The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”

Central to that effort was the principle, stated in Article 2, that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The U.N. General Assembly has been meeting in New York City since September 8, and today began its high-level General Debate, the annual meeting of the heads of state and heads of government that launches the General Assembly session. At the General Debate, all 193 U.N. member states are invited to address the General Assembly.

By tradition, Brazil speaks first because it was the first to volunteer to speak in 1955 when no other country would. Because the United States is the country that hosts the United Nations, it usually speaks second.

In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”

Much of the Iranian delegation walked out.

Trump’s immediate switch to a talking point about the midterms suggests that his speech was aimed at U.S. voters more than the U.N. audience, but it should not be overlooked that he stood in front of world leaders and rejected the premise of the U.N.

Touting his own “Board of Peace” and continuing his fiction that he has solved multiple wars, he outlined a fantasy worldview of himself as a powerful dictator, a man of action who rejects the diplomacy at the heart of the U.N.

“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” he declared. “They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.”

Rejecting the principles on which the U.N. was founded, Trump instead embraced the idea that powerful countries will have spheres of influence, dominating their neighbors. This is the worldview advanced by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who seeks to have control over the decisions made by the countries around Russia, including Ukraine. In this worldview, as Trump sees it, the United States will control the western hemisphere.

“To the victor belong the spoils,” he told the U.N. in a perverse echo of the world the U.N. founders set out to change. “You’ve all heard that.”

Trump threatened Mexico and boasted of U.S. attacks on Venezuela that removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, who was willing to work with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil fields.

“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”

“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba,” Trump said, “where the communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under. It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before and it will fall. Marco Rubio is handling a negotiation. He’s deep into negotiations with Cuba. Let’s see what happens.”

The Cuban delegation walked out.

In an echo of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump went full white nationalist, accusing the “U.N.’s top human rights officials” of wanting the U.S. “to open up our borders to gangs and criminals from [the] world’s most dangerous places…. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history. There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation and so should you.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, asked the nations of the world to hold fast to a different vision.

He warned that “we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” whose “reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.”

“At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.”

There are two routes open, Guterres said. Either the world will fragment into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or it will move toward “networked multipolarity,” a “world built on interdependence—and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules.”

Against the backdrop of Russia’s debacle in Ukraine and the U.S. morass in Iran, Guterres noted that the world’s superpowers have learned that “their power isn’t so super. That their power has limits.”

He urged countries to hold fast to the principles of the United Nations: “The primacy of international law. Upholding human dignity. And the pursuit of justice in all its dimensions.”

“It comes down to this,” he said, “Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?”

Force must not “be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter,” he said.

He called out the war in Iran and conflicts in the Middle East; Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza “with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General”; “violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank”; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in violation of the U.N. charter; the war on civilians in Sudan, with millions displaced; and escalating violence in Myanmar.

Guterres added that “[n]o discussion of inequality can ignore its most universal form: The inequality between men and women. Everywhere, women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion, and abuse. Around the world: Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds. And their freedoms treated as bargaining chips.

“This is an outrage—and a profound waste for humanity. Peace is more durable when women are at the table. Economies are more dynamic when women have equal opportunity. Societies are more resilient when girls can learn, lead, and live free from fear. And institutions are more effective when power is shared equally.”

“Equality is not a dream,” Guterres said. “It is a decision.”

“Excellencies,” he said, “The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it.”

“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together.

“The defiance of hope.”

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States will continue purchasing potash from Canada, while noting that Belarus has offered to sell the fertilizer at a lower price.

Trump made the comments to reporters during a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

"Belarus has a lot of potash, and our farmers need good prices," Trump said. "We’ll continue to go with Canada, but Belarus would like to sell it for a much lower price."

Trump first mentioned the potential Belarus purchase on Monday. The proposal indicates his approach to using alternative suppliers as leverage in trade disputes with Canada, which provides most US potash imports.

