<With the midterms more than a year away, US President Donald Trump and his enablers have launched a new war on voting rights. Its immediate target is November 2026; its ultimate goal is the institutionalization of one-party control of the federal government. This political “final solution” is the last step in MAGA’s quest to extinguish liberal democracy in America.

The war is being fought along legal and political fronts that stretch across the marble halls of the Supreme Court, Trump’s executive orders, Steve Bannon’s seedy podcast, the transformation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a latter-day Praetorian Guard, and threats to invoke the Insurrection Act.

The Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and Racial Gerrymandering

When it comes to voting rights, no single institution has been more destructive than the nation’s top judicial body under the hypocritical leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts.

In his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing, Roberts promised to serve as chief justice in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” That was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now.

Roberts has always been a Republican insider and activist, dating back to his stint in the early 1980s as a crusading young lawyer in the Justice Department, where he wrote upward of 25 memos, suggesting strategies to limit the scope of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark legislation passed by Congress in 1965 to outlaw racial discrimination in voting.

Redistricting experts predict that if the GOP gambit in Texas and elsewhere succeeds, the party could hold the House until 2050.

In 2013, he made good on his lifelong mission by authoring the infamous 5-4 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, one of the most regressive rulings in Supreme Court history. Shelby gutted sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which had required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter suppression, to obtain advance federal approval—a process known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures. Roberts declared in Shelby that “things have changed dramatically” since the passage of the VRA and that racial discrimination in voting no longer took place.

Shelby left Section 2 of the VRA as the last remaining bulwark of the law. That section prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or language. Both the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have long recognized the right of private parties and organizations to file lawsuits under Section 2 to challenge “racial gerrymanders,” which occur when a state uses race as the primary factor in redistricting to dilute the voting power of minority populations. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have used Section 2 litigation to force the creation of numerous majority-Black or “majority-minority” voting districts to give minorities a fair chance to elect candidates that reflect their views.

All that could change when Roberts and his Republican benchmates hear oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on October 15. The case stems from a complaint brought by a group of individuals who describe themselves in court filings as “non-Black voters.” They contend Louisiana violated their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection when it created a second Black-majority voting district in 2024 to give Black voters, who comprise nearly a third of the state’s electorate, proportional representation in the state’s six-member congressional delegation. If the court agrees with them, it could gut Section 2, leading to the elimination of an estimated 11 Black-majority districts, all held by Democrats, across GOP-controlled Southern states. Such a decision would neuter what little remains of the VRA.

Political Gerrymandering, Texas and California

Even if the court rules against the “non-Black” plaintiffs in Callais, it has given its blessings to another method of election rigging known as “partisan gerrymandering”—the practice of drawing state voting districts to benefit the political party in power. In 2019, by way of a 5-4 majority opinion penned by Roberts, Rucho v. Common Cause, the court held that partisan gerrymandering, no matter how disproportional or extreme, presents a “nonjusticiable political question” that lies beyond the jurisdiction of federal judges to alter or correct.

<....The GOP’s moves have finally awakened a fighting spirit among Democrats, but the outcome of the counterattack is uncertain. Led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California has set a special election for this November to consider a ballot proposition that would suspend the state’s current congressional map, which was drawn by an independent commission, and replace it with one that could give Democrats a five-seat boost to match the Texas power-grab. Democrats in New York, Illinois, and Maryland reportedly are exploring ways to follow Newsom’s lead.

Meantime, the Texas redo is a done deal, offering Trump and the GOP a clear path to retaining their stranglehold on federal power. Redistricting experts predict that if the GOP gambit in Texas and elsewhere succeeds, the party could hold the House until 2050.

Trump’s Executive Orders, Proclamations, and Rants

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s 2024 Roberts-authored decision on presidential immunity (Trump v. United States), Trump has made good on his pledge to be a “dictator on Day One” of his second term, releasing a torrent of autocratic executive orders and proclamations. These include an executive order issued on March 25 with the Orwellian title of “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” Among the order’s many directives is a requirement for voter ID to prove citizenship, and a prohibition on counting mail-in ballots that are sent in by Election Day but delivered afterward.

On April 24, federal district court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who sits in Washington, DC, issued a preliminary injunction, blocking the ID requirement and other provisions, noting that “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states—not the president—with the authority to regulate federal elections.” Unfortunately, the judge’s order failed to address the constitutionality of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which in many respects tracks the executive order. The SAVE Act was passed by the House on April 10 and is now pending before the Senate.

A permanent one-party state controlled by Trump and the GOP will set back women’s interests indefinitely.

Undeterred by the courts, Trump has doubled down on his demands, vowing to impose nationwide voter ID by presidential fiat, ban mail-in ballots and replace voting machines with hand counting. In remarks delivered at the White House on August 18, he claimed that “mail-in ballots are corrupt,” and no other country permits them. In fact, some 34 countries allow them.

Trump has also demanded a new census that would exclude undocumented aliens to be conducted as soon as possible. The census is mandated every 10 years by the Constitution and is used to determine how many House seats are apportioned to each state. To date, no census has been conducted mid-decade, and never have the undocumented been excluded.

The Impact on Women

The election law changes demanded by Trump and the GOP will also undermine the voting power of women.

According to the Pew Research Center, despite the Democratic Party’s declining approval ratings, women remain 12 percentage points more likely than men to affiliate with the Democrats. Exit polling conducted by CNN after the last election found a similar gender gap, showing that women nationwide voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump by a 10% margin. Black women in particular have been the most reliable supporters of the Democratic Party. In 2024, a whopping 92% of Black women opted for Harris, continuing a decades-long trend.

Women also hold more liberal values than men on a variety of key political issues, such as abortion access, gun control, environmental protection, and racial justice. This is especially true of younger women between the ages 18 and 29. A permanent one-party state controlled by Trump and the GOP will set back women’s interests indefinitely....>

<....Steve Bannon and ICE

On his War Room podcast on August 19, right-wing fulminator Steve Bannon upped the ante in the voting rights war, calling for the deployment of ICE to monitor polling places to ensure that “If you don’t have an ID—if you’re not a citizen—you’re not voting.”

It is, of course, illegal under federal law to deploy the military or armed federal troops to patrol polling places as monitors or observers unless they are needed to repel an armed invasion. A section of the US Code makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to do so. The Voting Rights Act also prohibits federal agents from intimidating voters, and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1868 generally proscribes using the military as civilian law enforcement.

These safeguards could easily be circumvented by an ICE army that will be 10,000 strong by the midterms simply by staging high-profile immigration enforcement operations anywhere in blue cities on Election Day. The intimidation effect would be palpable.

The Insurrection Act and the Final Solution

Should all other options for election-rigging appear unavailing by 2026, Trump will have one final card to play: declaring a national emergency and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to delay or even suspend the elections. The act provides an exception to the prohibitions of the Posse Comitatus Act, and as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department will no doubt argue, all other federal statutes.

Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in 2020 in response to the George Floyd protests, and again this past June in response to protests in Los Angeles. Never in American history has the act been invoked to disrupt an election. But if Trump feels sufficiently threatened by a potential loss of power, there is little reason to believe he would not choose to become the first. Nor could we count on the Supreme Court to try to stop him.

In the end, as always, the fate of the American experiment with democracy will depend not on our institutions, but on our collective will to preserve it at the ballot box and beyond. Each of us has an obligation to spread the word and peacefully resist in whatever way we can.>

<According to polling data, 62 percent of Americans favor the government being responsible for the health coverage of all people in the country. Sixty-five percent of Americans polled favored the infrastructure bill passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. In a poll taken just last year, 63 percent of Americans wanted to increase trade with other countries, and 75 percent worried that tariffs would raise consumer prices. Another poll found 83 percent of likely voters, including 80 percent of Republicans, supported providing federal housing assistance after a natural disaster.

Yet in 2024, a near-majority of voters chose a president who would not only not improve medical access, but would adopt a policy to drop coverage for at least 10 million Americans who are currently insured. His other policies include neglecting infrastructure (with the exception of ICE detention facilities), and rescinding unspent funds from the Biden infrastructure bill. FEMA has been cut, and the president has imposed the highest tariffs since the Smoot-Hawley Act almost a century ago.

