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Inside the Private Equity Scam—and the Livelihoods It Has Destroyed - 2025-07-27T10:00:00Z

In 2019, when I was working what I have grudgingly come to accept may be one of the best jobs I’ll ever have, my employer, Gizmodo Media Group, was acquired by a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners.

Private equity had not shown itself to be a great friend of journalism: Alden Global Capital, another firm, had just gutted the Pulitzer Prize–winning Denver Post. Still, my colleagues and I on the company’s investigative team were cautiously optimistic about the new management, personified by our new CEO, an executive named Jim Spanfeller, who had previously run Forbes’s digital arm. Following a rough few years, an infusion of cash seemed like it could be a good thing. Our soft skepticism, it turns out, was disastrously naïve.

Within days of the sale, both of my editors had been fired by people who did not appear to know they had direct reports, leaving my team to collect paychecks without any actual work to do—a particularly comical hit, given the firm’s alleged goal to eradicate waste. Out of a sense of duty, most of us assigned ourselves to other sites within the company. But the new management insisted we replace much of our reporting with slideshows to artificially inflate our audience. Invasive, auto-playing ads became such a problem that we fielded constant complaints from our readers. Our product and sales teams disappeared. People routinely left meetings frazzled and burdened by bizarre mandates with little data to back them up.

I stuck it out for a while; I truly adored my job reporting alongside people who alternately delighted and intimidated me, journalists I had admired for years. I finally made the decision to quit when management rewrote a sensitive story, entirely fabricating key details, and tried to pass the work off as my own. It wasn’t just that the company was being run poorly, or that Great Hill was trying to squeeze every last penny out of our labor. It was that the people in charge seemed actively hostile to our attempts to do good, ethical, even profitable work. No one is going to visit a website they can’t trust or even use. I’m not a businessman, but a libel lawsuit seems bad for the bottom line. And there was something almost hallucinatory about working under people with such a vague grasp of our corner of the industry, who were so deeply incurious about the work that went into the brands they were allegedly trying to save.

Meanwhile, across the office, the journalist Megan Greenwell was struggling with a much higher-profile version of this conundrum. As was extensively reported in the New York media press, Greenwell, then the editor in chief of the anarchic and beloved sports site Deadspin, publicly resigned four months after Great Hill purchased our company. “The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits,” she wrote in an eviscerating blog post announcing her departure. “It’s that the people posing as experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen.”

Greenwell’s entire staff followed her lead shortly after, mass quitting largely in protest of a mandate to abandon higher-traffic stories about politics and internet oddities (and irreverent classics like “my enemies in nature, ranked”) to focus entirely on sports. In the years since, the Deadspin story has become something of a parable about media and private equity and the ultimate value of those guys in the ill-fitting suits.

Following the resignation, a number of former Deadspin writers launched Defector, a worker-owned publication that claimed 40,000 paid subscribers as of last year. And, as Greenwell writes in Bad Company, her wide-ranging account of private equity’s impact on American life, over a period of less than five years, Great Hill executives ran Deadspin so far into the ground that it “draws slightly less traffic than a Pennsylvania dog breeder called greenfieldpuppies.com.” Last spring, the remaining writers were laid off and the brand sold to a Maltese company with plans to feature “gambling content” on the site. Almost all of the 12 websites that Great Hill originally purchased have been auctioned off in severely depleted states. This July, Spanfeller announced that G/O Media (as the collection of sites was rebranded) was “working towards a full wind down,” noting “we will exit having increased shareholder value.”

Years later, I still acutely remember the shock of watching a few guys armed with little more than inspirational quotes turn a functional if imperfect company into a series of spammy content farms. “Making it difficult to know what’s going on is exactly the point of so much about how private equity operates,” argues Greenwell in Bad Company. She follows four people in disparate industries—retail, health care, journalism, and housing—trying, as we did at Gizmodo Media, to understand why people claiming to revitalize our companies did exactly the opposite.

For people who genuinely desire functional, vibrant institutions, funds like Great Hill can represent not just a logistical but an emotional challenge. It’s not easy to watch something you depend on, and spent countless hours analyzing and agonizing over, systematically stripped for parts. Greenwell’s book seeks to answer the questions many people at the receiving end of a private equity takeover want to know: Who are these people, how did they get here, and what on Earth do they actually want?

Ostensibly, private equity firms flip underperforming private companies kind of like houses: The firms raise capital to buy “distressed assets” wholesale, take out (often massive) loans to cover a rehabilitation job, and pay their investors when the business either goes public or is sold. Greenwell locates the origin of these leveraged buyout arrangements in the “bootstrap deals” of the 1960s, when financial firms took on companies that were successful but too small to go public. Within a decade, opportunistic executives started targeting larger companies. By the ’80s, hostile takeovers of Fortune 500 companies became common, if not exactly the norm.

Today’s private equity landscape is vast: Once you’re attuned to the industry’s hold on nearly every aspect of American life, it feels impossible to escape. My local grocery, an iconic New York institution once owned by a family that pledged to hire union-represented locals and maintain the lowest prices in the city, was sold in 2020 to a national chain after a takeover from Sterling Investment Partners. On my beat, covering the health care industry, I was regularly confronted with the realities of staffing shortages and closures stemming in part from private equity firms’ attempts to bring budgets down to cover their debt. And I saw private equity’s obsession with becoming “agile” and “lean” reflected in the way the Department of Government Efficiency has deliriously hacked away at programs it has neither the capacity nor the will to understand.

As recounted in Greenwell’s book, stories like these aren’t simply anecdotal. Private equity’s influence on the economy, and our livelihoods, is significant. Twelve million Americans, she writes, work for companies that are owned by private equity. The industry operates 8 percent of private hospitals, four out of five of the largest for-profit day care chains, and currently controls $8.2 trillion in assets—a number that accounts for more than the GDP of any country besides China and the United States. And, where 2 percent of companies go bankrupt within 10 years of their founding, that number jumps to 20 percent when private equity is involved. Between 2009 and 2019, 1.3 million Americans working in retail lost their jobs as a direct result of the industry’s touch.

Bad Company offers a few reasons why private equity firms aren’t successfully turning their “distressed assets” around, the most relevant of which is that it pays investors just as well, if not better, to run a company into the ground. (Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech from the movie Wall Street makes two separate appearances in the book, both entirely appropriate.) Decades of aggressive lobbying and cozy relationships with politicians have favored these firms, which style themselves publicly as “brash swashbucklers, eager to be the hero,” swooping in at their own risk to rescue businesses in distress.

But in practice, Greenwell argues, private equity bears vanishingly little risk. And its mandate to not just profit but maximize shareholder value has the effect of abstracting critical industries to a point where, the author writes, “a company doesn’t even need to exist at all.” If reducing the quality of service, selling off real estate, and collecting fees are more profitable than running a successful business, argues Greenwell, “liquidation is not just the best option, but indeed the only one.”

Today, when a private equity firm borrows money to “save” a company, the debt is almost always carried not by the firms that purchased a company, but by the company itself. Standard takeover deals include what’s known as a 2-and-20 clause: Funds take a 2 percent management fee of all assets under their control, as well as 20 percent of all profits above a certain threshold. This is in addition, writes Greenwell, to a range of other common payouts, including monitoring and transaction fees.

As one team of researchers found over a decade ago, as much as two-thirds of a private equity firm’s profits typically come from these kinds of management fees. Many deploy sale-leaseback arrangements to make a quick buck, selling off property and requiring acquired companies to pay rent on real estate they once owned. And then there are classic cost-saving measures like mass layoffs. “Taken together,” Greenwell writes, “it is very, very difficult for private equity to lose money.” In this context, whether a company provides anything of value beyond dividends to investors is somewhat beside the point.

Private equity’s central conceit is that financiers, not skilled workers or industry experts, are best positioned to figure out what makes any given business work. In her reporting, Greenwell makes a detailed argument for the fundamental misguidedness of this stance. Many private equity managers don’t know very much at all about the businesses they run. They’re experts in markets, not trades. So it’s no wonder they hop from industry to industry deploying the same tactics, cutting jobs and saddling companies with debt and inking extractive real estate deals. Hospitals, newspapers, rental apartments, and toy stores have wildly different business models. But to a private equity firm, they’re all the same.

Over the course of Bad Company, Greenwell follows four people whose lives have been altered by a private equity takeover. The history and policy analysis act as a scaffolding for these stories; it’s in these intimate portraits that the book truly shines. Though never stated outright, the experiences of Greenwell’s subjects act as a powerful foil to a certain kind of managerial thinking that is implicit at the heart of private equity’s pitch: that profits could only possibly matter to the people in charge of the ledgers, that employees need to be micromanaged, that businesses suffer because of a lack of commitment from the people who clock in and out every day. In other words, Greenwell managed to find a collection of characters utterly devoted to what they do.

Liz, an Alaskan mother trying to lift her family out of chronic instability, worked for the retail giant Toys “R” Us, which declared bankruptcy and axed 33,000 employees without severance when private equity–imposed debt made it impossible to keep shelves stocked. Liz loved working at Toys “R” Us so much that she got a tattoo of the company’s signature giraffe. As recounted by Greenwell, after a particularly satisfying customer service experience, a pair of new parents gave their baby her name. A physician named Roger abandoned a cushy job decades ago to practice medicine in rural Wyoming. Now in his eighties and retired, he reflects on his battle to maintain essential medical services, like maternity care, following a series of acquisitions. “You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he tells Greenwell through tears. Natalia, a Texas journalist born in Mexico, ping-ponged between private equity–owned papers, making less than $60,000 a year in Austin and maintaining significant debt to write stories that would resonate with younger, Spanish-speaking audiences. Greenwell also spent time with Loren, a parent whose private equity–backed low-income housing complex flooded, ejecting residents from their homes with no recourse. She is still handing her number out to residents of the building, helping them file complaints from afar.

These are not people who need dividends to commit. Throughout Bad Company they find creative ways to circumnavigate the constrictions placed on them by faceless billion-dollar firms. They work longer hours and organize their neighbors. They unionize and campaign. They leverage their tangible connections to their communities to combat people they’ve never met in gleaming Manhattan office towers they’ll never see. In comparison, the copy-paste labor private equity firms perform looks awfully lazy.