The move could represent a continued warming of relations between Washington and Belarus following the removal of sanctions. source

Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko said Monday that there are no available volumes of fertilizer to send to the U.S. This came after President Trump announced that he was working on a “massive Deal” to buy potash from Minsk at a steep discount amid the trade war with Canada.

“Even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes — everything is contracted,” Lukashenko said in remarks published by his office on Monday.

At the same time, Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that the U.S. purchase of potash from Belarus would be “very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers.”

“The United States is working on a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus. The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada,” he posted.

Potash is a key component in fertilizers, and Canada is the world’s largest supplier, with 53 percent of exports going to the U.S. The Canada Press reported that 80 percent of potash used on U.S. farms comes from Canada.

Canadian potash remains exempt from U.S. tariffs on Canada, amid a fraught trade war between the two countries.

But shortages of fertilizer and its rising price are attributed to multiple global conflicts, including Russia’s war against Ukraine, the U.S. war with Iran and the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz.

(...)

Lukashenko, nicknamed Europe’s last dictator, is under massive international sanctions for a violent crackdown after rejecting his 2020 presidential election loss, and for supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine and hybrid attacks against Europe.

(...) source

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has admitted his country doesn't have enough potash to satisfy U.S. President Donald Trump's demands for the critical fertilizer.

“Everyone keeps saying: Ah, potash! Even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes — everything is contracted,” Lukashenko said Monday at a meeting with Vladimir Orlovsky, head of the Belarusian state customs authority.

That same day, Trump said his country was "working on a deal" to purchase Belarusian potash fertilizer, as it’s “substantially” cheaper than Canada’s offering. Washington and Ottawa are embroiled in an escalating trade dispute.

“The United States is working on a massive deal with respect to the purchase of potash from Belarus. The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our farmers and ranchers,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Yesterday, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden, and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica published a blockbuster story reporting that the anti-corruption group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) for engaging in a pay-to-play scheme in which defense contractor Navatek made illegal donations to her 2020 campaign and later got multimillion-dollar contracts from the government. Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

And yet, the story continues, when he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump fired the investigators building the case and largely stopped investigating public corruption.

While the primary witness in the case was Martin Kao, the man who allegedly engaged in the bribery, the ProPublica journalists corroborated much of Kao’s account through legal records, FBI evidence, and interviews with people who worked with Navatek and the FBI.

Collins’s deputy chief of staff Annie Clark said Collins’s office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-to-play, but she did admit that “the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.” Emails suggest that, in fact, her office did know about the deal. After a $150,000 donation, a staff member from her office emailed a lobbyist for Navatek to ask for Kao’s phone number, writing: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”

Although the story’s authors report that Navatek never produced a product the military needed, it did, in fact, receive millions in defense contracts.

The bribery angle of this story is huge. So, too, is that the story suggests that Trump, at least, might perceive that he has something to hold over Collins’s head to keep her behind his actions, even when they have dramatically weakened her power at the head of Appropriations.

The 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain that gave the late nineteenth century its nickname was not about the riches of the industrialists who came to be known as robber barons. It was about the political corruption of the era. In the book, unscrupulous speculators bribed congressmen. “A Congressional appropriation costs money,” a railroad man tells a naive youth who wonders where a $200,000 appropriation has gone. He listed the bribes his project required and noted that the “high moral” lawmakers cost more than the usual ones.

It was an era in which lawmakers lived by the “spoils system,” as in “to the victor go the spoils.” Lawmakers at the time rewarded their business followers with government contracts and put supporters into political office. The businessmen and officials, in turn, would hire workers on the condition they voted for the party the boss supported. “Every good man looks after his friends,” as one politician put it.

The U.S. outlawed the spoils system in 1883 after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James Garfield, replacing it with the merit-based Civil Service Reform Act, or Pendleton Act. Trump has ripped up those civil service protections, making much of the government staff again political appointees. Curiously, at the United Nations yesterday, Trump used the phrase “to the victor belong the spoils.”