Ignorance theory

One correspondent of mine writes that “most Americans did not know who and what they were voting for,” adding that few people would have looked at the 982-page Project 2025, a “daunting document.” I must admit that I, too, was not masochistic enough to read it.

But accurate news summaries of that plan, the “Mein Kampf” of the current Republican Party, were ubiquitous in the months before the election. And Donald Trump was hands-down the most publicized candidate in history, whose every utterance was almost universally reported, including his intention to decree tariffs. He had 100 percent name ID and had already been president for four years, when his atrocious handling of matters like the COVID pandemic should have given anyone not living in a Trappist monastery, shut off from all communications, ample warning about his likely policies.

Terms like “ignorance” and “low-information” are often used to describe much of the electorate, but ascribing Trump’s election to voters not knowing who he was or what he stood for is not credible. Indeed, it runs afoul of the entire basis of both political science and economic decision-making: the rational choice model of human behavior, whereby people are assumed to understand their own material interests.

Terms like “ignorance” and “low-information” are often used to describe much of the electorate — but ascribing Trump’s election to voters not knowing who he was or what he stood for is not credible.

The agrarian rebellion of the 1880s and 1890s was led by farmers at a time when literacy was far from universal and rural areas were incredibly isolated by today’s standards. Yet these political insurgents seemed to know precisely which powerful interests were keeping them in debt. Likewise, industrial workers seeking union recognition during the 1930s grasped that their material interests were not improved by submitting to the dictates of Henry Ford and his fellow industrial moguls.

By contrast with today, consider Owsley County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in the U.S., whose residents’ life expectancy is almost 10 years shorter than the nation’s average. Two-thirds of its residents are enrolled in Medicaid, as one might expect from the poverty. Yet the county’s voters went 88 percent for Trump in 2024, which was no fluke. In the 2016 governor’s race, 70 percent of the county voted for Republican Matt Bevin, whose signature campaign theme was cutting Kentucky’s Medicaid program.

These voters freely chose to deny themselves medical insurance. Aside from flatly contradicting the rational choice model, their action makes nonsense of the latest fad among Democratic Party operatives and ideologically aligned pundits, “abundance liberalism”: If we offer all kinds of goodies to the public, they will flock back to the Party of FDR. One of the abundance nostrums, making things cheaper through deregulation, is laughable. Engaging the GOP in a bidding war over deregulation is like getting suckered into a hot dog-eating contest with Joey Chestnut. If people reject their own medical coverage, dangling them offers to attend community college for free probably won’t work.

While it is unquestionably true that ignorance can lead to poor decision-making, that cannot provide a full explanation of recent voting behavior. Why were voters in previous eras, however lacking in education or information, aligned with their own material interests when that is no longer the case? If sheer ignorance is responsible for tectonic political upheavals (and America’s current turn to fascism is certainly that), then so much for the consent of the governed on which democracy is based. Approval made in abysmal ignorance is hardly informed consent....>

<....Svengali theory

This notion posits that large portions of the American electorate are systematically brainwashed by Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and other Republican propaganda organs. This behavioral model is a staple of democratic pundits; left-of-center media watchdog websites frequently run excerpts of Fox News shows to demonstrate intentionally biased reporting, and how it is carefully designed to mislead its consumers..

Propaganda undoubtedly has an effect; Jen Senko’s “The Brainwashing of My Dad” clearly demonstrates how some people, particularly the elderly, are vulnerable to being influenced by glitzy production, flashing chyrons announcing bogus breaking news, and algorithm-driven scripting scientifically designed to build up fear, rage and helplessness.

But how big a factor was Republican media in Trump’s victory, which was based on the remarkable turnout of 77 million people voting for him? How many people did propaganda convert into Trumpers who otherwise would have voted for Kamala Harris or stayed home?

In the 1930s, newspapers were as influential as electronic media is today, and were largely owned by right-wing interests like William Randolph Hearst, Robert McCormick or the Chandlers. Many of these press barons were no mere “conservatives”; they took a friendly line towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s. There is no neutral estimate of political endorsements for the presidential election of 1936, but Franklin D. Roosevelt guessed that 85 percent of the press endorsed his opponent, Alf Landon. Yet FDR won a crushing 61 percent of the vote.

If present-day Americans are deemed uniquely vulnerable to political propaganda, it is not as if they have no choice in the matter, unlike the people of North Korea. There are hundreds of cable channels and uncountable numbers of internet sites in all shades of political views.

To the extent that calculated mendacity delivered through the media can swing elections, the implications are grave for democratic theory. If there is no “marketplace of ideas” where one can objectively shop in the manner of comparing prices at Home Depot versus Lowe’s and, instead, insidious manipulation determines outcomes, then human beings are no more capable of exercising free will than so many laboratory rats.

The Fox News effect might go a short distance in explaining the rot of our democracy, but it is more likely a symptom of decay rather than the primary cause. For the most part, it preaches to and mobilizes the converted.

Politics-as-entertainment theory

In the Roman Empire, the games at the Circus Maximus were an amusement and a distraction, a token to the proles as a substitute for being able to exercise any political power. But what if politics itself in America has degenerated to the level of entertainment in the minds of voters? A friend who teaches at a state university related to me that a student of his said he supported Trump “because he’s funny.” How did stand-up comedy rather than policy ideas come to be a criterion for choosing a president?

The origin of this mentality was first described, in tentative fashion, by American historian Daniel Boorstin in his 1961 book ”The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” He said that the reproduction of an event can become more “real” than the event itself. This process creates “pseudo-events,” primarily intended for diversion and profit, which distance the spectator from reality. For our purposes, the determining pseudo-event may have been the reality-TV franchise “The Apprentice,” in which Trump, a bankrupt six times over, presented himself as a savvy businessman, and people bought it.

In 1967, French philosopher Guy Debord wrote “Society of the Spectacle,” which expanded the idea of the pseudo-event into a comprehensive social dysfunction: “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” he wrote, meaning that images are presented to the public as ostensible entertainment, but really as a kind of anesthesia, turning human beings into passive receptors for whom seeming (usually on a TV screen) is more important than being or doing. Why else would ostensibly serious people think Oprah Winfrey could or should become president, or, God help us, Kid Rock a senator?

The determining pseudo-event of our age may have been “The Apprentice,” in which Donald Trump, a bankrupt six times over, presented himself as a savvy businessman — and people bought it....>

<....Neil Postman’s 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” continued this theme, arguing that politics had already been reduced to entertainment and that political ideas were sacrificed to images and representations. Thus, according to the media’s fairy tale, candidate George W. Bush was a guy you could have a beer with, whereas Al Gore was a supercilious stiff, a bit of idiocy that may (with a little assist from the Supreme Court) have gotten Bush elected. Never mind not only that Bush was a recovering alcoholic whose policies were uniformly disastrous; he was even re-elected on the strength of a fictitious gunslinging cowboy persona, despite his assiduous avoidance of the Vietnam War.

We have now reached the stage where Trump’s unconstitutional actions are not perceived for what they are — a mortal threat to democracy and common decency. Instead, sending National Guard troops into D.C., denying lawfully appropriated funding to universities, imposing tariffs on a country to punish it for prosecuting an ex-dictator — all these gambits are seen as reality-TV stunts to divert attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Celebrity journalist Michael Wolff evidently understands Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin purely as a matter of getting Epstein out of the headlines – and he might not be wrong, making that a pseudo-event if ever there was one.

Of course, the Epstein case itself is no longer “real,” but a plot device to keep viewers tuning in to see what befalls the protagonist, in the manner of someone being voted off the island. But the key matter is that in all historical cases of self-rule, from the Greek city-states onward, the community has required the active participation of citizens who understand the stakes, whereas, if Boorstin, et al., are correct, the American public has now been reduced to spectators gawking at images and pseudo-events rather than citizens absorbing ideas or cogent arguments.

The reader will notice there is no great difference between the Svengali theory and the entertainment theory, except that while one involves the conscious use of electronic media to deceive and brainwash, the other holds that the very nature of the various media turns involved citizens into a passive audience, literal consumers rather than citizens.