Intermittently, Bad Company touches on the stories the men in the suits tell one another, and the public, about their critical societal role. “The enduring myth of the lone business genius creating a Fortune 500 company, or saving one from destruction, has benefited private equity immeasurably,” Greenwell writes. She notes that giants of the finance industry like Mitt Romney are rewarded with Senate seats, and that the central branch of the New York Public Library, the MIT computing school, and Yale’s performing arts center all bear the name of Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of Blackstone. The idea that these men are facilitating the process of free-market natural section has contributed to a lack of meaningful regulation—though the donations the private equity industry throws to politicians of both parties certainly don’t hurt.

Most memorably, Greenwell describes a Machiavelli quote that once hung in the private conference room of a senior partner at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the hundred-billion-dollar firm responsible for Toys “R” Us’s leveraged buyout as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of others: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its outcome, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things,” it read.

But Greenwell, through her thorough accounting of four companies’ acquisitions and rapid declines, illustrates just how musty that order of things has become, or maybe has always been. Another story the private equity industry likes to tell is that its work is crucial and inevitable, because the companies it acquires suffer from a “failure to thrive” from which there is no turning back. According to this logic, the companies in which Greenwell’s subjects lived and worked were pronounced dead long before funds stepped in to profit from their distress. Toys “R” Us could never survive the shift to e-commerce. Rural hospitals had to consolidate and cut services or face extinction. Declining ad revenue killed journalism. There was simply no other path.

But, as Greenwell points out, there are successful retail operations and small hospitals and profitable publications operating in this country today. Many apartment buildings manage to house residents without flooding their apartments or turning off the heat. Extracting every ounce of shareholder value from these companies was far from inevitable—and it’s certainly much harder for an organization to adapt to changing conditions when it’s shedding workers and crippled under a mountain of debt.

Of course, it’s impossible to know how any individual company would have fared without private equity’s involvement. Greenwell detours to earlier instances of managerial ineptitude that proved fateful before new ownership stepped in. It could have been in Toys “R” Us’s foolish early deals with Amazon, or the conventional wisdom that underperforming medical centers should slash services, or newspapers’ sluggishness to embrace new models in the digital age. Those were all decisions made by highly paid executives, too. In this sense, Bad Company is a call to bring more creativity and expertise to our country’s critical institutions—to extract them from the hands of people for whom a business isn’t a dynamic entity full of actual people but instead a collection of assets and debts.

Yes, Dems Should Push to Repeal Trump’s Big Bad Law—but Not Stop There - 2025-07-26T10:00:00Z

Earlier this month, I brought you the good news that Democrats were developing a concept of a plan for their upcoming midterm campaign, having spent the first half of the year on a concentrated strategy of sitting back and letting Republicans screw things up. The precipitating event for the change of heart, according to reports, was the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which I guess was the trap that Democrats were hoping to spring. Well, as if to confirm that the game is, finally, afoot, James Carville—the chief advocate of his party’s “roll over and play dead” strategy—is calling for a big shift, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

To my surprise, there is merit to be found in his proposed line of attack. But it’s sandwiched between a confused read of the political landscape and a rather limp call to action that really fails to contemplate the real harms that Trump’s legislation is about to unleash. For this garden to bear fruit, we need to do some weeding.

As is their wont, the minders of the rubber room in which New York Times opinion pieces are formed did permit Carville to spend several paragraphs throat-clearing about how the Democrats are “constipated” and “leaderless”—which, you know, shouldn’t bother someone who advised them to do nothing for six months, anyway. He also seems weirdly panicked at the fact that Zohran Mamdani won his party’s nomination for the upcoming New York mayoral election, which to Carville represents “an undeniable fissure in our political soul.” To my mind, our political soul would be more gravely imperiled had serial sex pest Andrew Cuomo won the nomination, but it’s always interesting to learn about what elite Democrats and their favorite newspaper editors are prepared to forgive.

After this simultaneously overwrought and underbaked beginning, we finally arrive at Carville’s big idea: Democrats should let Trump “rope-a-dope with MAGA on the Jeffrey Epstein case” without “get[ting] in the way” and instead train their fire on the depredations of Trump’s budget bill.

Now, I come from a controversial school of thought that holds that a political party can, and even should, do two things at once. But I’m willing to concede that the Epstein matter has become something of a perpetual motion machine, with Trump’s own actions being the strongest force keeping this hurdy-gurdy spinning. It is also the precise kind of story—salacious, wicked, and conspiratorial—that our cynical political media doesn’t need outside encouragement to cover. As always, Democrats should take note of what it is the political press wants to spend its time covering and do more to provide low-minded fodder for partisan conflict.

But Carville is very much on point where one vital matter is concerned: This is a phenomenally favorable environment to wage war on Trump’s signature law. Carville cites a July 16 CNN poll that found that a majority of respondents oppose the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 61–39 percent, and expect it to hurt the economy, 51–29 percent.

What can I say? The public basically has it correct. Taken as a whole, we have strong evidence that there is fertile terrain to wage a maximal battle against Trump on this issue. So it’s puzzling that Carville’s clarion call to action is so oddly muted—and so fundamentally illogical:

Our midterm march starts with a simple phrase every candidate can blast on every screen and stage: We demand a repeal. A repeal of Mr. Trump’s spending law is the one word that should define the midterms. It is clear, forceful and full-throated. It must be slathered across every poster, every ad, every social media post from now until November 2026. That single word is our core message. Every Democrat can run on it, with outrage directed not at the president or a person but at this disastrous bill. And the reasons are countless, each one a venom-tipped political dagger.

I am really struggling to understand how we’ve landed at “We demand a repeal.” In the first place, are Democrats … not planning on winning the midterm elections? I thought the goal here was to take back both houses of Congress, in which case they wouldn’t need to demand a repeal from anyone, they could simply—you know—pass their own bills to repeal things and then demand the president sign them. Which Trump wouldn’t do, of course, but hopefully Democrats understand that the goal here would be to use politics to cross-pressure vulnerable Republicans and construct an anti-GOP electoral majority, not expect Trump to give in to their demands. Republicans spent the Obama years trying to send Obamacare repeals to his desk, not because they thought he’d sign them but because doing so helped reaffirm their commitment with their base.

At any rate, “Demand a repeal” is strained and supine—it suggests that you’re either not planning on using your power to fight or you somehow still intend to attempt bipartisan collaboration once you gain back power. A clearer and more full-throated campaign message would be, “Not only will we repeal this bill, we will pass bills to undo the damage done to the government, we will fight to get the civil service rehired, and we will crush the corrupt thieves who stole your wealth and health care.”

And they shouldn’t stop there. Democrats need to contend with what the One Big Beautiful law will do—and it’s not clear that Carville, at any rate, is prepared to do that. Yes, the law, as Carville suggests, filches wealth from the American people in a thousand different ways, but he fails to connect the all-important dots as to where that money is actually going. Beyond the usual, bog-standard creation of yet another taxpayer-funded slush-fund for oligarchs, Trump’s law is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to fund a domestic deportation army and construct a nationwide network of concentration camps.

Phenomenal sums of money are already changing hands. The law allocates $8 billion to ICE to go on a massive hiring spree, for which the agency is offering $50,000 signing bonuses. This week, an eye-popping Bloomberg story reported that the Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics Company was awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build another detention facility in Texas. Prior to winning that contract, the firm had collected a mere $29 million in Defense Department contracts. And the fact that the company “doesn’t appear to have any experience with detention” was no impediment to its receiving this windfall.

The law is not merely greedy; it’s not merely cruel. What Trump is doing is nefarious. Needless to say, I’m troubled by Carville’s omission of the way this one law furthers and funds what can only be called the president’s fascistic designs for our country’s future. And I’m troubled by the feeling that Democrats—who are far from great on the issues of immigration and asylum—may try to duck this fight.

Democrats are notoriously conflict-averse, and I worry that they’re still intimidated by Trump’s alleged mastery of the immigration issue. But the biggest reason to take this fight to Trump is that Trump doesn’t think Democrats have the heart for it. As Brian Beutler recently noted, Trump is “betting that grappling with a giant, masked right-wing police force and a multistate immigrant gulag will tear Dems apart if they ever retake power.” Anyone authentically concerned with “undeniable fissures” in the Democrats’ “political soul,” as Carville purports to be, needs to make sure Trump loses this bet.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Guess Which Texas Republican Was Just Accused of Paying for Abortions? - 2025-07-25T21:23:13Z

Republican Texas state Representative Giovanni Capriglione co-authored the law that bans nearly all abortion in the state. And on Friday, the District 98 representative was publicly accused of having “funded several abortions for his own personal gain.”

The accusations against the legislator, who earlier this week ended his bid for an eighth term in office, come from Alex Grace, a former exotic dancer. On Friday, the right-wing publication Current Revolt published a video interview with Grace, in which she reportedly claims she had a yearslong affair with Capriglione, with their relationship beginning in 2004 when she was 18 years old.

Grace said Capriglione’s hypocrisy on issues like abortion contributed to the end of their fling. “He is someone that portrays himself to be so anti-abortion, yet he has funded several abortions for his own personal gain,” Grace alleged—though she refrained from providing further details, saying, “you’re just going to have to go with my word.”

Capriglione was the author of Texas’s “trigger” abortion ban, which outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The law makes performing an abortion, at any time from the moment of fertilization, punishable with life imprisonment or a civil penalty of $100,000. He has also, per The Texas Tribune, backed laws making it a civil offense to pay for someone to receive an abortion.

Capriglione on Friday issued a statement admitting to infidelity, without mentioning whom it was with, but denying having ever funded an abortion: “Years ago, I selfishly had an affair. I’m not proud of this. Thank God my wife and family forgave me, and we moved past it and have the strong marriage we do today.… The rest is categorically false and easily disproven.… I have never, nor would I ever, pay for an abortion.”

The lawmaker chalked the revelation up to “blowback” for “holding the wealthy, the powerful, the corporate elites, and the Austin insiders to account.”

Capriglione also vowed to pursue “legal remedies,” and Current Revolt publisher Tony Ortiz says he received a legal threat from the lawmaker on Wednesday evening. The day prior, Capriglione had announced the end of his reelection campaign.