The relationship between the MAGA Republican agenda and the misuse of tax dollars is becoming more and more obvious since ProPublica ran the story last November of how contracts from the Department of Homeland Security appeared to be going to those personally tied to then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her ally Corey Lewandowski.

In July 2026, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Lewandowski “effectively controlled billions in spending at Homeland Security.” Lewandowski responded, somewhat halfheartedly, that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again,” and emphasized that he was “a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda.”

Stories of the Trump administration’s misuse of taxpayer money are starting to drop fast and furious.

Yesterday, Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. funded enhanced security for himself by taking funds from the department’s Office of Minority Health. Whyte notes that the Reagan administration created the Office of Minority Health after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.

Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported today that, over the past year, Kennedy has also accepted $4 million in book advances and more than $270,000 in gifts from allies connected to the “Make American Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement interested in changes to government policies. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, accepted $210,000 in consulting fees from a MAHA advocacy group.

On a far larger scale is the use of tax dollars to pay authoritarian governments to imprison immigrants from the United States who are not their own citizens.

On Monday, David Nakamura and Adam Taylor of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “Office of Remigration” has pledged at least $410 million to facilitate third-country renditions to expel migrants that U.S. courts say cannot be returned to their home countries for fear they will be harmed or killed. So the U.S. has sent more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, including Eswatini, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, for a fee. That money includes $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments, as well as funding for agencies that will then contribute to those countries.

Those countries either imprison the migrants or send them back to their home countries, a loophole that enables the administration to get around the prohibition on the U.S. sending them there. Last Friday, a federal appeals court found that this policy is unlawful. The administration will appeal to the Supreme Court.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has ordered the deals, and Christian Ehrhardt, a State Department official, has secured them.

Nakamura and Taylor explain that the Office of Remigration—the word “remigration” is popular with white nationalists who seek to expel racial minorities and immigrants through ethnic cleansing—reverses the previous U.S. emphasis on resettling refugees and instead focuses on expelling them, including into places where there is strong evidence they will be tortured. The administration is locking in these deals as quickly as possible, the journalists report, exercising “minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.”

A former State Department official who left the department over the policy told Nakamura and Taylor that the administration wanted “fast money, with no strings attached. The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.” The plan appears to be to create such terror in migrant communities that people here self-deport, and others are afraid to come.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “Congress should demand answers from those responsible for diverting taxpayer funding intended to protect people from persecution to some of the world’s worst authoritarians, for purposes which clearly violate human rights.”

On Sunday an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan food delivery driver, in the back in Austin, Texas. With a bullet still lodged in his body, he was discharged from a hospital to ICE custody, where he spent the night in pain on a cold floor. Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported yesterday that the officer was a recent hire who was not wearing a body camera, despite the promise of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that all ICE agents would wear cameras. News outlets reported that the officer had been issued one.

The Department of Homeland Security set out to add 10,000 new agents last year after Congress provided billions of dollars to double the ICE workforce. ICE ramped up its hiring by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and cutting normal vetting procedures, sometimes not even checking fingerprints or identities or conducting a job interview. David Brouillette, the ICE officer with a volatile history who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in July, was also a recent hire. On September 15, Alex Horton, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Maria Sacchetti, and Ted Hesson of the Washington Post reported that ICE has been quietly firing some of those hastily hired.

ICE told the Washington Post reporters: “ICE is hiring the best of the best to go after the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens including drug traffickers, murderers, and pedophiles. When individuals fall short of that standard—personnel decisions are made. This is standard practice in almost every American workplace.”

Officials told Miroff that the agents who stopped Garcés Pérez used a commercial database and federal immigration file that identified the man’s plates as belonging to someone with an outstanding deportation order; his lawyer said he had a valid work permit and is an asylum seeker, and that the deportation order came because notice of his immigration court hearing was sent to the wrong address. After a public outcry, officials took Garcés Pérez back to the hospital on Monday.

Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed reported Monday that the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality are running far behind where they should be in terms of funding for the fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

Trump fired the board of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in April, and the foundation is now effectively being run by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a former NSF board member told Quinn. The director of OMB is Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. “And OMB is directing the agency to direct its grant-making dollars in ways that are very different from federal law as passed by Congress in its budget,” the former board member said.