“This-is-who-we-are” theory.

All the previous theories have elements of truth, but there is something unsatisfactory about them. One instinctively feels that far-reaching changes do not occur through the accident of people failing to pay attention or through passive acceptance or because they are brainwashed into voting for change that will damage them materially.

It is difficult to argue that Trump fell from the skies, like the alien pods in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” upon a populace too ignorant, too manipulated or too electronically stupefied to know what was happening. That, however, is the conclusion of virtually all of American journalism, because there is a deep-seated taboo that has become all the stronger for being tacitly accepted. This is the shibboleth that no fault must ever attach to the electorate. It’s a unique case: We may harshly judge politicians, institutions, sports teams and so forth. Why not the voters? It’s vacuous to say we’re in a historic political crisis, but that somehow the voters bear no moral responsibility.

The Jeffrey Epstein case itself is no longer “real,” but a plot device to keep viewers tuning in to see what befalls the protagonist, in the manner of someone being voted off the island.

Just suppose that the great majority of Trump voters are not oblivious or deluded, that they more or less understand his policies and like them, as well as his performative cruelty, vulgarity and general jackassery. In that case we can assume that his epic corruption, so blatant it would make Boss Tweed blush, doesn’t bother them. We can also suppose that his violent language that usually results in death threats does not trouble their consciences, as it retaliates against people his voters regard as evil or even demonic.

Trump supporters may value these qualities in a politician more than whether he tries to provide them health care or education, things that may poll well only in isolation from other priorities, thereby explaining the voting behavior in Owsley County and other Trump strongholds.

While our mainstream journalists studiously avoid seeing Trump as a reflection of the moral state of the American people, publics in other countries certainly do. In just seven months since his inauguration, the favorability of the U.S. (not just of its president) has collapsed to the point where this nation is now less popular than China in the eyes of the rest of the world. Imagine how positively we will be viewed after three-and-a-half more years of Trump’s depredations. The world may well look at the American people the way our grandparents or great-grandparents looked at the Germans of the 1930s....>

<....I believe that willful, conscious and knowing support of Trump and his policies is a greater factor than conventional wisdom would have it, and more likely to have been politically decisive than accidental or zombie-like support.

A recent report on voter registration shows a drastic falloff in Democratic registration and commensurate gain in Republican registered voters since 2020. Evidently, Americans approved of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, or at least it didn’t concern them. Preliminary data show a continuing edge in Republican registration even after Trump’s inauguration, when one might have expected a falloff.

But why should Democrats have imagined that younger people would support them overwhelmingly? Considering that they grew up in a stagnant culture suffused with right-wing propaganda, holding liberal views is by no means certain. Why should Democrats have assumed that newly naturalized citizens would be progressive, rather than importing, out of pure habit, the machismo and caudillismo of Guatemala or Honduras, or the authoritarianism of South Asia?

This possibility has unpleasant implications, as it suggests that your neighbor or work colleague might not be unduly troubled if you are hauled off to prison for a social media post or deprived of your pension for being photographed at a demonstration. No doubt this is why journalists avoid discussing it: It’s rude and unpleasant, like describing an autopsy at a dinner party. Perhaps Trump is exactly who most of us are, and we don’t want to acknowledge it.

What have the American people done? The spectacle we have witnessed in the last several years, involving not only Trump but a Congress replete with bizarre creatures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace and dozens of others, cannot but suggest that modern conditions in America have uncovered weaknesses in democratic theory that could make it a self-liquidating form of political organization.

In just seven months, the favorability of the United States (not just of its president) has collapsed to the point where our nation is now less popular than China in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Political philosophers from Plato through Thomas Hobbes, and even our own constitutional framers (who constructed an indirect democracy, hedged with checks and balances), all had the same critique of majoritarian democracy: The masses were ignorant and emotional, and their passions could be inflamed by a demagogue who would then rule as a tyrant claiming to embody to will of the people.

Anyone writing critically these days about democracy is likely to be perceived as attacking motherhood or profaning the Holy Spirit. Yet any thinking person can see there is something wrong when the supposed will of the people results in malicious investigations of political opponents, censorship of national institutions like the Smithsonian, and the suppression of academic freedom. Through approval or indifference, these actions may be acceptable according to majority rule, but that does not make them legitimate.

I am not condemning democracy; I am pointing out its flaws. It is an inherently fragile system, like civilization itself, and periodically needs to adapt its rules to thwart those forces that would undo it.

The Weimar-German constitution of 1919 was very liberal — far more so than the U.S. at the time, which was groaning under Prohibition, with most Black citizens excluded from voting and the Klan dominating many state legislatures — yet it collapsed in little more than a dozen years. An exemplary lesson having been learned by the near-total destruction of Germany in World War II, the Bonn constitution of 1949 contained multiple well-designed safeguards against extremism, and the country flourished remarkably well for 75 years. But now an extremist group, the Alternative for Germany or AfD, may become that nation’s biggest political party, just as the Nazis did in the waning days of Weimar.

That example illustrates a crucial fact: As the oldest constitutional republic in unbroken existence on earth, the United States is uniquely vulnerable to tampering and disruption because of its sheer age and its sclerotic resistance to change. Knee-jerk appeals to what the founders supposedly wanted or intended are no longer sufficient; does any other democratic system make its rules according to what its leading citizens are presumed to have thought a quarter-millennium ago?

If the current president of the United States, elected by 49.8 percent of the people in a high-turnout election, appears eager to accept advice from Vladimir Putin on how to run future American elections, and seeks to impose the result by decree, I rest my case: Our democracy has comprehensively failed.>

<On Wednesday, there was another highly publicized school shooting. Republicans, as usual, are offering thoughts and prayers.

But why?

Why have Republicans — who, before Ronald Reagan, were the party in favor of gun control — decided that it’s just fine for America to be the only country in the world where the leading cause of childhood deaths and injury is bullets?

Why have Republicans — who during the Eisenhower administration pushed for massive public works programs like the interstate freeways and new schools coast-to-coast — decided instead to kill off as many of those sorts of programs as possible to pay for tax gifts to billionaires?

Why are they defending insider trading in Congress, supporting monopolies that rip off consumers and small businesses, and refusing to do anything about uninsured people or student debt?

The question is answered most easily with another set of questions, these ones rhetorical:

Would you trust your doctor if she told you the only reason she went into medicine was to get rich and doesn’t much care for people? Would you take your kids to such a physician?

Would you trust your child’s teacher if he said he hated kids but needed the paycheck and though teaching might be a great way to meet attractive single mothers of young kids?

Or a pilot who hates flying but loves the paychecks and the flight attendants?

Yet this is exactly what Republicans have done with government. They stand up at campaign rallies and proudly proclaim that government doesn’t work and never will, and then voters hand them the keys.

Once in office, they make sure their wealthy friends and donors get the perks while they steer the rest of us straight into turbulence. It’s sabotage disguised as leadership, and the only way they get away with it is because they’ve convinced enough people that wrecking the plane is the same thing as piloting it.

Republicans — in the years since Reagan told us that, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” — have been like that doctor, teacher, and pilot. They run for public office because it can make them rich, introduce them to people who’ll help them get richer, and might even improve their sex life.

Look, for example, how Tiffany Trump’s new husband suddenly got rich once Donald was back in the White House.

But making life better for average Americans? Hah, they’ll tell you: that’s for Democrats and suckers.

JD Vance has taken seven very expensive taxpayer-funded vacations in the eight months since he became VP; Trump plays golf about every third day and has made an estimated $3.5 billion off his having occupied the White House so far; every Republican in the House and Senate knows that if they treat the right industry the right way they’ll have a very-well-paid job waiting for them when they retire.

They don’t care about governing; they’re just in it for themselves.

This is a far cry from the idealistic notions of public service that animated the Founders and generations of Americans who’ve fought and died for this country in the years since. It’s a twisted embrace of Ayn Rand Libertarianism, a philosophy that says greed is good and whoever’s the most efficient predator deserves whatever they can steal or con people out of.