Since the story broke, The Texas Tribune reports, Republican Representative Briscoe Cain, another prominent anti-abortion lawmaker in Texas’s House, called for Capriglione’s resignation, and urged the body’s Committee on General Investigating to probe the matter.

Trump’s Big Trade Deal With Japan Is Already Falling Apart - 2025-07-25T19:48:09Z

“I just signed the largest trade deal in history, I think maybe the largest deal in history, with Japan,” Trump boasted Tuesday. But a new report from The Financial Times demonstrates that U.S. and Japanese officials don’t see eye to eye on what exactly the countries agreed upon.

According to Trump and his administration, in return for a reduction in tariffs, Japan would invest $550 billion in certain U.S. sectors and give the United States 90 percent of the profits.

But Japanese officials say profit sharing under the agreement isn’t so set in stone: A Friday slideshow presentation in Japan’s Cabinet Office, contra the White House, said profit distribution would be “based on the degree of contribution and risk taken by each party,” per The Financial Times.

The FT also reports conflicting messages between Washington and Tokyo as to whether that $550 billion commitment is, as team Trump sees it, a guarantee or, as Japan’s negotiator Ryosei Akazawa sees it, an upper limit and not “a target or commitment.”

Mireya Solís, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Financial Times that the deal contains “nothing inspiring,” as “both sides made promises that we can’t be sure will be kept” and “there are no guarantees on what the actual level of investments from Japan will be.”

The inconsistent interpretations of the deal could possibly be owing to the fact that it was hastily pulled together over the course of an hour and 10 minutes between Trump and Akazawa on Tuesday, according to the FT, which cited “officials familiar with the U.S.-Japan talks.” And, moreover, “Japanese officials said there was no written agreement with Washington—and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”

Some are thus beginning to wonder whether Trump’s avowed “largest deal in history” even technically counts as a deal at all. Brad Setser, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on X: “If something like this is not ‘papered’ it isn’t really a deal.”

Immigration Agents Laugh at U.S. Citizen as He Records His Own Arrest - 2025-07-25T19:17:01Z

As federal immigration agents attacked a U.S. citizen, they warned him: “You’ve got no rights here.”

What began as a simple traffic stop for Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old Floridian, in May, turned into a traumatizing arrest when U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrived at the scene.

Alongside his mother and two undocumented male companions, Laynez-Ambrosio was laughed at, ridiculed, and violently detained by a group of officers, according to video footage secretly captured by the teenager, first reported on by The Guardian.

“Wait, hold up,” Laynez-Ambrosio said when agents opened the door of their company work van. “You guys have no rights to do that.”

“We don’t have rights to do that?” one agent said, laughing.

The video footage, panning upward, then shows the border patrol agents restraining one individual in a chokehold. All three men were forced out of their vehicle and onto the ground. As another companion is manhandled by three officers in tactical gear, the sound of a stun gun is heard going off, sending the man crashing onto the floor as he cries and shakes in agony.

“You can’t be doing that,” Laynez-Ambrosio said.

“Get on the ground,” an officer screams at him.

“I’m not going to get up, I’m going to just stay like this,” Laynez-Ambrosio responds. “Y’all scaring the dude.… I’ve got rights to talk.”

“You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother,” an agent told Laynez-Ambrosio.

“I do,” Laynez-Ambrosio insisted. “I was born and raised here.”

In the aftermath of the violence, the ICE agents can be heard laughing and making light of the pain they inflicted on their arrestees, referring to the Taser use as “funny,” and insulting its target as a “dick.”

“You can smell that … $30,000 bonus,” said another officer.

Later, the officers can be heard claiming that more individuals have started to resist their arrests, anticipating even more extreme uses of force in future.

“We’re going to end up shooting some of them,” an agent said, referencing Laynez-Ambrosio’s attempts to assert his rights. “This kid goes like … ‘No, you can’t do that’; I’m not doing shit. We told you already to get out, you either get out or I’m going to pull you out.”

Federal authorities have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—but actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful residents possessing visas or green cards. So far this year, ICE agents have been caught interrogating children, deporting U.S. citizens, and stuffing uncharged prisoners into America’s very own concentration camp.

Economists Are Seriously Alarmed About Official Data Under Trump - 2025-07-25T17:31:32Z

As the Trump administration guts and otherwise interferes with federal statistical agencies, nearly 90 percent of economists recently surveyed by Reuters are concerned about the reliability of official government data on the economy.

From July 11 to 24, Reuters polled economists—including “Nobel Laureates, former policymakers, academics from top U.S. universities, and economists from major banks, consultancies and think tanks”—and found that 89 of 100 of them “were concerned about the quality of official U.S. economic data,” with 41 saying they are “very concerned.”

Reuters’ report shows that alarm over Trump’s cuts to key agencies that collect and deliver data, such as statistics on jobs and inflation (to say nothing of other data impacted by Trump, such as that on health, weather, and education), has reached fever pitch.

Erica Groshen, former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, told Reuters, “I can’t help but worry some deadlines [for future data releases] are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff.”

Groshen also noted “another very big risk”: that “all of the current administration’s changes will make civil service employees more like political appointees.”

MSNBC’s Steve Benen observed in an article earlier this month that the prospect of “corruption and political mischief” interfering with federal statistics under Trump is also worth keeping in mind. “Perhaps Donald Trump, the argument goes, might use his influence to tell the Labor Department to manipulate the data and deceive the public,” Benen wrote—though he noted “there’s been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative” to date.

Even setting that worrisome possibility aside, Trump’s war against trustworthy federal data already threatens to wreak real havoc.

During a press conference last month, Fed chair (and MAGA persona non grata) Jerome Powell explained why we mustn’t take for granted “having good data” on the economy: This information, he pointed out, “doesn’t just help the Fed. It helps the government, it helps Congress, it helps the executive branch. More importantly, really, it helps businesses. They need to know what’s going on in the economy.”

For years, Powell noted, the United States has prided itself on being a leader in “measuring and understanding what’s happening in, in our very large and dynamic economy.”

“I hate to see us cutting back on that,” he continued, “because it is a real benefit to the general public that people in all kinds of jobs have the best possible understanding of what’s happening in the economy.”

Trump Is Using Your Taxpayer Dollars to Promote His New Golf Course - 2025-07-25T17:06:37Z

President Trump is using $10 million of our taxes to market his new golf course in Scotland.

The president traveled to Scotland on Friday for the grand opening of an 18-hole golf course in Aberdeen. He’s expected to stay for four days. His appearance will likely generate positive revenue and publicity for the course—money that will flow right back into the pockets of the Trump Organization.

HuffPost has estimated that the trip will likely cost at least $9.7 million dollars due to Air Force One operations, motorcades and helicopters, Secret Service overtime, and more. Trump has framed the international vacation as a “working trip,” and has instead emphasized his plan to meet in Aberdeen with U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer. But Aberdeen is not the capital of the United Kingdom, or even the capital of Scotland, making it clear this meeting was just randomly added in to use as an excuse for the golf course.

Trump has grown more and more comfortable completely blurring the lines of his private businesses and his public office. This trip will make his second-term golf tab at least $52 million in just six months, according to HuffPost. His first term was $152 million over four years.

“We’ve reached a point where the Oval Office is an extension of the Trump Organization, and American taxpayers are footing the bill,” Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told HuffPost. “A president should not be spending time trying to make money in a foreign country while in office, but if they do, at the very least they could pick up the tab for their business trips.”

Trump Adviser Warns Stephen Colbert Is Just the Beginning - 2025-07-25T16:44:32Z

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show is apparently a sign of what’s to come for America’s media industry.

Speaking with CNBC Friday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blamed the comedy show’s demise on a lack of profitability, and warned that the “media industry across this country needs a course correction.”

“The American people simply do not trust the mainstream media,” Carr said, likening the current field of late-night comedy shows to genuine news outlets.

He has a point: Media trust has never been so low in this country. A February Gallup survey found that trust in news had fallen to a five-decade low, with just 31 percent of polled Americans claiming to trust the mainstream media a “great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36 percent said they didn’t trust traditional news sources “at all.”

But threatening to forcibly curtail content via the heavy hand of the federal government—à la some Russian- or North Korean–inspired trajectory—is not the solution.

“For broadcasters, they have a federal license and they are obligated to operate in the public interest,” Carr said. “In the extent that we’re starting to see some changes, I think that’s a good thing.”

Some of the most prominent news companies in the country have already been pressured into changing their coverage of Trump. The longtime head of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, quit after Paramount executives attempted to interfere with the show’s content, reportedly pressuring him to change how the show reports on the president. The former president of CBS, Wendy McMahon, resigned under similar circumstances shortly afterward.

Colbert’s show—the most popular show in its time slot—was canceled three days after the comedian claimed that Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over his groundless lawsuit targeting Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview looked like a “big, fat bribe.”

In his first show back following the announcement, Colbert didn’t deny that it was possible the show was hemorrhaging money. However, he said he couldn’t work out the $40 million loss that an unidentified Paramount source leaked to The New York Post—until he considered another possibility.

“$40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million. But where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh yeah,” Colbert said.

The FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Thursday.

Will Trump Pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Hear His Answer for Yourself - 2025-07-25T15:47:44Z

Asked on three occasions Friday morning whether he would consider pardoning convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump first said he didn’t “want to talk about” it and, later, made a point to note he is “allowed” to do so.

“Well, I don’t want to talk about that,” the president responded to the first query about a potential pardon.

Later, Trump said: “It’s something I haven’t thought about. It’s really some—it’s some. I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”

“But you wouldn’t rule it out?” a reporter followed up, but Trump did not reply.

Trump on Epstein: "You ought to be speaking about Larry Summers. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island." pic.twitter.com/P9wrKrAnTR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 25, 2025

Trump on pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell: "I'm allowed to do it" pic.twitter.com/e9bjwFqfYr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 25, 2025

Later still, the president told reporters, “I certainly can’t talk about pardons right now.”

While the president’s response wasn’t a “Yes,” it certainly wasn’t a “No,” either. (And recall that, in 2019 and 2020, Trump said he hadn’t thought about pardoning Roger Stone, whom he pardoned in December 2020.)