Quinn noted that Nature attributed the funding shortfall mainly “to the agency keeping more than $1 billion in an account, much of which is for the White House’s Grand Research Challenges project, which is meant to support specific fields, including artificial intelligence.” The Trump family and the president’s allies are heavily invested in the AI sector.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects. Even before Trump announced that the American taxpayer wouldn’t pay a dime for the White House ballroom project, the administration had already signed contracts that put the American taxpayer on the hook for more than $300 million for it.

Today Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that James McCrery II, the first architect on Trump’s ballroom, resigned when Trump insisted on a design that did not meet fire codes. Normally, White House construction would be managed by federal agencies required by law to comply with building safety codes, but White House officials have routed the ballroom through the tiny Executive Residence office that is exempt from rules because it is not a federal agency.

McCrery warned that Trump’s design did not have enough emergency exits or measures to contain a fire, which could spread quickly from the kitchen below the ballroom to the event space above it, and pointed out that the design was not up to code.

Trump waved off his concerns. “I am the code,” he said.

Yesterday evening, after briefly taking the case under consideration, a federal judge ordered the White House to temporarily restore access to CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, the three outlets the president banned from the building via a social media post last week.

White House security may not have gotten the memo, according to a new story from Politico.

The outlet wrote this morning that a reporter showing up for work was blocked from entering the White House on Thursday and had his press credentials seized. The alleged denial of entry came after a federal judge instructed the Trump administration last night to allow the news outlets their usual access while their lawsuit against the president over the ban moves forward.

The Associated Press also reported that a CNN journalist told the outlet she was denied access to the White House on Thursday morning.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/sep/24/white-house-press-xi-jinping-netanyahu-trump-latest-news-updates[/url]

After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the request of the media outlets to stop Trump’s order banning members of their organizations from the White House complex.

Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2017, challenged the argument of the White House that it had banned the journalists because they had endangered national security, noting that the stories to which administration lawyers claimed to object were “routine.” In fact, one of the stories the White House claimed endangered national security was based on a press call from the White House itself. According to Oliver Darcy, who writes the media newsletter Status, the anonymous “senior administration official” who provided the quotations on the call was none other than Vice President J.D. Vance.

Kelly ordered the credentials of 78 journalists restored immediately.

This morning, the White House continued to deny reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW access to the White House campus. Their lawyers asked for an emergency hearing because the administration had “already repeatedly violated the Court’s Order,” and soon after the judge ordered the administration to respond, the reporters were once again allowed into the area.

And then tonight, at least CNN and MS NOW were blocked from access to the White House state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After Trump posted on social media that CNN and MS NOW (he called it MSDNC) were refusing to cover Xi’s visit “because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’” the White House told CNN it could send only an audio producer and a cameraman to the event, not a reporter or producer. Senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said: “They again said that we were specifically denied access and that they were not letting in the CNN editorial presence.”

This morning, Trump complained on social media that “[t]he Media is trying to cover up how well things are going before the Midterms, just to help Democrats.”

And that’s the gist of Trump’s attacks on media outlets: MAGA is falling apart, and he either lives in a fantasy world or hopes to stem that collapse by issuing propaganda that will convince voters he is actually winning.

The fantasy world thesis has supporting evidence in an image posted on Trump’s social media account this morning, showing Trump and Xi standing together on a red carpet in front of an airplane apparently labeled Air China. There is a military aircraft flying over a circle of stars with the words “Only Trump” superimposed in a German-style blackletter font. Behind Trump, to his right, is a young woman who looks like Trump’s loyal aide Natalie Harp standing with her hand over her heart.

Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice noted that the image was a digitally altered photo in which the image of the chief officer of protocol of the United States, Monica Crowley, had been replaced by an image that appears to be Harp.