Once you understand that simple reality, everything else the GOP is up to makes sense.

It explains why they’d saturate our country with guns while taking billions from the gun industry, why they’d deregulate polluters while Americans are dying from pollution and climate change, why they’d sanction a healthcare system that has caused millions of unnecessary deaths but has meanwhile made insurance, hospital, and healthcare executives into billionaires.

This past Spring was the 22nd anniversary of my radio program. During that entire time, I’ve run a contest for anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40+ years (since Reagan) that was:

・authored by Republicans,

・principally co-sponsored by Republicans,

・passed Congress with a Republican majority,

・signed by a Republican president,

・and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class....>

<....Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or subsidized higher education.

In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis; nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick; and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republican politicians have fought tooth-and-nail for generations to prevent any of those things from happening here.

Which again raises the question: “Why?”

Why do Republican politicians promote hateful messages and cruel policies? Why are Republican-run Red states the real “s------” parts of the US with the highest rates of poverty, violence, early death, disease, and illiteracy?

What motivates these Republican politicians to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they pursue are to cut taxes on the morbidly rich, gut unions, destroy public schools, and ship jobs overseas?

It’s not about ideology.

Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that those programs are going to somehow turn America into a “socialist” country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not just about racism, although it often appears that way.

The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money. Thus, morbidly rich Republican “donors” — being part of the overclass — can reap the benefits of increased corporate profits while keeping their taxes low so they can stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and Confederate iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.

It’s not about charity.

Republicans say that the housing, healthcare, and other needs of poor people should be taken care of through “private philanthropy” instead of government. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who got an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people.

Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flout His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic or concern for public health.

Last time he was president, Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories were humming and the stock market was rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans were just collateral damage with the 2020 election looming.

It’s not about conservatism.

They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” or “obsessively selfish” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place.

Republican politicians deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages, and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace.

They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing young people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican-donor banksters!>

<....It isn’t about “culture.”

They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun. And if any of their daughters were raped, they’d be getting an abortion in a New York minute.

It’s not about “gun violence.”

As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republican politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Although they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity. As California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on Wednesday:

“We cannot even make it through the first week of school without mass shootings. And the @GOP will continue to do absolutely nothing while our kids are being gunned down. This is sick.”

It’s not about “protecting our children.”

The main through-story of the GOP attacks on queer people is that “they’re coming for your kids.” If Republican politicians actually cared about our kids, they’d do something about America being the only country in the world where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.

Republican politicians know that most pedophiles are straight men, but attacking defenseless minorities has been the cheap trick of craven demagogues from the eras of crusades, pogroms, and witch burnings to this day. And don’t get me started on the damage Bobby Kennedy Jr. is inflicting on our public health system and programs to vaccinate our children and grandchildren.

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers). This was part-and-parcel of the GOP’s war on unions.

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. Not a single wealthy white employer ever goes to jail, although they’re the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and is what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

The greed embraced by Republican politicians — and the billionaires and CEOs who fund them — is why average Americans can’t have nice things. It’s why we and our children must walk the tightrope of life without the same safety net other countries — from Canada to Costa Rica, France to Taiwan — offer their citizens.

It’s why children are dead this week in Minneapolis as Republican politicians happily pocket NRA cash.

It doesn’t matter to Republican politicians how many Americans die unnecessarily, how many of our fellow citizens struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or bodies and brains are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers, or terrified by active shooter drills in our schools.

It’s a safe bet that over the next three years Trump and Republicans in Congress will not give my listeners an opportunity to win that contest.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and the GOP’s billionaire patrons keep paying less than 3 percent in income taxes, greed and their own wealth and power are all Republican politicians care about or are willing to fight for.>

<As deputy US attorney Todd Blanche announced last week that the justice department would release transcripts of his interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, he described this disclosure as being “in the interest of transparency”.

“Except for the names of victims, every word is included. Nothing removed. Nothing hidden,” Blanche also said of his two-day sit down with Maxwell, who was convicted sex trafficking in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls.

That same day, James Comer, the House oversight committee chair, said that the justice department had sent a large tranche of Epstein investigative documents in response to a congressional subpoena. Comer praised justice officials and Donald Trump, saying: “The Trump DoJ is moving at a pace far faster than anything ever produced by the Biden DoJ.”

Trump, who has faced extensive political blowback over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files, also voiced support for transparency. “I’m in support of them keeping it open. Innocent people shouldn’t be hurt, but I’m in support of keeping it totally open,” he said.

While those supportive of Trump have touted these actions as a show of openness, many others have pointed to the questions left unasked – and the people who have not been asked anything at all – as indicating that these disclosures about Epstein were more of a show than any real push for truth. For them the Maxwell transcripts, and the ignoring of victim’s voices, are not a sign of openness; they are a sign of a reluctance to pursue any potentially dangerous truth.

For example, Blanche asked Maxwell whether people around Epstein – including the numerous high-profile and powerful men who had known him – were associating with him for the purpose of sexual encounters. In her reply Maxwell said that some of the “cast of characters” around Epstein were “in your cabinet, who you value as your co-workers”.

Despite the fact that Maxwell had just openly mentioned Epstein associates as being in Trump’s current cabinet, Blanche – a hardened lawyer not known for missing a trick in trial argument – did not pause to ask Maxwell to identify the cabinet members she was referring to.

At another point in the interview, Blanche asked Maxwell had ever had contact with Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

“Well, not deliberately,” Maxwell said. Blanche responded: “Pardon me?” She again said “not deliberately” and Blanche then moved on to a question about whether Epstein was receiving money from any intelligence agency.

Blanche also seemed to indulge Maxwell’s repeated professions of spotty recollection, including in response to questions about whether Trump penned a letter for Epstein’s birthday book, as had been reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Blanche, prefacing a question with the phrase, “I understand you don’t remember anything with President Trump or a lot about the book anyway,” asked: “Do you remember asking President Trump to submit a letter for that?”

Maxwell said: “I do not.”

“Do you remember – would you have been the one to do that or could somebody else – would somebody else have done that?” Blanche asked.

“I did ask some people. I don’t remember Mr Trump. I don’t remember who I did ask, but Epstein also asked people himself directly.”

Blanche responded: “OK.” He did not pursue the obvious line of thought that Maxwell’s response suggested: had Epstein reached out to Trump?>

<....Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor who is the founder of West Coast Trial Lawyers, said: “Many of Blanche’s questions were surface-level and didn’t drill down the way lawyers, especially prosecutors, do when they want to catch inconsistencies.”

“She has zero credibility and I don’t believe for a second that she saw nothing and knows nothing,” Rahmani said. “Perhaps Blanche’s questions were more of the softball variety, but there was no world where Maxwell was going to implicate herself when she has her supreme court appeal pending or anyone in the administration when she is trying to get a presidential pardon.”

For victims’ representatives and advocates, the issue with unasked questions also extends to who hasn’t been asked questions. Several attorneys, representing more than a total of 50 Epstein and Maxwell, survivors told the Guardian that the justice department had not reached out for sit-downs with them.

“Despite the fact that we have successfully represented 11 Epstein victims, no one has reached out,” said attorney Lisa Bloom.

Spencer Kuvin, who has represented multiple Epstein survivors, commented: “We have heard nothing from the DoJ or the house subcommittee regarding request to speak with either the attorneys for the victims or the victims. I have repeatedly advised that I am willing to volunteer to provide testimony at their request. The victims have been ignored in this entire process.”

Another attorney said: “I have received updates from the justice department, but no requests to speak to my clients.”

Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, who filed sexual harassment suits against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and co-founded the non-profit Lift Our Voices, said that the approach has ignored those who were abused by Epstein and Maxwell.

“If they actually had survivors in mind, if you were thoughtful about them, they would be able to talk to them, and then we’d be consulting subscribers and lawyers to make sure inquiries were unfolding in the way they wanted,” Carlson said.

“Nobody is doubting that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked young girls. Nobody is doubting that Jeffrey Epstein was not the only man who raped these young girls,” Roginsky said. “All we need to do is listen to these survivors as they tell us who these others are.”