Trump’s glaring nonanswers come as his allies appear increasingly open to embracing Maxwell as a way out of his Epstein mire. The administration is facing an uproar over its lack of transparency and Trump’s personal ties to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse minors. (When she was arrested by the FBI in 2020, Trump had said, “I wish her well.”)

Despite Maxwell’s crimes, as Rolling Stone reported Thursday, “the Trump administration and the president’s allies in Congress seem to think that if they get Maxwell to attest that Trump did nothing wrong,” it will solve everything. MAGA media has also begun cozying up to the convicted sex criminal.

In recent days, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Maxwell and will depose her next month. Meanwhile, Todd Blanche, Trump’s deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer, has met with Maxwell and will meet again Friday, purportedly to gain information “about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.”

The potential for corruption in Blanche’s closed-door sit-downs with Maxwell, who has everything to gain from aiding the president, is plain, as has been much observed by Democratic lawmakers and other critics. The observation was even made by Trump toady House Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently told reporters that he backed the House Oversight Committee’s move to subpoena Maxwell while noting an “obvious concern”:

Could she be counted on to tell the truth? Is she a credible witness? I mean, this is a person who’s been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts, and acts against innocent young people. I mean, can we trust what she’s going to say?

Palm Beach County Attorney Dave Aronberg and former aide to Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, has speculated that the DOJ’s talks with Maxwell could presage a “hidden pardon” deal.

And of course it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Trump to flagrantly abuse the pardon power.

This story has been updated.

Trump Gives Israel Chilling Order as It Starves Gaza to Death - 2025-07-25T15:45:09Z

President Trump suggested on Friday that Israel should “finish the job” and “get rid of it,” when asked about Gaza, which is now suffering from mass starvation due to Israel’s blockade.

“Gaza, they pulled out of Gaza, they pulled out in terms of negotiating. It was too bad, Hamas didn’t really wanna make a deal. I think they wanna die. And it’s very, very bad,” the president said on Friday before departing for Scotland. “You’re gonna have to finish the job … don’t forget, we got a lotta hostages out. So now we’re down to the final hostages and they know what happens after you get the final hostages. And basically because of that they really didn’t wanna make a deal I saw that. So they pulled out, they’re gonna have to fight, they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of it.”

The Trump administration has been explicit about its horrifying vision for Gaza, as the president clearly views it as potential property for an Israeli beach resort rather than an area that human beings call home. The genocidal language he casually uses here, saying that Israel needed to “get rid of it,” only reinforces that.

While leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the U.K.’s Kier Starmer have this week finally decided that the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—for throwing rocks, for waiting for aid, for doing journalism, for simply refusing to leave their homes—has become too much, Trump has tripled down in his dismissiveness. All signs point to him allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s butchering of Palestine to continue uninhibited.

Trump Says a Weak Dollar Is a Good Thing, Actually - 2025-07-25T15:13:33Z

A weak dollar is better than a strong dollar, according to Donald Trump.

The dollar hasn’t fallen this fast since 1973. Over the last six months, the dollar has declined more than 10 percent against America’s most prominent trading partners, bringing the value of the world’s reserve currency to a three-year low.

“Why has the dollar fallen so much, and are you concerned about that?” a reporter asked Trump outside of the White House Friday.

“Well, I’m a person that likes a strong dollar, but a weak dollar makes you a hell of a lot more money,” Trump said. “I don’t know if you study, but I study it.”

“I went to Penn and Wharton,” the reporter said, referring to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious business school. “So I know this.”

“Then I know you’re smart,” Trump said. “So when we have a strong dollar, one thing happens—it sounds good. But you don’t do any tourism, you can’t sell tractors, you can’t sell trucks, you can’t sell anything.”

But tourism is booming everywhere but the U.S. A study from the World Travel & Tourism Council last month found that the U.S. was the only country in the world forecast to have less international travel spending, with the potential to lose as much as $12.5 billion in the category compared to last year, a figure that has rattled the hospitality and aviation industries. And Trump hasn’t made it easier: Prospective visitors might have to contend with more red tape to enter the country, paying a $250 “visa integrity fee” in addition to the $185 price tag on the nonimmigrant visa itself.

“It is good for inflation, that’s about it. But we have no inflation, we wiped out inflation,” the president noted Friday, further explaining his “strong dollar” ideology. Yet his administration did not actually eliminate inflation—it’s still a major concern, fueled in large part by Trump’s roller-coaster tariff plan.

“It doesn’t sound good, but you make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar—not a weak dollar, but a weaker dollar,” Trump said, claiming that America’s trading partners, including China and Japan, were “fighting” for their own weaker currencies.

“And it’s good psychologically, it makes you feel good,” he added.

Reporter: Why has dollar fallen so much?

Trump: A weak dollar makes you a hell of a lot more money. When we have strong dollar… you don’t do any tourism pic.twitter.com/8qcWgrcqtq

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 25, 2025

Trump’s New Defense for Epstein Birthday Letter Is Most Pathetic Yet - 2025-07-25T15:06:07Z

Donald Trump’s latest tactic of bringing up Barack Obama’s administration every time someone asks him about Jeffrey Epstein is getting downright ridiculous. 

Speaking to the press outside of the White House Friday, Trump once again denied writing a “bawdy” birthday message for Epstein in 2003 as part of a book of birthday notes for the alleged sex offender. 

“I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Now, somebody could have written a letter and used my name, that’s happened a lot,” Trump said. 

But the president wasn’t satisfied with simply answering the question—he took a moment to return to his favorite subject. 

“All you have to do is take a look at the dossier, the fake dossier,” Trump continued. “Everything’s fake with that administration. Everything’s fake with the Democrats. Take a look at what they just found about the dossier. Everything is fake, they’re a bunch of sick people.”

Trump was likely referring to the Steele dossier, a collection of reporting by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been used to obtain surveillance warrants on a former Trump campaign adviser after the 2016 presidential election. 

Here, Trump is attempting to compare the validity of his crude birthday letter to the dossier, of which much of the contents has since been discredited or denied. In a broader sense, his administration is hoping to cast the ongoing fallout over Epstein as yet another vicious “hoax.” Even as president, Trump continues to cast himself as some sort of victim. 

But evidence of Trump’s ties to Epstein, who once claimed to be the president’s “closest friend,” are mounting. 

Earlier this week, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard claimed that the Obama administration had “used already discredited information like the Steele dossier—they knew it was discredited at the time.”

It’s worth noting that the dossier was not the sole basis for the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After questions arose about the dossier’s credibility, the FBI continued to pursue the surveillance warrants for other information.  

Gabbard has emerged as the main sycophant in charge of Trump’s smoke screen, setting off on a campaign to prove the Obama administration manufactured the narrative that Moscow wanted Trump in power (Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted that he did! Mystery solved!). But her declassified report didn’t really prove anything at all, and she has quickly returned to her own favorite pastime: spouting debunked Russian propaganda. 

Trump also said Friday that people should spend more time focused on the others who reportedly wrote birthday notes for Epstein, such as former president Bill Clinton.

Trump Is Teeing Up a Pardon of Epstein Accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell - 2025-07-25T14:33:56Z

So Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime abettor of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, is meeting Friday for a second time with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. OK, first of all, let’s just stop right there. Why Blanche? Well, gosh, you say, he’s a deputy A.G.; seems legit. Actually, no, not by a long shot. Blanche was Trump’s personal defense attorney—on a sex case. (Technically, it was a hush-money case—the one involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which Blanche and Trump lost—but it was really about sex, in this case between consenting adults.)

So, no—Blanche, whose actual job entails the day-to-day running of the department, is absolutely not the appropriate person for this task. Wait—let’s stop right there again. Is this “task” even legitimate? Under certain circumstances, it might be. Let’s say a mobster is in the can for some felony. Prosecutors believe he has information about a different crime. So they go to him to see if he’ll talk, and they offer him a deal.

If that’s what’s going on here, maybe it’s OK—although alas, we stop again to ponder the morality of offering a deal to a child sex trafficker (hey, right wing, I thought this was a moral line in the sand for you?). This is not a mobster rat whose information could bring down another made man or even a whole family. This is a woman who was convicted of conspiring to groom minors for Epstein’s pleasure and who, according to at least one witness at her trial, participated in the sex.

So the whole thing shouldn’t even be happening. She was tried, she was convicted, and that’s that. But: If it had to happen; if we are to concede that questioning her at this point is a legitimate enterprise, shouldn’t it be done by a line attorney who is familiar with the details of the case? Of course it should. Someone like, oh, Maurene Comey. Oh. Wait. They fired her last week.

I hope you’re putting these puzzle pieces together with me as we go. The bottom line here is obvious. Donald Trump, I believe, wants to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her silence. Note I said wants to. He might not. A pardon would rip his base in two. He may grasp that and not do it.

But I say there can be little question that he’s thinking about it. In fact, on the White House lawn Friday morning, a couple hours after I wrote this column, he was asked about a possible Maxwell pardon, and he said: “I’m allowed to do it.”

I’m not the only one who smelled this possibility coming. Dave Aronberg, who worked as the Florida drug czar under U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general, made some interesting comments on CNN the other day.

First, he observed how weird it was that Blanche was conducting these interviews: “I can’t overstate it, Brianna [Keilar]. It’s as if the number two executive at CNN was conducting this interview with me instead of you. Like, what? It never happens.”

Then he connected the political dots: “But there are others who could do this, which makes me believe this is a lot about perhaps some politics involved, like maybe to protect the president, to get a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell that she would get some immunity now and maybe a hidden pardon in the future, some sort of implication that she would be pardoned in the future if she comes out and says that the president was exonerated, not involved in any criminal activity.”

Of course, we do not know whether Trump committed these heinous crimes. Like any American, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the mere fact of these interviews being conducted the way they are raises certain obvious suspicions.

Maxwell and her lawyers surely know all this. She has a lot of incentive, in other words, to say what Trump and Blanche want her to say. Oh, and by the way, let’s stop here again. Why should we believe a word she says? There is much-documented evidence of Maxwell showing a “significant pattern of dishonest conduct,” as Merrick Garland’s Justice Department put it in 2022. They spared her (and themselves, and their finite resources) a perjury trial because she’d already been convicted of the big stuff.

