stop, Trump has harped on the idea that the ballroom is crucial for national security. But as Will Hobson and Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, Trump began suggesting a ballroom back in 2010 for reasons of aesthetics and space. The national security argument, the journalists note, didn’t arrive until January 2026, after legal challenges to his authority to demolish the East Wing and build his ballroom.
Trump’s weekend fantasies put him in the same category as framers of the Constitution as he showed an AI-finished ballroom to George Washington, at one point writing: “Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas on this great Military Complex/Ballroom!” In real life, Washington staunchly opposed royal luxury for the president.
By equating himself with George Washington, Trump appeared to entertain the fantasy that he is leading the country toward a second American Revolution, much as Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in 2024. Trump’s vision for the country is literally dark: on Saturday his social media account posted a dark black-and-white image of him wearing a Trump 2028 hat, with the caption, in a German-style typeface echoing that of the Nazis, saying: “We are going to win.” In another post, he boasted that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “get along GREAT!”
Sunday evening, Trump declared that "based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” the North Korean dictator, he had ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” traditional military exercises with key U.S. ally South Korea. The joint drills were scheduled to begin today.
Trump wrote that such exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.” Trump suggested the change was retaliation for the refusal of South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung to help the U.S. in Iran, but as political scientist Norm Ornstein noted, the decision comes just as North Korea is sending 50,000 troops to help Russian president Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.
The idea that Trump is a powerful dictator making a victorious alliance with North Korea and Russia presents a darkly threatening posture but, like the rest of Trump’s social media dump, portrays a world different from reality.
Today is the day that the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran that Trump signed on June 17 expires. Rather than ushering in a permanent agreement that opens the Strait of Hormuz and stops Iran’s nuclear ambitions, today shows just how badly Trump is flailing.
This morning he lashed out, telling Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel “that Iran should ‘put up the white flag of surrender.’ I have no time schedule,” Trump told Yingst. “I’m not in a hurry...the midterms have nothing to do with my thinking.” As for talks between Iran and Oman over control of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump told Yingst: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them.” Oman is a key U.S. ally in the region.
For Iran’s part, an Iranian leader told Reuters that if diplomacy fails, Tehran will shift from defense to offense. Benoit Faucon and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Iranian hard-liners have spent the past two months planning to widen the war and raise the cost for the U.S., inflicting enough pain that Iran can deter future attacks. Today Reuters reported that Iran-backed Houthis launched missiles at Saudi ships near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another key international shipping route.
Meanwhile, Trump is caught in a domestic scandal over the condition of the U.S. military. In early August, news broke that the U.S. was running low on precision missiles after using the expensive weapons to shoot down inexpensive Iranian drones. Then we heard about the appalling conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier kept overseas without adequate resupply and with maintenance issues, including overflowing toilets. Multiple outlets have reported that despondent service members, months past the scheduled end of their deployment, have attempted self-harm. The U.S. is moving the USS George Washington from the western Pacific to replace the USS Lincoln, leaving the region near China without a U.S. carrier.
When a reporter began a question to Trump on Friday with, “Family members of U.S. service members are concerned about the conditions on board the USS Lincoln,” Trump interrupted to say: “No they’re not.” When the reporter followed up with “Has the deployment gone on too long? Are you worried about their mental health?” he blustered: “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.”
Families of sailors reacted with fury, telling Ed Pilkington of The Guardian that sailors have bad water and so little food they have lost up to 30 pounds (13.6 kg). There is little mental health counseling despite the extended deployment. “Keep praying for us,” one sailor texted home. “We are doing our best to make sure we protect our country and our families.”
On Saturday, Aaron Parnas in MeidasNews reported on a supply crisis on the USS Boxer, as well, and today Brad Lendon of CNN reported that sailors on a U.S. guided missile destroyer spent four days in blistering heat last month without working toilets, cooked food, or air conditioning after the vessel lost power.
Trump’s contribution to military plans has been to order the U.S. Navy to alter the construction of new aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller—named for a Pearl Harbor hero—ordering the designers to replace the modern electromagnetic launch system for planes with an older, steam-powered catapult system. Kaanita Iyer of CNN reports the change will delay production of the craft for several years and could cost billions.
Noah Robertson and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday that the Navy is also considering redesigning the aircraft carrier fleet to reflect Trump’s preference for ships that look like those from World War II. That change, too, could cost billions.
On Sunday night, a social media user posted a video of Trump at a party at his Bedminster club blasting “Y.M.C.A.” on his iPad for the crowd. National security scholar Tom Nichols responded: “We’re losing a war to Iran, we’re alienating our allies, we’re emboldening our enemies, our stalwart service people are being subjected to deprivations...and this is what the Commander in Chief is doing.”
But, in fact, that’s not all Trump is doing.
Late Friday night, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leader Trump appointed, approved a preliminary charter for World Liberty Financial (WLF) to become a bank. As Lawrence Delevingne and Pete Schroeder of Reuters report, the charter would permit WLF to issue USD1, a stablecoin tied to the dollar, and to manage and hold assets for customers and settle payments faster. WLF is the cryptocurrency venture launched by the Trump family and their close allies the Witkoff family.
Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and WLF has done at least one major deal with a national security advisor for the United Arab Emirates. Reuters estimates that as of April 2026, WLF had “funneled more than $1.6 billion to the U.S. president and his family.”
Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wrote: “They are going to steal everything they can while they have power.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, said: “President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen—and Congress cannot allow it to stand.” She and nine other senators are introducing a bill to guarantee “that no President, Vice President, their immediate families or other senior government officials can exploit their positions to own or control a bank, which could serve as a major vehicle for corrupt dealings.”
At 4:09 this afternoon, Trump posted on social media an image of Kim Jong Un outside with several men standing around him, talking on a landline telephone. The caption read: “HEY DONALD, WE COOL… RIGHT?”
Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 US datasets, endangering public health, education and more
"To be honest I know the think end of **** all about national security. I've been his sister for so long I don't even know my own sodding name." Lyndsey Graham's sister.
The principal aim of President Trump’s second term is revenge.
Trump is consumed by this lust for revenge. It defined the first moments of his second term. “Within hours of taking the presidential oath,” my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the president “stripped protective details” from Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and others he had viewed as disloyal, including former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.”
Revenge against the aides and officials who restrained Trump’s worst impulses. Revenge against the bureaucrats and “deep state” agents who challenged his lawbreaking. Revenge against the prosecutors who pursued cases against him and against the judges who ruled in their favor. Revenge against the few Republicans who voted for his impeachment and conviction and against those who abandoned him after Jan. 6. And last, revenge against the American people, for rejecting him in 2020 and dealing a grievous blow to his ego.
Revenge shapes the president’s priorities, drives his actions and structures the decisions of his government. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Trump turns the weight of the federal government against those Americans who defy his will.
Take Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He was supposed to disappear — unlawfully shipped to a foreign dungeon and left to languish as part of the administration’s draconian deportation program. But with the help of his family, lawyers and lawmakers, Abrego Garcia fought back.
Not only did he successfully challenge his removal and captivity, but he also won a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court, which ordered the federal government to facilitate his return to the United States. Soon after, the Department of Justice announced his criminal indictment, and he was imprisoned, again.
He fought this, too. In May, a judge dismissed the criminal case against him.
The Ahab-like tenacity of the White House in its pursuit of Abrego Garcia might make sense if he were some criminal mastermind — a danger to the public order. He wasn’t. He was just an ordinary person, a working member of his community who happened to be an easy target for the president’s deportation machine.
He was supposed to be an example — a warning to immigrants, legal or otherwise, to leave the country or suffer the consequences. By challenging the administration and winning in court, Abrego Garcia threatened the president’s program. He stood as a symbol of defiance in the face of Trump’s despotic abuse of power. This is why the Trump administration wouldn’t let up. As an unnamed White House adviser told Rolling Stone last year, “The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything.”
Trump tried to crush Abrego Garcia, and when he couldn’t, he made it the priority of his government to punish him for his resistance. This was less policymaking than obsession. And it should be said that Trump has still not given up; his Department of Justice has asked an appeals court to reinstate the criminal charges against Abrego Garcia.
Abrego Garcia is not alone. Trump has, for most of the summer, been pursuing a vendetta against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. Hearn was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, which is in a state of disrepair in the wake of the president’s attempted renovations.
Several months ago, Trump announced a plan to paint the floor of the pool blue, to match his vision of the National Mall. He handed a no-bid contract to a Virginia-based company, which proceeded to try to waterproof and paint the pool. Once that was finished, Trump drove his presidential motorcade down the empty pool in a show of triumph. Soon after, the pool was filled — and the trouble began.
The blue paint trapped heat, the heat spurred algae growth, and in short order the Reflecting Pool had turned green. There was nothing the White House could do about it. Misapplication of the new coating, meanwhile, had caused the floor to peel; chunks of it floated to the surface.
Unable to take responsibility for his own mistakes and failures, Trump blamed unnamed saboteurs and appears to have ordered the Department of Justice to press charges against them. Enter Hearn, who was accused of pulling off a piece of the pool’s liner. He was indicted by a grand jury on a federal vandalism charge and arrested.
But there was no evidence Hearn had done anything wrong. Instead, the problems at the pool were the product of poor work and quality control. Even the Department of Justice was forced to admit that the damage was the result of a “flawed installation.”
The U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, dropped the charges. Trump was furious. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?” He wants a prosecution. He wants revenge.
Trump is hardly the first powerful person to abuse the law enforcement powers of the federal government to pursue narrow interests and petty grievances. Richard Nixon infamously turned both the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. against his political enemies. J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the F.B.I., used his authority to wage what amounted to a personal crusade against the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he viewed as a dangerous subversive.
The story of the Trump administration is, as always, one of continuity with the worst parts of our past. And yet that continuity exists alongside novelty.
Both Nixon and Hoover cloaked their abuses of power in the language of necessity and national interest. They paid lip service to the rules and norms of constitutional government even as they treated them as obstacles to their own power. Committed to vice, they nonetheless feigned tribute to virtue.
Trump does no such thing. He does not see himself as a man in possession of an office, heading a government, so much as he sees himself as the government. The state is an extension of his person. He is the king, and it is one of his two bodies.
There is no observable national interest at work in the crusades against Abrego Garcia or Hearn. These are personal crusades, shaped entirely by Trump’s grievances, his desire for revenge, his insatiable need to soothe his own psychic wounds.
There are, to be sure, true believers within this administration, from the executive power fanatic Russell Vought to the far-right nativist Stephen Miller. But the man at the top has no such ambitions. He is there only for himself. The principal aim of his government as he sees it is his own glorification — a desperate quest to never lose face and to pursue vengeance against anyone who might undermine his sense of self.
Hence Trump’s failed war with Iran — a military failure and disastrous strategic mistake. There is no apparent plan to end the conflict, only the futile efforts of a president desperate to shed the stench of defeat. That is what the false negotiations and endless missile strikes are all about: a way to try to end the war without having lost it. Peace with honor, this time as something closer to farce.
The danger, of course, is what happens if there is no way out. What if Trump is truly stuck, fully caught in a trap of his own making?
With the terrible power of the United States at his fingertips, it is frightening to contemplate what he might do to save his fragile sense of self. He has already tried to wreck the country in pursuit of revenge against all those who challenge his ego and authority. There’s no reason to think that he won’t try to wreck the world in pursuit of the same.