“Ghislaine Maxwell is a convicted sex trafficker and felon who has been previously accused of lying under oath. Her conversations with United States deputy attorney general Todd Blanche reveal nothing shocking; Maxwell provided a version of the truth that best suits her agenda, in an attempt to continue concealing her wrongdoings,” said Jennifer Freeman, an attorney for Epstein survivors and special counsel at Marsh Law Firm.

“For far too long survivors have been left in the dark, shut out and shunted aside from receiving vital information in their most painful hours.”

The House oversight committee says it is in contact with Epstein survivors and that there will be a bipartisan meeting with them on 2 September.

Ro Khanna, a California Democrat on the oversight committee, said in a statement that just 3% of the documents the justice department gave to the committee were new and that “the rest are already in the public domain.”

“Less than 1% of files have been released. DoJ is stonewalling. The survivors deserve justice and the public deserves transparency.” Khanna said he is holding a press conference with survivors on 3 September to “hear from them why releasing this information is so important”.

Asked about Blanche’s interview style or whether there had been any outreach to victims, the justice department said “no comment.”>

<Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.

Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”

A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.

This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.

Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)

His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:

“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”

That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?

The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.

But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.

In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.

Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.

Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“

Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helpedfinally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.

Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.

There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.

And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955....>

<....America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.

The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.

Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.

We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.

It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.

We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.

And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:

“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”

This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.

Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.

But Americans must understand what’s really going on.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.

Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:

“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”

Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.

And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:

"This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”

But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.

And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.

While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.

As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!

In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.

The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.

America needs ours.>

<THE DESCENT OF THE Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into an agency of anti-vaccine agendas and organizational chaos—see my Bulwark colleague Jonathan Cohn’s latest newsletter on this—has created additional fodder for Democrats already keen on campaigning on health care in 2026.

The topic has been emphasized by several Democrats over the past few days. Sen. Patty Murray​​ said it was “dangerous” for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to remain in power and called for him to be fired. Rep. George Whitesides, who represents a competitive California district and who has a background in science and technology, said that “we must protect our seniors and our kids from the dangers of communicable diseases” and called for Kennedy to be removed from office. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted that Kennedy’s “stubborn, pigheaded, and conspiracy-based attacks on proven science are going to make many more people sick and cause more deaths.” He, too, urged President Donald Trump to immediately remove RFK Jr.

It seems highly unlikely at this point that Trump will do that. But it would also be foolish to downplay the political significance of the chaos that Kennedy has overseen in the past few months.

Among the staffers at Democratic campaign committees and super PACs that I spoke with last week, the CDC saga was seen as a component of a larger story that the party could tell about Donald Trump dismantling the health care system. And although part of that story, for some audiences, might end up being about Kennedy—his purges at the CDC, his war on vaccination, his dismantling the FDA—another part, likely more politically potent, would be health care becoming less affordable and less accessible.

Affordability issues are already at the center of the messaging and advertising campaigns for the campaign committees and leading super PACs. Just this weekend, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a digital ad blaming Trump for jacking up grocery prices and making Labor Day cookouts “ridiculously expensive.” And as I wrote last week, Democratic leaders are also focusing on rising energy prices.

Health care costs will slot in as well. Democrats are already attacking Republicans for passing Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which could leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured and unable to afford basic health care. When Republicans return to D.C., they will face pressure to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies, which were created with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and are set to expire at the end of the year. (The GOP caucus is split over the subsidies, with more conservative members vehemently opposed to what they see as protecting Obamacare.)

“I do think it’s gonna be a health care election, but I think it’s gonna be wrapped into this whole issue of affordability,” said Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care.

“There’s a wicked brew here that is amassing against Republicans, and it’s all self-inflicted,” Woodhouse added. “They’ve committed political suicide.”

THE LOOMING SEPTEMBER 30 government-shutdown deadline gives Democratic leadership one of the highest-profile opportunities to corner Republicans on issues related to health care. Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent a letter to their GOP counterparts last week stressing that if they wanted Democrats to help pass the funding bill—which requires sixty votes to clear the Senate—then they needed to present a plan to address “the health care crisis Republicans have triggered in America.” The reference was to Medicaid cuts and the potential for rural hospital closures put in motion by the Trump-pushed reconciliation bill this summer. But in the coming week, Democratic senators also plan to grill Kennedy when he heads to the Hill to testify.

Some Dem officials and health care advocates see parallels between the upcoming midterms and the 2018 cycle, when the party focused its campaigns on Trump’s failed attempt to repeal Obamacare. The difference this time around is that Republicans actually succeeded in passing their legislation.

“Affordability will continue to be a major theme of the election and health care is probably Exhibit A in that conversation,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, a consumer health advocacy organization that has pushed to expand health care access. “I think it has its own power because it is literally about taking care of yourself and your family. It has an emotional pull, and any impacts of that have the ability to punch through the information bubble that you happen to be in.”....>

<....At least one Democratic-aligned advocacy group has launched an effort to get more doctors elected to Congress, with other left-leaning organizations eyeing fired public health workers as top recruits for competitive House races. Some Democratic congressional candidates have also noted that Trump’s reconciliation bill, Kennedy’s stewardship of HHS, and DOGE’s cuts to federal agencies allow candidates to tailor their message to their specific states and districts. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, for example, has been a leading critic of Trump’s push to shrink the CDC, given that it is based in Atlanta.

When I asked Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek what he thought would be the defining issue of the midterms, he brought up Medicaid cuts. But he also mentioned that Iowa’s cancer rate is rising faster than any other state’s, arguing that Iowans would be hurt by Trump’s budget cuts that have shuttered critical cancer research. It’s something he plans to highlight in his campaign.

“[Voters] want someone that understands the issues that people are going through. And right now in Iowa and all across the country, we have a lot of people that are struggling,” Turek said.

There are signs that Republicans also see health care as a major vulnerability going into next year. Sen. Joni Ernst, whose seat Turek is vying for, has recently told people close to her that she will not run for re-election. And though her reasons for doing so likely vary (an overall bad climate for Republicans is probably atop the list), health care notably was already one of her bigger vulnerabilities. Democrats pounced on the viral “we all are going to die” comment that Ernst made at a town hall earlier this year in response to constituents’ concerns about the Medicaid cuts. Ernst, who was elected in 2014 on a promise to repeal Obamacare (back before the legislation’s popularity had skyrocketed), was never able to find her footing after.

But perhaps the most telling comment last week came from a far less high-profile conservative. Students for Trump cofounder and MAGA diehard Ryan Fournier pleaded with Republicans to pass the extended Obamacare subsidies, arguing that the president’s policy agenda—and their own political standing—could crumble without it.

“Trump voters rely on premium tax credits,” he warned in a tweet. “Letting them vanish means higher costs, lower turnout, and a Democrat Senate.”>

<Remember back in July when Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) abruptly adjourned the House of Representatives for summer recess? The quick exit gave Republicans an escape from headlines about the Trump administration’s refusal to release files on Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender.

Now, Congress is about to return. And the Epstein drama is just one fire burning among many. As September begins, Republicans remain on the defensive, and this time they won’t be able to call a time-out.

The bottom line for congressional Republicans this fall is not governance but survival.

The hottest flame coming at them is the burning threat of an Oct. 1 government shutdown, unless there is a budget deal. Despite Republican majorities in both houses, the GOP has failed to pass next year’s appropriations, despite allowing government debt to reach record highs. To get a deal done, Republicans will likely need some Democratic votes. In exchange for their votes, the Democrats have demands in hand.

First, they want Republicans to restore cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). Both health care plans were decimated by President Trump’s recently passed tax and budget reconciliation bill.

Democrats risk paying a price with voters if they force a government shutdown. But 20 million Americans are about to be hit with higher health insurance premiums due to the Trump cuts. A big bloc of voters across party lines has already told pollsters that they agree with Democrats on this.

And with Trump’s approval numbers now in negative territory — especially on his handling of rising health care costs as well as overall inflation — Republicans on the Hill lack his shield from political heat.