Even assuming Trump is personally innocent, he still has a motive to cut a deal with Maxwell that leads to an eventual pardon. She might name prominent Democrats or other people to whom Trump is hostile. Her “pattern” suggests she’ll say anything Trump wants her to say.

If you think Trump wouldn’t do this, that pardoning a child sex trafficker is a bridge too far even for Trump … honestly, wake up. I bet you also thought he’d never pardon 1,200 anti-American insurrectionists.

If Trump is innocent, there’s one simple thing he should do. Order the release of all the Epstein files. Ah, but now we know that his name appears in them “multiple” times and that he lied earlier this month when asked about it. (The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Bondi told him about the multiple mentions of his name back in May.)

How would MAGA world receive a possible pardon by their hero of a woman who did the things Maxwell did? Some percentage, maybe even a substantial percentage, would throw in the towel, finally. But I doubt a majority. They’ll find an excuse. Child rape is bad, sure, but it’s really only bad when Democrats do it. Trump was sent by Jesus, after all, and Jesus teaches us to forgive, so Trump’s joined-at-the-hip, 15-year friendship with Epstein was about as Jesus-like as you can get, right? The sad thing about that joke is that, if it’s ever revealed that Trump did unspeakable things, one of those sick “Christian” preachers will probably say this in all seriousness.

The administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal and the likely coming indictment of Barack Obama, which I’ll write about next Monday, take us to depths we never, ever imagined we could reach in this country. Trump is the law, the law is Trump. I’ve always thought that, as horrible as everything is, if there’s an election in 2028 and the Democrat wins, we can get back to normal fairly quickly. As of this week, I’m not so sure.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

MAGA Senator Gets Brutal Fact-Check on Live TV Over Epstein - 2025-07-25T14:30:04Z

Republican lawmakers are doing everything they can to squash the Trump administration’s Epstein scandal—even if their theories don’t make sense.

Speaking with CNN’s The Source Thursday night, Senator Bernie Moreno claimed that “the media and Democrats” were fueling the boiling pressure campaign to unveil the Epstein files.

“No matter how much is disclosed at this point, there’s going to be a small segment of the population fueled primarily by the media and the Democrats that are never going to be satisfied with what’s out there,” Moreno said.

But a few outliers immediately came to mind for host Kaitlan Collins.

“Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer are not fueled by the media and Democrats,” Collins said. “They would probably take offense to that.”

Bannon has called for full public transparency on what Trump has derided as a Democrat-invented “hoax.” (Bannon was reportedly paid to media-train the deceased pedophile.) Loomer, meanwhile, effectively predicted the right’s newfangled spin on the scandal last week, which has so far involved cozying up to the pedophile’s longtime girlfriend and imprisoned criminal associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in a supposed “pardon campaign.”

“I said a small population of Republicans,” Moreno said, laughing.

“Yeah, but that’s the president’s base,” Collins threw back.

The Ohio Republican further insisted that Trump has “never been more popular”—though recent polling indicates he’s wrong on that point too.

A Quinnipiac poll published last week found that 63 percent of voters disapprove of the way that the Trump administration has handled the Epstein case, which has so far included the Justice Department backtracking on the existence of certain documents.

Moreno: No matter how much is disclosed, there’s going to be a small segment of the population fueled primarily by media and the Democrats that are never going to be satisfied

Collins: Bannon and Loomer are not fueled by the media and Democrats pic.twitter.com/gilaDloPFv

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 25, 2025

There is mounting evidence that Trump and Epstein had a remarkably close relationship. The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump was named as a contributor on a birthday book for Epstein organized by Maxwell. The Times’ story backed up the bombshell report from The Wall Street Journal last week, which unveiled a salacious letter that Trump had penned to his “pal,” making reference to “a wonderful secret.”

The president has vehemently denied that he was ever close with Epstein.

Alina Habba Is Back in Power Thanks to Shady Trump Move - 2025-07-25T14:27:51Z

President Trump is bending judicial rules to help his personal lawyer keep the job she’s woefully unqualified for.

On Tuesday, New Jersey federal judges decided to fire Alina Habba, refusing to vote to extend her 120-day appointment as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, leading to uproar from the right. Now, the Trump administration seems to have found a loophole to keep one of their most loyal operatives back into a powerful position.

To rig the system for Habba’s return, Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this week fired the first assistant U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Desiree Grace, whom a panel of New Jersey judges had voted to succeed Habba. A Justice Department official then confirmed Thursday that Trump withdrew Habba’s permanent nomination, and Bondi appointed Habba as first assistant. This allows Habba to become the acting U.S. attorney once again, as the position is currently vacant thanks to Grace’s ousting. It also allows Habba to bypass Senate confirmation, which is needed for permanent appointments.

The Trump administration is going to such lengths to secure Habba this position because she is a thoughtless foot soldier whose main priority is not the law of the land, but unwavering devotion to Trump. And she’s demonstrated that throughout her career.

As the president’s personal lawyer she unsuccessfully defended him in his hush-money and E. Jean Carroll defamation cases. In her first 120 days as U.S. attorney, she made headlines for claiming that the thousands of military veterans indiscriminately fired by DOGE were simply unfit and attempted to prosecute Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for trying to enter a local ICE detention center.

“Donald J. Trump is the 47th President. Pam Bondi is the Attorney General. And I am now the Acting United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey,” Habba wrote Thursday on X in a victorious tone. “I don’t cower to pressure. I don’t answer to politics. This is a fight for justice. And I’m all in.”

Elon Musk Hits Back at Trump After His Surprise Outreach Attempt - 2025-07-25T14:17:56Z

Elon Musk, the billionaire and former head of the White House’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” slapped away an olive branch extended by the president on Thursday, keeping the feud between them alive.

Earlier in the day, Trump had taken to his platform, Truth Social, to dismiss what he said was a widespread perception that he plans to “destroy” Musk’s companies by withdrawing “the large scale subsidies he receives” from the government.

On the contrary, the president said, “I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE.”

The apparent sign of goodwill came just days after the Pentagon awarded Musk’s company xAI a $200 million contract.

Musk challenged the veracity of Trump’s claims about subsidies and claimed that his ventures won their government contracts on merit.

On his own platform, X, the billionaire wrote: “The ‘subsidies’ he’s talking about simply do not exist. DJT has already removed or put an expiry date on all sustainable energy support while leaving massive oil & gas subsidies untouched.” Trump’s tax and spending plan, passed last month, included a number of unfavorable provisions for electric vehicle companies like Musk’s Tesla.

Musk also claimed that his space technology company, SpaceX, had earned its NASA contracts “by doing a better job for less money.”

In a subsequent post, Musk seemed to ridicule Trump’s promise not to “destroy” his companies, writing, “Phew.”

Trump and Musk have, famously, been at loggerheads since the billionaire, who formerly styled himself the “first buddy” to the president, ramped up attacks on Trump’s budget bill, which he called “pork-filled” and an “abomination.”

In the ensuing public clash last month, Trump repeatedly threatened to terminate government subsidies and contracts with Musk’s companies. He even suggested siccing Musk’s DOGE on its former handler, posting: “Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far…. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this?”

Musk’s jabs against Trump included threatening to create a new political party and alleging that Trump “is in the Epstein files.” Musk deleted the post in which he made the latter accusation (although it was corroborated by The Wall Street Journal’s report this week that the Justice Department, in May, informed Trump that his name appears repeatedly in the files).

While Musk has said some of his insults toward Trump went “too far,” the billionaire has continued, even since Trump’s attempt to make amends, to criticize the administration for its failure to provide full transparency on the case of the notorious pedophile (another former friend of the president). Notably, on the 2024 campaign trail, Musk had promised that the Epstein client list, which the DOJ said earlier this month is nonexistent, would become public under Trump.

“Going to F*** Me”: Trump Crashes Out Over Epstein Chaos - 2025-07-25T14:09:50Z

Donald Trump privately fears that his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is about to detonate, Politico reported Thursday.

In the Oval Office recently, Trump was spiraling out over the next steps of addressing the fallout from his administration’s handling of the files on the child sex offender.

“They’re going to accuse me of some funny business,” Trump warned, according to a Republican close to the White House who heard the president’s fretting firsthand.

In the Oval Office, Trump maintained that he had no involvement with Epstein’s alleged criminal activity but that it didn’t matter. “They’re going to fuck me anyways,” Trump said.

In recent weeks, Trump has come under increased scrutiny over his apparently quite close friendship with Epstein. The Justice Department released a memo earlier this month insisting that the alleged sex trafficker had kept no incriminating client list, despite Attorney General Pam Bondi previously claiming that she’d been in possession of such a document, sending Trump’s base into a frenzy. The memo also stated that no further evidence from the files would be disclosed, months after the Trump administration distributed “Phase 1” binders in February, lacking any new information.

Bondi and her deputy told Trump in May that his name had appeared in government files on Epstein “multiple times.” By July, the government had announced that so-called “Phase 1” would be the last.

Trump has continued to claim distance from Epstein, who once described himself as the president’s “closest friend.” Epstein orchestrated a child sex-trafficking ring in which he raped at least dozens of young girls and helped his wealthy and famous affiliates do the same.

Trump Is Definitely in Epstein’s Birthday Book—and It Gets Worse - 2025-07-25T13:24:11Z

Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book wasn’t the only time that Donald Trump left a personalized note for the child sex trafficking kingpin.

A book from Epstein’s personal collection featured the president’s signature sharpie scrawl, alongside a message once again calling Epstein a terrific guy.

“To Jeff—You are the greatest!” reads the inscription found in a copy of Trump: The Art of the Comeback. It is dated “Oct ‘97,” the month that the book was published.

Trump’s name appeared on a contributor list for Epstein’s birthday book, despite the president’s repeated denials that he was ever involved or contributed to a book of personalized messages celebrating the well-connected pedophile, reported The New York Times. The Times’s story backs up the bombshell report from The Wall Street Journal last week.

Trump was one of a dozen people listed as having been involved in the project, organized by Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and criminal associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The list also included other well-known Epstein associates, such as former Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie H. Wexner, Bear Stearns CEO Alan C. Greenberg, and physicist Murray Gell-Mann, reported the Times.