Convincing voters he is winning is an even harder sell.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is its signature policy, and last week a federal appeals court stopped the Trump administration from sending migrants to third countries, finding that the short timeline for those renditions stripped deportees of their right to due process. The administration appears to have continued the renditions, arguing that the court had not officially notified a lower court of its decision and thus it was not yet in effect, prompting an appeals court to clarify that the flights must stop.

Today Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to step in to permit those renditions to third countries. He said that disruption of the administration’s “plans…imposes massive costs on the government and invariably requires new rounds of diplomatic engagement with countries who may be all the more skeptical of our removal efforts given the disruption.”

Also today, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for ignoring his previous orders and continuing to hold people in “inhumane and unconstitutional” conditions at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, depriving detainees of “sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care.” Although, as Josephine Walker of Axios points out, the administration likely sees the appalling conditions of its prisons as a way to induce migrants to leave, the judge required ICE to provide adequate space and humane conditions for detainees.

Meanwhile, as Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press reported today, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ICE had no strategic plan for spending the unprecedented $45 billion Congress gave it in Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, and has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on slapdash plans for mass detention.

It spent nearly $3 million for tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million for maintaining warehouses that were never used to house detainees and are now being sold, and excessive rates to lock people up. Foley reports that the Department of Homeland Security told the GAO that it would have a plan for spending its windfall by August 31, 2027, nearly a year from now.

After Trump announced the U.S. would accept meat from other countries in order to lower food prices, on September 22 the Department of Agriculture announced the recall of more than 167,000 pounds (75,750 kg) of raw pork, beef, and goat. The items were produced without federal inspection but carried false marks claiming they had been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said the food “should be considered misbranded and unsafe to eat.”

Trump’s insistence that the country suffers from voter fraud isn’t going well, either.

In California, Republican sheriff Chad Bianco and the Riverside County sheriff’s department confiscated more than 650,000 ballots after California voters agreed to redistrict the state to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting of Texas. The state’s Democratic attorney general immediately ordered him to return the ballots, saying he had no authority to confiscate them and that the seizure was intended to make people distrust elections.

As Uwa Ede-Osifo of the Guardian reported, the California Supreme Court today ordered Blanco to return the ballots, saying that it was Blanco, rather than voters, who was endangering elections: “Allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret, based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity,” it said.

On Saturday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it a felony to seize ballots from a county elections office.

Trump’s own claims of voter fraud also took a hit this week. As Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported today, in July, Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed they had found more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Mullin stated that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.

But when officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) met with Nevada election officials in August, they admitted Mullin’s number was inflated. After the meeting, one wrote to say that the department had confirmed just 185 people on the voter rolls were not citizens. They sent Nevada officials a list of those 185 names.

On Tuesday, Nevada told the federal government that the 185 people on the government’s list are all citizens. “Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” said Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”

Trump’s job approval rating continues to drop. Fifty Plus One aggregated new polls today and found that only 34.7% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while 62.1% disapprove.

Meridith McGraw, Maggie Severns, and Suzanne Vranica of the Wall Street Journal reported today that an ad airing in major U.S. markets shows Trump promising to “defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all,” before showing images of Trump at White House events as a choir sings “Love Me.” At the end of the ad, the screen reads: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Former campaign finance official Daniel Weiner called the ad “an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen.” Democratic lawmakers wrote to the White House demanding the ad be taken down, calling it “government propaganda” more fitting for North Korea than the U.S. and “an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”

According to the Wall Street Journal reporters, the White House says the ad is a “public service announcement,” “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

The weaker he gets, the more dangerous he gets’: Trump lashes out as his power wanes
David Smith

Almost 240 years later, Trump, who has frequently hailed Jefferson as one of his political heroes, and installed a lifesize bronze statue of him in the White House Rose Garden in July to mark the US semiquincentennial, appears to have eschewed every element of his predecessor’s advice.

His hugely unpopular war in Iran endures; the national debt has surpassed $40tn for the first time; Trump’s “blitzkrieg” on the constitution continues; and he is at odds with American farmers over his administration’s treatment of the agricultural sector.