Congressional Republicans also know that Trump’s name will not be on the 2026 ballot. In the past, his support within the MAGA base shielded them. There is no Trump shield next year, and Republicans are getting dire forecasts for their prospects in the midterms. As Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, said in July, “midterms election are always a slog” for the majority party and “you are always running against history.”

The most relevant history is that Republicans lost 40 seats in the midterms during Trump’s first term.

Democrats, meanwhile, want to show they can put up a fight over the budget. That was not the case in March, when Democrats gave the GOP the votes to keep the government open. Democrats said they avoided a fight to prevent Trump from having a free hand to cut programs during a government shutdown.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was blasted by his party for not putting up a fight.

Now it is a different game. Before the August break, Trump and Schumer failed to agree on a deal to get more of the presidents’ nominees quickly approved. Schumer asked Trump to end a hold on spending previously approved by Congress in exchange for speeding up approval of nominees.

When Trump rejected the offer, he put up a post full of rage, telling Schumer to “GO TO HELL!”

Trump’s anger at Schumer has since shifted to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Trump dismissed the veteran Republican as merely a disloyal acolyte, posting “I got [him] re-elected to the U.S. Senate when he was down by a lot.”...>

<....Trump insisted that Grassley lacks the “courage” to “solve the ‘Blue Slip’ problem” — referring to the Senate tradition of requiring both senators from a given state to sign off on certain judicial nominees. Grassley replied that he was “offended by what the president said, and I’m disappointed that it would result in personal insults.”

Look for that internal feud to slow the GOP. At best, congressional Republicans will try to nudge, if not elbow, the president to make a deal on the budget and on nominations. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said before the break that Schumer and Trump need to negotiate.

“At some point, obviously,” Thune told Politico, “there are certain things they are just going to have to figure out, because on some of these things where we need 60 [votes], there are going to have to be conversations.”

Schumer said Trump is “going to have to learn that he has to work with Democrats if he wants to get deals … going at it alone will be a failed strategy.”

While Republicans try to dig out of their hole, Democrats are poised to gain political momentum. Victories in gubernatorial races and legislatures in Virginia and New Jersey in November would boost morale.

And the president’s deployment of troops to occupy Washington D.C. is alienating independent swing voters the Republican Party needs for the midterms.

Meanwhile, the Epstein saga keeps boiling. The president’s team is trying to lower the heat, dispatching the deputy attorney general to interview Epstein’s imprisoned partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who said Trump did no wrong.

Now, House Republicans are calling former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to testify. As the U.S. Attorney in Miami at the time of his first prosecution, Acosta had engineered the slap-on-the-wrist deal that allowed Epstein to shield his co-conspirators.

I still believe Acosta should testify. His testimony is crucial — particularly given investigative journalist Vicky Ward’s reporting that Acosta told Trump transition vetting officials that he had been instructed to “back off” of Epstein because of his ties to U.S. intelligence.

Is that true? Every news outlet should lead with his answer.

Epstein remains a problem for Republicans as Congress returns. But there are fires everywhere. And should Democrats take control in 2026, a third Trump impeachment will be on the table.>

<So let’s get this out of the way first: As I wrote in a previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, DC, is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year.

That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to DC is a lie.

In defense of President Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in the nation’s capital, the White House has put out a “fact sheet” of scary statistics on crime in Washington, DC.

It’s about what you’d expect: a bunch of brazen, lazy, easily disproven garbage. Which of course isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is that they’ve actually linked to the sources that disprove their lies.

The lying starts with the first bullet point:

In 2024, Washington, D.C. saw a homicide rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents. That was the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country—nearly six times higher than New York City and also higher than Atlanta, Chicago, and Compton.

Nope. The linked study is only a sampling of 23 cities. It does not purport to be a list of the 23 most dangerous or murderous or crime-ridden cities. It does not purport to be a comprehensive list of any kind. The point of the study was to compare year-over-year statistics among a diverse selection of cities around the country. DC’s homicide rate was the fourth highest out of these 23 cities. Not out of all US cities.

This first bullet point also fails to contextualize the 27.3 per 100,000 figure for 2024. It was down from 39 in 2023. It’s on track to go down further, to about 22.7 this year. This matters, because Trump’s argument is that crime in the city is out of control due to poor leadership. That isn’t what’s happening.

Trump has also claimed that homicides in DC in 2023 were the “highest ever.” Not even close. The city’s murder rate topped 80 per 100,000 in 1991.

A surge of heavily armed troops is not going to fix any of DC’s problems— and it certainly won’t make residents more trustful of law enforcement.

As of April, DC’s murder rate this year ranked not fourth highest, but 19th. It ranked behind red state cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Tulsa.

Again, the whole point of the study the White House itself cited was to compare year-over-year homicide stats—to see which cities improved from 2023 to 2024. And here, DC comes out very well. Of the 23 cities the study surveyed, DC had the fourth-highest drop in its homicide rate from 2023 to 2024.

One of the four cities that had an even bigger drop was Oakland. Trump has said he wants to send troops there, too. Seven of the 23 cities in the study cited by the White House actually showed an increase in homicides last year. Four of those—including the top two (Indianapolis and Lexington, Kentucky) are in red states. The city with the largest increase—Lexington—has a Republican mayor. Send the National Guard to Lexington!

Omaha is also among the seven cities that saw an increase in homicides. It, too, had a Republican mayor until this year.

If Washington, D.C. was a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation.

This is true of nearly every large city in the country. Most cities have higher crime rates than most states because cities have more density.

But if you want to compare states, we can do that. Six of the seven states with the highest homicide rates are all deep red, and 17 of the 21 highest crime rate states all voted for Trump in 2024.

In 2012, the homicide rate in Washington, D.C. was just 13.9 per 100,000 residents. This is true. And Washington, DC, had a Democratic mayor and city council then, too.

Also, guess who was president? Guess who was president in 2014, when the country hit its lowest recorded homicide rate since the 1950s?

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.

Here I’ll add my usual caveat that, with a few exceptions, I don’t think presidents have much effect on crime. I’m not convinced executive branch leaders at any level of government do. But Trump has spent much of the last decade blaming Obama, Biden, and Democrats for crime. So it’s worth pointing out that crime rose under his watch, while it fell under Obama and Biden. And more generally, blue states have less crime than red states....>

<....Washington, D.C.’s murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba.

Comparing the crime rate of a US city to a city in an authoritarian country in a way that’s favorable to the authoritarian country is…an interesting choice. But if we’re going to go the route of deferring to official stats from totalitarian states, Pyongyang’s official crime rate is zero. But let’s not give them any ideas.

Trump also claimed at his press conference that DC was “number one in the world” for homicides. That isn’t remotely true. Again, it isn’t even among the top 10 big cities in the US.

It’s neither helpful nor revelatory to compare crime rates in the US to those of countries with vastly different laws, values, histories, economies, and methods of measuring crime.

The number of juveniles arrested in Washington, D.C., has gone up each year since 2020—many of whom have had prior arrests for violent crimes.

They’re arresting more kids, even as crime drops? I thought the problem was that DC leaders were soft on crime? Which is it?

In any case, this figure also sorely lacks context. From the NY Times:

According to data compiled by [Washington, DC’s] Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, the police made about 1,500 arrests of children in 2020; 1,400 in 2021; 1,700 in 2022; 2,200 in 2023; and 2,000 in 2024. Juvenile arrests totaled 1,128 through the first half of 2025, compared with 1,114 in the first half of 2024.

In comparison, the police arrested 2,300 to 2,900 youths annually from 2016 to 2019 and 3,400 to 4,000 annually from 2006 to 2010.

It’s not surprising that there was an increase in these arrests in the years following the pandemic. A lot of people—including kids—stayed home in 2020. Police staffing plummeted, meaning there were fewer officers to make arrests. Schools were closed. It only makes sense that arrests ticked up as things started to return to normal.

But DC police are still arresting far fewer youths than they were prior to the pandemic.

I’d also just add that it’s a little twisted to be talking about how we need to arrest more children. In the local news article linked by the White House, local officials say a good percentage of the increase in youth arrests were driven by fights at school. Fights at school happen. It happened quite a bit when I was growing up—probably a few times per week at my small, all-white high school. Not a single one of those fights resulted in an arrest. But then, we didn’t have cops roving the hallways, either.