In an introductory letter to the birthday book, Maxwell wrote that the project’s intention was “to gather stories and old photographs to jog your memory about places, people and different events.”

“Some of the letters will definitely achieve their intended goal—some well … you will have to read them to see for yourself,” Maxwell wrote to Epstein. “I know you will enjoy looking through the book, and I hope you will derive as much pleasure looking through it as I did putting it together for you.”

Other evidence proves that Trump was undoubtedly in Epstein’s universe. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times—including at Trump’s second wedding. Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York Magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

On Wednesday, the Journal reported that the Justice Department had notified Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files, despite his public dismissal of the case as a Democrat-led “hoax.”

Coast Guard Arrested a Canadian Man. He Says He Wasn’t in U.S. Waters. - 2025-07-25T13:12:26Z

A Canadian fisherman is sounding the alarm to stay far, far away from the United States-Canadian border, alleging that the U.S. Coast Guard detained him in Canadian waters, CTV News reported.

Sixty-year-old Eduoard Lallemand borrowed his friend’s fishing vessel near Venise-en-Québec, about nine miles north of the U.S. border at the northern end of Lake Champlain, where he has been fishing for decades.

Lallemand said he was surprised when he was approached by the U.S. Coast Guard, who instructed him to turn off his engine and told him he’d ventured into U.S. territory. He complied, but maintained that he was in Canadian waters.

“I said, ‘No, I’m very sorry, I’m in Canada,’” Lallemand recalled to CTV News. “And I said I’m polite enough to talk to you guys but you cannot arrest me. ‘You can’t come across the border and pick me up,’ but they did.”

Lallemand said that he told the agents he’d like to talk to them by the shore, starting up his engine again. He claimed that the Coast Guard then attempted to push his boat closer to U.S. waters, causing his boat to capsize and sending him into the waters of Lake Champlain.

Lallemand said the agents were furious as they handcuffed him and brought him to the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who detained him in his wet clothes for two hours.

The U.S. Coast Guard released a statement claiming Lallemand was 65 yards south of the U.S. border and that he’d capsized because he had “ignored commands” and made an “abrupt” turn, hitting their vessel. “The actions of the operator of the Canadian vessel are currently under investigation,” the statement said.

But Darlene Fielding, Lallemand’s wife, suggested that there was reason to doubt that her husband had strayed into U.S. territory. “We were told afterward that their GPS may not have been working properly,” his wife wrote in a post on Facebook.

“We treat our pets better than they treated him,” Fielding told CTV News.

Meanwhile, Lallemand is warning other fishermen to keep their distance from the United States.

“I want the people to know and to be aware: Stay away from the border,” he told CTV News. “Even if it’s 500, 600 feet from there.”

It seems that some Canadians were already keeping their distance. In May, there was a 25 percent decrease in legal border crossings between the U.S. and Canada.

This incident comes amid strained relations with America’s northern neighbor, spurred by President Donald Trump’s additional 35 percent tariffs on certain Canadian goods and 25 percent tariffs on aluminum and steel imports. Not to mention Trump continues to childishly feud with the leader of the northern nation, which he previously insisted should join the U.S.

Transcript: Trump Savagely Mocked on “The View,” Enraging White House - 2025-07-25T11:09:15Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 25 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

New Gallup poll finds that President Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 37 percent. But guess what? The White House has figured out just how to get those numbers back up: by picking a huge fight with The View. This week, Joy Behar unleashed a striking takedown of Trump on the air, mocking him mercilessly for being jealous of Barack Obama. This enraged the White House, which responded with a bunch of name-calling and also with a veiled threat. This comes as Trump’s threats are escalating on many other fronts as well. We think the logic of this is worrisome. At some point, won’t Trump and the White House have to escalate? What happens then? The outright jailing of Democrats and TV critics? Salon’s Amanda Marcotte is one of the best out there at decoding MAGA’s various cultural hatreds, so we’re talking to her about all this today. Good to have you on as always, Amanda.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with what Joy Behar said on The View. This comes as Trump has been inventing fake reasons for threatening prosecution of Barack Obama and so forth. Listen to what Behar said about that.

Joy Behar (audio voiceover): So the thing about him is that he’s so jealous of Obama, because Obama is everything that he is not: trim, handsome, happily married, and can sing Al Green’s song “Let’s Stay Together” better than Al Green. And Trump cannot stand that. It’s driving him crazy. Jealousy is not a.… Green is not a good color.

Sargent: Amanda, the one thing Trump hates more than anything—and the one thing he really suspects to be happening—is him getting laughed at and ridiculed. Seems like Behar really drew blood there, doesn’t it?

Marcotte: Nothing hurts more than the truth, right? She’s right about Trump’s particular problem, but I think she hit on something that is bigger and deeper and maybe why he thinks this is going to connect with his base: So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves. I hate to go to Hannah Arendt this early in your podcast, but her writing about Eichmann in Israel really got a lot of people misunderstand the “banality of evil” comments. But she was basically talking about that—that he was a mediocre man and his only real pathway to importance, power, whatever, is to just go Nazi.

And I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call “the elites,” who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them. I don’t know if you saw, [but] Kash Patel was having FBI agents hooked up to polygraphs and was asking them if they were making fun of him behind his back. I think for the kinds of folks that listen to this show, that level of obsession is hard to wrap their minds around—but it really is obviously a huge part of the MAGA movement.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, I think that really explains why the responses to these types of things from the White House and MAGA are always oriented around belittling. That’s what happened here as well. The White House ran to their dutiful propagandists at Fox News, unleashed a furious statement. I’m going to read from it, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s no surprise that The View’s ratings hit an all time low last year.” Now Amanda, “The View” responded to this by saying their viewership is actually up, but note how for Trump and the White House, everything has to come back to this idea that Trump is in people’s heads. He’s in critics’ heads. He’s psychologically dominating them. You hear this garbage all the time. This megafantasy is so bizarre. They organize their entire emotional lives around the fantasy that liberals are psychically suffering torment because of Trump’s world-historical success. Can you talk about that weird tick on their part?

Marcotte: Yeah. And this is where the cultural insecurities that drive the movement blend well with Trump’s actual personality disorders. He’s a narcissist. He’s obsessed with the idea that he needs to be in people’s heads. But the problem is, he sucks. He’s not interesting. He’s not smart. He’s not anything. He’s just a mean, stupid, mediocre narcissist. So the only way he can get what he wants to be in our heads all the time—which unfortunately is true because he’s the president and we can’t ignore him—is to just be extremely awful and annoying. But getting attention from people by smacking them in the face over and over—it gets attention, but it doesn’t get the attention that he wants, which is admiration. And so he’s just in this constant hamster wheel of trying to get people to admire him when all he can ever do is.… And the admiration he gets from his base is not enough because those people, in his view, suck too. He’s really in an interesting trap.

Sargent: The problem with this is that he happens to be in control of the vast law enforcement bureaucracy under the federal government. I want to read another line from the White House’s statement to that effect: “She should self-reflect on her own jealousy of President Trump’s historic popularity before her show is the next to be pulled off air.” That’s a pretty straightforward threat. Retract the criticism of dear leader or we just might use our power to get your show canceled. Your thoughts?

Marcotte: Yeah, I really would like to ask people who voted for Trump because they bought the idea that they were standing up for free speech against cancel culture to reflect on the fact that the White House thinks they have the power to cancel television shows and that they’re going to use it. I assume most of those people will just make up excuses and come up with bizarre rationalizations, but this is straightforward. “Cancel culture” was mostly just people being mean to you on Twitter. And he’s actually literally threatening to cancel “The View” because they’re mean to him. And he can’t—but unfortunately, as we’ve seen with the Colbert report and all these other media companies making settlements because they have business interests before the White House, he’s not wrong to think that he might be able to induce ABC to cancel “The View” in order to get some business deal approved by the FCC or FTC or whatever agency they have business in front of.

Sargent: Well, this is certainly even more alarming when you listen to Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s response to this whole thing. After it all happened, Fox News had Carr on and asked him if “The View” is now going to face retribution. Listen to this exchange.

Bill Hemmer (audio voiceover): Is “The View” now in the crosshairs of this administration?

Brendan Carr (audio voiceover): Look, it’s entirely possible that there’s issues over there. Again, stepping back this broader dynamic, once President Trump has exposed these median gatekeepers and smashed this facade, there’s a lot of consequences.

Sargent: What’s amazing about that is that before this question and before this exchange, Fox literally played audio of Behar attacking Trump and then went right on to ask if the administration is now targeting “The View,” basically inviting them to say yes. Fox offered the opportunity to draw this direct link between criticism of Trump and the government punishing the view, and Carr basically said, Yeah, you know, we really might do it. This is really like state TV. What do you make of it?

Marcotte: I try to not be shocked and frightened by everything that the Trump administration does in part because, as you said, they’re trying to get in our heads and they’re trying to make us afraid. But I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me. It scared me. The First Amendment is about as ironclad as it gets. Now, I know that the Trump administration doesn’t think anything in the Constitution is ironclad. They’ve come after birthright citizenship, which is also as ironclad as it gets. But we should all.… If anybody has any doubts that Donald Trump wants to be a fascist dictator, and I think there is still a lot of people who would call that Trump Derangement Syndrome or something like that—this is what he’s doing. He is literally saying he has the power to cancel TV show and then he’s sending out one of his minions to say that they’re going to use the federal authority that exists for legitimate reasons to regulate advertising and business interests to silence somebody because she said something that hurt the president’s feelings. I want to remind people: All she said was he’s jealous of Obama, which anybody with two eyeballs and a brain can see.

Sargent: Although in fairness, by saying Obama’s slim and happily married, she did implicitly say that Trump is fat, which is true.

Marcotte: Yeah, and not too happily married if you’re promising [your wife] you’re going to rename the Kennedy Center after her because the Epstein situation is heating up and she’s probably mad all over again.

Sargent: What you just said before got me thinking. It does seem unlikely that a confrontation this big would happen without Trump’s explicit approval, doesn’t it? Which, if I’m right about that, then what we have to entertain is the possibility that it went down like this: either Trump saw “The View” and flipped out and got on the phone and said, Time to go out and threaten them—or someone, maybe an underling, saw an opportunity for Trump in this, flagged it for Trump, and said, What do you think, sir? Should we go after them? And he said, Absolutely, and put out Carr, the FCC chair, to do it as well. I think it probably went like that.

Marcotte: Yeah, I’m sure that Trump either watches “The View” or that was flagged for him. And Joy Behar is exactly the kind of woman that almost couldn’t be more well designed to just drive him up the wall because she is exactly the smart New York feminist that has always sneered at Donald Trump his entire life.

Sargent: Yeah, exactly. Well, I want to bring up this Gallup poll as the setup to the conclusion of this conversation. Extraordinary numbers. Trump is at 37 percent approval. On immigration, he’s at 38 percent, which is absolutely abysmal for his supposedly best issue. On the economy, he’s at 37 percent. On trade, he’s at 36 percent. And on the federal budget, he’s at 29 percent. That’s after this big, beautiful or big, ugly bill passed. These are awful numbers. Now it’s risky to rely on one poll, but we’re seeing a lot of other polls finding very similar things. This is historic levels of unpopularity we’re talking about here. What do you think?

Marcotte: Yeah, he’s weak right now. And it’s not just “The View” he’s lashing out at; it’s South Park. He basically said that they’re bad. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but the Rolling Stone reported that he’s been calling them fourth rate or something because they put out an episode that really went after Trump hard, including a pretty devastatingly funny penis joke about him. And also [they] just made him look fat and old and weak, what he almost certainly looks like with his clothes off. And they humiliated him, but I think he loves to lash out and have these feuds with celebrities like that. I think in his mind, that would be how he’d spend all of his time anyway: just getting pressed for yelling at Rosie O’Donnell, then Joy Behar, and South Park, and whatever.

I think he’s also especially sensitive to it right now because his polling numbers are really low and he’s weak—and he knows that when pop culture comes after you and you’re already weakened, it starts to actually reinforce the narrative with ordinary, especially low-information or not politically engaged voters, that you are a joke, that you suck. And that was one reason I started to really fear that Joe Biden was going to lose pretty early on because he was the butt of a lot of jokes on television and [comedy shows] and radio about how old and weak he was. And Trump knew it, which was why they leaned hard into that messaging. So the fact that Donald Trump is also the butt of very similar jokes—that he’s a petty narcissistic “manboy” who also is old and weak and out of touch—is going to create a snowball effect in terms of his reputation with ordinary people. He knows it, and he’s freaking out, I think.

Sargent: Yeah, and that makes me want to step back and get at the big picture here. I think something else is going on under the surface as well. Remember when Trump won the election, there was all this talk about how the culture was really turning toward Trumpism. He seemed to really have his finger on a pulse that that maybe others didn’t; that was the sense that was out there. But now his numbers are in the toilet. As I said, his approval on immigration is 38 percent in this new poll—abysmal. Clearly, the culture has turned against Trump’s immigration crackdown. The culture was supposed to rally behind authoritarianism and state-sponsored cruelties to immigrants and white nationalism and so forth. But that’s not happening.

Trump is reaching these settlements with universities, but they’re fundamentally not breaking as liberal cultural institutions. Trump is losing against some of the law firms. The culture is pushing back. We’re seeing this huge outpouring of communication from the grassroots and from the streets about the immigration stuff. The Long March through our institutions isn’t transforming them, and I think Trump and MAGA are hysterical about all that. They’re strong-arming “The View” in this ham-handed way, but they’re going to have to ratchet things up, right? What do you make of that overall reading?

Marcotte: I think that you’re right. I think they’re going to try to ratchet things up because they’re going to try to force what you can only get through persuasion, which is people to like you. This discussion is actually making me think...this second Trump election, I think, hit a lot of us even harder because it wasn’t a fluke—and it made us feel like this wasn’t the America that we thought it was. Right or left, I think most of us felt like Americans view themselves as independent, freedom-loving people.

Sargent: And not cruel.

Marcotte: Yeah, and not cruel. And I think that it was very disturbing to us to think that maybe a majority—even—of Americans are fine with being ruled by a fascist dictator who won’t even let you make dick jokes about him. It’s heartening to see that the polling shows that a lot of people.… What it was was they just weren’t paying close attention, but now they have no choice but to be reminded of who Donald Trump really is. And he’s worse this time around. That part—what I thought America always was actually turns out to be there. People are like, We don’t like ICE agents kicking in people’s doors. These concentration camps, what are they talking about? And I don’t think that cracking down on comedy and freedom of speech and Joy Behar is going to work for them. I think it’s going to make people mad because very fundamental to how Americans see ourselves is our ability to talk back to our leaders and make fun of them.

Sargent: I think what you’re getting at is really this toxic downward spiral for them. They really think that things like Alligator Alcatraz are going to be popular, right? Stephen Miller was absolutely 100 percent confident in doing things like lining the White House driveway with mugshots of Latinos and so forth would be a hit with the public—that he could provoke the press into criticizing it and that would prove that the press is elitist and out of touch. The opposite’s happening. They thought that they were going to win the argument over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is now back here in the United States and may end up getting freed. The toxic cycle seems to me to be that when things get worse for them, they’ve really got to ratchet up stuff to make the base happy because that’s what their foundation is. But then when they do that, it further alienates the middle in the way you’re talking about. I got to say that I think they’re just going to keep going, and we may be seeing actual arrests.

Marcotte: I think they have convinced themselves that the only real Americans are the people that voted for Trump, but even a lot of them don’t like what they’re seeing. And I think honestly [they] voted against Democrats more than they voted for Trump. They don’t consider people like you and me to be real Americans. They don’t consider even a lot of the Joe Rogan audience that just voted impulsively for Trump to even be real Americans. If I was going to guess, I would say the percentage of Americans that are just straight-up authoritarians is what it always has been, which was 25 to 30 percent. It’s never really been more than that. And I think the more Trump plays to that, the more he’s going to shrink it just down to those people.

What’s funny about that is they’re the least American of Americans. I’m not going to say they’re not Americans. They’ve always been with us, but they’re not in the spirit of America in my opinion.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, I think the bottom line is that Stephen Miller and Trump believed on a very deep level that there’s a latent authoritarian white nationalist majority in this country and there just isn’t.

Marcotte: Yeah, definitely not a majority. Not even close.

Sargent: Yeah, well, let’s hope it’s as small as it’s starting to look. Let’s hope it keeps shrinking because that’s our way out of this. That’s the only way out that I can see. Amanda Marcotte, great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me as usual. Great time.

Trump’s Budget Law Will Wreck Reproductive Health Care for Millions - 2025-07-25T10:00:00Z

Republican administrations and lawmakers have had Planned Parenthood in their sights for decades, but the new Republican spending law achieves their long-sought goal of defunding the reproductive health and abortion care organization. Between dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the targeting of Planned Parenthood, the measure, passed in Congress and signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month, will have devastating implications for low-income Americans’ ability to access reproductive health care of all kinds.

“We’ve seen this kind of provision for years, and they’ve just never been able to pass it, and now they finally have,” said Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “What makes this really unprecedented is just that it comes at the same time that we’re going to see millions of people lose access to Medicaid altogether.”

The law prohibits any reproductive health clinic that performs abortions and receives more than $800,000 in federal reimbursements from receiving Medicaid funding for one year. Although it does not mention Planned Parenthood by name, it effectively defunds the organization, given its high operating budget. Abortion rights advocates say that the law also may serve as a backdoor ban on the procedure even in states where abortion is legal; the law leaves nearly 200 Planned Parenthood clinics at risk of closure, 90 percent of which are in states where abortion is legal.

“It’s going to make it harder for everybody in those states—and everybody coming from other states where abortion has already been banned or severely restricted—to access care,” said Karen Stone, vice president of public policy and government relations at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Planned Parenthood is already prohibited by federal law from using Medicaid funds to provide abortions—with the exceptions of cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment—although 20 states use their own funds to cover abortion for Medicaid particpants. It instead uses those resources to provide other kinds of reproductive health care. According to KFF, Planned Parenthood clinics serve more than two million patients per year; moreover, roughly four in 10 Medicaid recipients reported receiving medical care from a Planned Parenthood facility at some point. Planned Parenthood health centers provide health care unrelated to abortion, including cancer screenings, contraception, and testing for sexually transmitted infections. If they are cut off from federal funding, it becomes more difficult for clinics to see those low-income patients who may be in need of these services because the health centers would not be reimbursed for the care they provide.

The passage of the law has sown “chaos and confusion” for Planned Parenthood health centers across the country, said Stone. This week, a federal judge blocked the total implementation of the provision related to Planned Parenthood, although the injunction only applied to certain clinics. The Trump administration has already appealed this decision, and it will likely wend its way to the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority has been overtly hostile to abortion rights.

The passage of the new law came just one week after the Supreme Court dealt another blow to Planned Parenthood, ruling that individual states could block the organization from receiving Medicaid funds for reproductive health services. The court’s conservative majority argued that, although Medicaid patients have the capacity to choose their own provider under law, they do not have the right to file lawsuits against states that wish to block funding for the group. This particular case was not centered on abortion but rather on access to contraceptive care, which the plaintiff was trying to obtain from a Planned Parenthood clinic; even in states where abortion is severely restricted, Planned Parenthood is associated with abortion by Republican lawmakers.

“What we saw from the Supreme Court, in my mind, was already worsening the deep divide between states that ban abortion, or states that are hostile to abortion rights, and states that protect abortion rights,” said O’Connor. By defunding Planned Parenthood, O’Connor continued, the new Republican law builds upon the decision by the Supreme Court by making abortion more difficult to access across the country—not just in red states.

If clinics are closed in states where abortion is legal, it would also make it more difficult for out-of-state patients traveling to seek an abortion to obtain that procedure. “It would flatten out the differences between states, and also put a lot more pressure and challenge on places that remain open, because they’d be serving even more people as the population of clinics declines,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and an expert on abortion law and history.

Another element of uncertainty lies in timing. Because the provision is written to be in effect for one year, it would need to be extended by Congress for it to continue to be in effect. “There may be various Band-Aids and stopgaps that people can use to cover the difference in the short term, but that would not work or be sustainable in the longer term, so that’s another wild card,” continued Ziegler. For example, while donors could step in to help defray costs and alleviate funding shortfalls to cover immediate needs, those funding streams may not be tenable over the long term; moreover, it would put pressure on abortion and reproductive health care funds intended to assist low-income patients in receiving care that might otherwise be too expensive.