There were 29,348 crimes reported in Washington, D.C. last year, including 3,469 violent offenses, 1,026 assaults with a dangerous weapon, 2,113 robberies, and 5,139 motor vehicle thefts.

All of these figures are much lower than in 2023. Overall, DC doesn’t even rank among the worst 30 cities in the country for violent crime, and it’s safer than more than a few cities in deep red states.

So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 1,600 violent crimes and nearly 16,000 total crimes reported in Washington, D.C. There have been nearly 100 homicides, including the fatal shootings of innocent civilians like three-year-old Honesty Cheadle and 21-year-old Capitol Hill intern Eric Tarpinion-Jachym.

You can pick any city in the world and find horrific specific crimes to exploit. Again, DC’s murder rate and violent crime rate are high, but they’re nowhere near the highest in the country, and both have significantly dropped since 2023.

Vehicle theft in Washington, D.C. is more than three times the national average—ranking it among the most dangerous cities in the world. Carjackings increased 547% between 2018 and 2023.

In 2024, there were triple the number of carjackings compared to 2018.

Vehicle thefts surged across the country during the pandemic, not just in DC. That said, carjackings have been a uniquely difficult problem in the city. Washington, DC, led the country in carjackings after the pandemic.

But note that the White House doesn’t include 2024 in the 547 percent figure. That’s probably because carjackings dropped by 50 percent last year. And vehicle thefts dropped by 25 percent.

Metro Police Department leadership are allegedly cooking the books to make crime statistics appear more favorable.

Outrageous!

We should probably pass a law to remove from office and prosecute any public official who buries unflattering statistics or “cooks the books” to make themselves or their office look better. I’d certainly support such a law.

We might start here:

Headlines from two publications about Trump firing the BLS chief whose statistics he didn't like, even though they were accurate. More to the point, yes, police officials are known to juke crime stats to make themselves look better. This is not a good thing.

But you can’t fake a dead body. And homicide figures in DC reflect the overall drop in crime....>

<....Many residents don’t feel safe reporting crime.

The link here goes to a right-wing X account excerpting from a ridiculously-framed Washington Post article about how, despite a decline in crime, the city still “feels” dangerous. So this is about vibes, not statistics.

You know what really makes people reluctant to report crimes? Mass deportations and militant immigration enforcement, and fear or mistrust of the police in marginalized communities. You needn’t take my word for it. Ask law enforcement officials themselves.

Somehow, I doubt scenes like the one below will make the 46 percent of Black and 15 percent of Latino DC residents feel safer about interacting with law enforcement.

Finally:

More than half of all violent crime in the U.S. goes unreported in the first place.

I’m not sure what the first point has to do with DC. Yes, it’s mostly accurate to say about half of crimes go unreported. This has always been the case, and it’s true from year to year. It’s why you should look at trends, not specific numbers. It’s also why we should compare FBI crime data, which comes from crimes reported to police, to National Crime Victimization Survey data, which comes from phone surveys.

This doesn’t mean crime isn’t really down in DC. What they’re trying to do here is make you distrust all crime data, and rely instead on what they tell you to think.

So subways are dangerous, terrifying places. (They’re about the safest public space you can find.) New York City is a cesspool of violence and debauchery. (It’s one of the safest big cities in the country.) Blue jurisdictions are violent, anarchic hellholes. (After accounting for density, they’re safer than red jurisdictions.)

As for the WUSA report linked in the White House document, it’s true that people don’t like living with crime. And they don’t like feeling like their government is unresponsive when they feel unsafe. It’s also true that people tend to feel unsafe when they see disorder—homelessness, people visibly struggling with mental illness, people doing drugs in public, litter, and blight.

Deploying the military won’t make people safer—and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.

None of this is to diminish the crime that does occur in DC. The city still has one of the higher crime rates in the country. But this has always been the case. And there are lots of possible explanations for it, most of which are too complicated and nuanced to get into here. But here’s what we can say for certain: DC’s crime rate has not spun “out of control.” DC’s crime rate is not the fault of permissive, progressive crime policy. Nor is it the fault of the current city leadership. Crime in DC is actually falling. A surge of heavily armed troops is not going to fix any of DC’s problems— and it certainly won’t make residents more trustful of law enforcement.

I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in DC. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.>

<Speaking in the Oval Office this week, Donald Trump had something he wanted to clarify.

“I’m not a dictator. I don’t like a dictator,” the president said.

Yet his comments came weeks after he deployed armed soldiers and Humvee-style military vehicles to patrol the streets of Washington, claiming, despite all available evidence, that the use of the national guard was necessary to control crime.

The remarks followed Trump withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars from universities, and after the increasingly politicized FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, a prominent critic of Trump.

Trump has also targeted law firms who have filed lawsuits he opposes, while the Federal Communications Commission, led by a Trump appointee, is investigating every major broadcast network except Fox, which owns the pro-Trump Fox News channel. Trump has personally sued news channels over critical coverage and fired the government’s top labour statistician because she published jobs data that he didn’t like.

He has threatened Democrats with prosecution, and demanded that former president Barack Obama be investigated for treason. Trump has done all this as his family has ostensibly earned millions of dollars from his presidency.

None of these things are typical for a democratic leader. So … is Trump a dictator?

“Yes, of course,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who spent years researching autocracies including Hungary and Russia. Scheppele said she had been wavering on using the term “dictatorship” until recently, but said: “If I was hesitating before, it’s this mobilization of the national guard and the indication that he plans to overtake resistance by force that now means we’re in it.”

Trump, emboldened by a Republican party that appears willing to let their leader do whatever he wants, is now threatening to send troops to Democratic-run cities including Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York City, prompting outcry and accusations of abuse of power.

Scheppele said: “He’s really planning a military, repressive force, to go out into the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and to just put down the whole thing by force.”

Most modern dictators try to hide their aspirations. Scheppele said leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have gone to “great lengths” to avoid looking like “20th-century dictators” in the hopes they can avoid the label.

“If you think of dictators as, you know, tanks in the streets and large numbers of military people saluting the leader, and big posters of the leader going up on national buildings, all that stuff does remind everybody of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia and all and Mussolini’s Italy,” she said.

Hence Orbán, Erdoğan and the like attempting to avoid those scenes. But it doesn’t seem to bother Trump.

Just this week, a giant banner was draped over the Department of Labor building, showing Trump glaring out over Washington DC above the slogan “American workers first”. On his birthday, which coincided with the 250th anniversary of the formation of the US army, he held a military parade in the capital, and was reportedly furious that the troops did not look “menacing” enough.

In Trump’s first term, as he railed against political norms, the book How Democracies Die – which examined the unraveling of democracies around the world – became a bestseller. Steven Levitsky, the book’s co-author and a political scientist at Harvard University, said Trump has the mentality of “a classic tin-pot dictator”, but said the president hasn’t managed to become one so far.

“Technically in political science terms, no, he’s not a dictator. The United States, I think, is collapsing into some form of authoritarianism. But it has not consolidated into an outright dictatorship,” Levitsky said.

Trump has said he is not a dictator, but claimed last week: “A lot of people are saying: ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” It’s not clear who he was referring to, but he continued the theme on Tuesday.

“The line is that I’m a dictator. But I stop crime. So a lot of people say: ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator,’” Trump said in a cabinet meeting.

The Guardian asked the White House what data Trump was citing when he claimed Americans want a dictator, but did not receive a response.

Levitsky reiterated that he does not believe Trump is a dictator in the truest sense, but added: “Dictators everywhere, first of all, claim that they’re not dictators. And second of all, somewhat contradictorally, claim that the people want a dictator. Those are classic dictator lines.”....>

<....The US has expressed interest in authoritarianism before. At the height of his fame, a third of Americans tuned into the radio broadcasts of Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose antisemitic broadcasts praised the likes of Benito Mussolini. Jim Crow laws were allowed to enforce racial segregation into the 1960s, while senator Joseph McCarthy was allowed to persecute alleged communists during the so-called Red Scare.

“You could always, in many, many periods of US history, find 25, 30% of the US electorate that was authoritarian-leaning, and I think that’s definitely true today,” Levitsky said.

Today, that makes up a “big chunk” of the Republican party, he said, and Trump is leaning into that base.

“There’s a real performative side to this government’s authoritarianism, which suggests that there is a constituency for it, which is very frightening. And I really haven’t seen anything like this sort of performative authoritarianism, honestly, since the 30s in Europe,” he said.

Most 21st-century authoritarian countries are “hybrid regimes”, Levitsky said. He pointed to Venezuela, Hungary, Tunisia and Turkey, where Erdoğan has spent more than two decades in power, cementing his position by cracking down on the country’s media and bringing thousands of criminal cases against people who insult the president.

“They’re authoritarian, in that they’re not fully democratic: there’s widespread abuse of power that tilts the playing field against the opposition. So nobody would look at Turkey and say: ‘That’s a democracy.’ But they’re not what I would call a dictatorship. And that’s what I think the great danger is in the United States.”

There is, Levitsky said, a “non-zero chance” that Trump could use emergency powers – as he has in justifying immigration measures and tariffs – to subvert the constitution, potentially undermining elections.

But, he said: “The more likely outcome is a more mild authoritarianism where opposition exists, opposition is above board, opposition contests for power, competes in elections.

“The government doesn’t win all its battles, but abuse of power – as we’ve seen in the last six, seven months – abuse of power is so widespread, so systematic, and violations of law, violations of rights are so widespread and systematic that the playing field begins to tilt against the opposition.

“And you would not call that a full democracy.”>

<A so-called “missing minute” of CCTV footage, a key ingredient of conspiracy theories surrounding the prison death of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has been found, contradicting the assertion of Pam Bondi, the attorney general, that it was recorded over.

The video was in a cache of material, including 33,000 pages of records relating to the disgraced financier and former Donald Trump associate, released late on Tuesday by the US House oversight committee. The panel has been looking into Epstein’s August 2019 death at Manhattan’s Metropolitan correctional center.

In July, the same month as a government review confirmed Epstein died by suicide, the FBI released hours of surveillance footage taken from outside Epstein’s jail cell on the night he died. Observers quickly realized from time stamps that a block of one minute, from 11.59pm to midnight on 10 August, was not there.

Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at 6.30am.

Conspiracy theorists leapt on the development as “proof” there was something suspicious about Epstein’s death, fuelled by Bondi’s insistence at the time that the prison’s CCTV system was routinely reset every 24 hours. That, she told a cabinet meeting on 8 July, meant every night’s footage would feature a “missing” minute.

But CBS reported later that month that there was no blackout in the recording, and that the justice department, bureau of prisons, and the FBI had a full version including the previously unaccounted for 60 seconds.

The revelation was supported by Tuesday night’s congressional release that included the footage among two hours of previously unseen video. It reveals nothing out of the ordinary, with a handful of guards working outside the cell.

Other images not seen before, according to CBS, include Epstein being escorted by guards through the facility to make a phone call.

There was no immediate response on Wednesday from Bondi’s office or the FBI.

Most of the files released on Tuesday and posted online to Google Drive contain information already publicly known or available. Many are image files of court documents relating to Epstein and his former girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to a 20-year prison term in 2022 for sex-trafficking crimes.

Maxwell met with justice department officials at least twice in recent weeks and is, according to critics, pressing the Trump administration for a pardon.

Also featured in Tuesday’s release are what appears to be body-cam footage from police searches and police interviews. An estimated 97% of the material is not new.

The release came as Trump faces renewed scrutiny over his relationship with Epstein, a longtime friend who was part of the president’s wealthy network of associates in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York.

A number of Republicans joined Democrats in demanding more transparency from the Trump administration over the case, and the release of all documents related to it, amplified by this week’s return of lawmakers to Washington DC after the summer recess.

The controversy has caused a rare split in Republican ranks with many still fiercely loyal to Trump, and others critical of what they see as the administration’s secretive approach.

Congressman Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, joined Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, in filing a discharge petition in the House this week that would force the release of all of the Epstein files.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has insisted his party is committed to transparency and justice, but has called Massie’s efforts to secure the records “meaningless” and urged colleagues not to support them.

Massie hit back on Tuesday, telling Fox News Digital: “He is afraid of President Donald Trump. Mike Johnson’s speakership just hangs on that thread.”

A number of Epstein’s victims were joining other survivors of sexual abuse at a rally and press conference in Washington DC on Wednesday to demand justice, some speaking publicly for the first time.>

<After markets closed Wednesday, financial news sites were full of talk about a “global bond rout.” The headlines were over the top: long-term interest rates were up, but not all that much. Call it “Apocalypse Not Yet”. And as I write this, rates have retreated again in the aftermath of a jobs report that strongly suggests a weakening labor market.

Still, market movements since Donald Trump announced that he was (probably illegally) firing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors offer a preview of what to expect if the courts allow Trump to destroy the Fed’s independence. Spoiler: Not good.

Trump began his effort to replace Cook on Friday, Aug. 25, after the markets had closed. Below is a graph of the probability that Trump will succeed assigned by betting markets. After a sharp uptick on August 25th, the probability dropped down to around 30%, reflecting a belief that he will probably fail. However, it’s important to note that a 30% probability is not trivial.

If Trump does succeed in firing Cook, it would be a step on the road toward a fully Trumpified monetary policy.

What would happen if Trump gained control of the Fed?

He would be able to push through large cuts in the Federal funds rate, the short-term interest rate on overnight loans banks make to each other. And I mean large: he’s been talking 300 basis points. We have in the past seen rate cuts that big, but only in the face of serious recessions. Trump, however, insists that the U.S. economy is booming, and a cut that big in the absence of a recession — and with inflation both above target and set to rise due to tariffs, deportations and surging electricity prices — would be unprecedented.

Standard economics says that a big Fed funds rate cut in the absence of a severe economic slump would be inflationary. It would also damage the Fed’s credibility — investors’ belief that it will do what is necessary to fight future inflation. Eventually, however, inflation would force even a Trumpified Fed to raise rates.

What would you expect to see in bond markets if investors put a high probability on Trumpification of the Federal Reserve? You would expect short-term interest rates, which mainly reflect expectations about Fed policy over the next one to two years, to fall. But very long-term rates, which mainly reflect expectations about long run inflation, should rise. So what did we see between Aug. 25 and Sept. 2? Two-year rates fell by 7 basis points, while 30-year yields rose by the same amount.

Granted, these weren’t huge moves, reflecting the markets’ belief that Trump is unlikely to be able to fire Cook. Yet, this was a cameo appearance by Wile E. Coyote. The divergence between short-term rates and long-term rates was a reminder that Trump’s move to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence is a real threat to the Fed’s credibility. And that matters.

At the Federal Reserve’s most recent Jackson Hole conference — its annual shindig in the Grand Tetons — Emi Nakamura, Venance Riblier and Jón Steinsson presented a paper on the effects of central bank credibility, as indicated by the ability of the Fed and its counterparts to ‘‘look through“ post-Covid inflation, allowing the temporary inflation surge caused by supply chain disruptions to work itself out without needing to impose high unemployment.

Specifically, they looked at the ability of central banks to temporarily deviate from the Taylor rule, a basis for interest rate policy initially suggested by the economist John Taylor in a 1993 paper. Taylor argued that when responding to tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment, the Fed shouldn‘t fly by the seat of its pants; it should commit in advance to a specific rule linking interest rates to the inflation rate and the unemployment rate or some other measure of economic slack.

The Fed has never explicitly adopted a Taylor rule — I say “a“ rule because there are a number of variants on Taylor‘s original suggestion, similar in principle but differing in the details. The Atlanta Fed has a “Taylor Rule Utility“ that incorporates a number of popular versions: pick your rule and it tells you what the Fed funds rate will be.

Still, various rules tend to give similar guidance. And the Taylor rule has proved highly influential as a sort of baseline or norm: The Fed doesn‘t want to deviate too far from the rule without very good reason....>