A June report by the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank focused on reproductive rights, found that other federally qualified health centers would not be able to easily replace the care currently provided by Planned Parenthood affiliates. In 2020, Planned Parenthood served roughly one-third of the contraceptive clients that visited family planning centers funded through the social safety net. If Planned Parenthood were to be excluded from Medicaid reimbursement, Guttmacher found that federally qualified health centers would need to increase their capacity to provide contraceptive care by 56 percent.

Moreover, in the longer term, the law’s cuts to Medicaid will exacerbate these challenges when certain provisions are implemented in 2028. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the new law will result in 10 million people losing health coverage over the next decade. This in turn would devastate their ability to access reproductive health care and health centers’ capacity to serve them.

“Medicaid, for low-income folks, is critically important to their ability to access contraception, STI testing—all of the whole range of sexual reproductive health care services,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at Guttmacher. “That also then has this ripple effect on abortion [care]. So, as you start cutting off people’s access to certain kinds of health care services and clinics’ ability to serve them, those clinics end up potentially closing.”

In 2023, more than 21 percent of women aged 15 through 49 received health care coverage through Medicaid, and more than half of all women living below the federal poverty level relied on Medicaid coverage. The cuts to Medicaid are also likely to have a significant effect in rural areas, where nearly one in four people rely on that program for health care coverage. Meanwhile, the uncertain future of Planned Parenthood clinics would exacerbate issues with obtaining care: According to Planned Parenthood, 60 percent of health centers at risk of closure are located in medically underserved areas, rural communities, and areas with a shortage of primary health care professionals.

“We’re just going to see this ripple effect of people not having coverage and not necessarily being able to get health care, and at the same time, you put a target on the clinics themselves that are there to serve those populations,” said Friedrich-Karnik. “So it’s just going to be this huge void, and you’re going to be left with millions of people unable to access the health care that they need.”

The Supreme Court Has Hit Rock Bottom - 2025-07-25T10:00:00Z

The Supreme Court’s most recent term may be over, but its work on behalf of President Donald Trump continues. The justices announced on Wednesday evening in Trump v. Boyle that they would stay a lower court order that had blocked Trump from firing the three Democratic appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

As usual, the court’s action took place on the shadow docket, where it handles emergency appeals and motions. This time, the court’s conservative majority greatly expanded that docket’s power to decide legal and constitutional questions. In theory, shadow-docket actions are procedural or administrative in nature and shouldn’t be seen as a decision on the actual merits of a case.

That understanding no longer holds weight. Trump’s dismissals violated a federal statute passed by Congress that only allows the president to fire CPSC commissioners for cause. The Supreme Court previously ruled in the 1934 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that Congress could lawfully extend for-cause removal protections to the heads of certain agencies. Congress has not repealed the law in question. The Supreme Court also has not overturned Humphrey’s Executor outright.

Except, well, now it effectively has. “Although our interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits, they inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases,” the court wrote in its unsigned order. “The stay we issued in [Trump v.] Wilcox reflected ‘our judgment that the government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.’”

You morons, the court might as well have said to lower court judges. Why are you applying our precedents to these cases? Why aren’t you telepathically discerning the law of the land from these unsigned orders where we barely explain ourselves? Why aren’t you treating our procedural moves as equivalent to a fully briefed decision on the merits? Don’t you know we want Humphrey’s Executor dead and buried?

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for his part, was the only member of the majority with a somewhat intellectually consistent position on how to handle this case. He argued in a concurring opinion that, in addition to issuing a stay, the court should have simultaneously agreed to take up the case on the merits because the case centered on whether one of the high court’s precedents should be overturned.

“In those unusual circumstances, if we grant a stay but do not also grant certiorari before judgment, we may leave the lower courts and affected parties with extended uncertainty and confusion about the status of the precedent in question,” he argued. (Certiorari before judgment is a rarely used procedure where the court reviews a district court’s ruling without waiting for an appeals court to weigh in.) He noted that waiting for the issue to “percolate” in the lower courts made no sense because lower courts, by definition, cannot overturn a Supreme Court ruling.

Justice Elena Kagan noted in a short but stern dissent that the conservatives had wrought major changes to the structure of the federal government with only a cursory explanation. “The majority’s sole professed basis for today’s stay order is its prior stay order in Wilcox,” she wrote, referring to the court’s prior decision in May to allow Trump to dismiss members of the National Labor Relations Board. “But Wilcox itself was minimally (and, as I have previously shown, poorly) explained.”

The three-sentence explanation the court gave in Wilcox, Kagan argued, was insufficient to justify Wednesday’s order. “So only another under-reasoned emergency order undergirds today’s,” she continued. “Next time, though, the majority will have two (if still under-reasoned) orders to cite.” At that point, Kagan noted, the court’s reasoning would be “turtles all the way down.” (Kagan also wrote the dissent in the Wilcox case; she appears to be the liberal justices’ point person on this issue.)

The immediate impact of Wednesday’s order is that Trump will be able to dismantle the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which will, in turn, make it easier for companies to keep unsafe and dangerous products on the market. This is not a good thing for Americans, of course, but it is a great boon to those companies that want Americans to keep buying their unsafe and dangerous products. In the longer term, Wednesday’s ruling is a further sign of how the Supreme Court is getting worse during Trump’s second term: more lawless, more arbitrary, less judicial, and less respectable.

Here is how the federal government has generally worked within living memory. Congress generally passes laws to provide the scaffolding for federal agencies to regulate the national economy. In theory, Congress could pass a new law every time it wants to approve a cancer drug, or ban a pesticide, or do any of the other mundane but vital tasks that come with governing a modern industrialized economy. Instead, it created agencies to regulate these things within the bounds that Congress authorizes.

Most of these agencies operate directly under the president. Starting in the early twentieth century, Congress also began to create agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission to tackle more complex economic issues, investing them with a greater degree of power and autonomy. Presidents have the power to appoint the heads of these agencies, as the Constitution requires, but Congress set limits on when and how they can fire them to give those agencies a measure of independence.

The first real legal test of these limits came in 1933 when the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired William Humphrey, one of the FTC commissioners appointed by Calvin Coolidge, over his qualms about the New Deal. Humphrey died of a stroke in early 1934, and the executor of his estate sued the federal government over his salary. If Humphrey’s firing was illegal, the estate would have a claim on the money that the government owed to him.

The Supreme Court unanimously sided with Humphrey’s estate—a striking result given the court’s later divides over the constitutionality of the New Deal. The court limited Myers v. United States, a 1927 ruling where then–Chief Justice William Howard Taft suggested a much broader removal power for the president, and held that because the FTC and similar agencies exercised “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers, Congress could limit the executive branch’s power over them.

This worked out pretty well for the United States, which enjoyed a high standard of living and unprecedented economic prosperity throughout the twentieth century. You would not know this if you only listened to the conservative legal movement, which often describes these agencies and their powers in ominous and near-apocalyptic terms. In a 2020 case, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed in a concurring opinion that “the decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people.”

Humphrey’s Executor was 85 years old at that point, and the republic somehow managed to survive until then. It would be more accurate to say that the precedent was a threat to corporate interests since it preserved the independence of their regulators from political interference. (The court often gets these things confused.) Selia Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the case in which Thomas wrote that concurring opinion, narrowed Humphrey’s Executor by allowing Trump to fire the CFPB’s director. That decision, in turn, paved the way for the Trump administration to dismantle the agency altogether when it retook power earlier this year.

At the center of the court’s approach to these agencies is a fundamental misunderstanding about the separation of powers and the early republic. In his majority opinion in Selia Law, Roberts explained the Framers’ mindset through his own hyper-presidentialism. He sketched a vision of the Constitution where Congress was a potential fount of despotism and the presidency was the bulwark of American democracy.

“The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that ‘differences of opinion’ and the ‘jarrings of parties’ would ‘promote deliberation and circumspection’ and ‘check excesses in the majority,’” he wrote, quoting from the Federalist Papers. “By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities. As Madison put it, while ‘the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be … divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.’”

“The Framers deemed an energetic executive essential to ‘the protection of the community against foreign attacks,’ ‘the steady administration of the laws,’ ‘the protection of property,’ and ‘the security of liberty,’” Roberts continued, quoting again from various parts of the Federalist Papers. “Accordingly, they chose not to bog the Executive down with the ‘habitual feebleness and dilatoriness’ that comes with a ‘diversity of views and opinions.’ Instead, they gave the Executive the ‘[d]ecision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch’ that ‘characterise the proceedings of one man.’”

I do not doubt that the Framers intended the presidency to be a potent and vital branch of government. But Roberts’s understanding of the founding era is impossible to square with even a modicum of historical context. The Framers did not write the Constitution in a vacuum; they gathered for the express purpose of fixing the flaws in the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, there was no president and no national system of courts, and its legislature had few powers that could only be exercised unanimously.

The Constitution, by its very nature, created a far more powerful executive and judiciary than what existed under the Articles. Something is always infinitely greater than nothing. Far from weakening the legislative branch, the Framers made it a substantially more powerful institution than its predecessor under the Articles or the revolutionary-era Continental Congress. They imbued it with the power to tax and regulate interstate commerce. They transferred to it the states’ powers over trade, copyright, naturalization, and diplomacy with Native American nations. It has the power to create and destroy any federal court other than the Supreme Court, and it can limit even the high court’s jurisdiction to a significant degree.

Congress can remove any executive or judicial officer from power with a majority vote in one chamber and a two-thirds vote in the other, while the president and the courts cannot remove a single senator or representative from their duly elected office for any reason whatsoever. It can disband and defund the president’s armies and agencies at will. It could add a hundred justices to the Supreme Court on a whim. All of these powers are just the explicit, undisputed ones at its command. If the Framers actually thought the legislative branch was a “unique threat to individual liberty,” they didn’t show it when they actually wrote the Constitution.

I digress slightly. Even against this backdrop, Roberts refused to kill Humphrey’s Executor altogether. He distinguished between the CFPB, which had a single director, and agencies like the FTC or the SEC that had a single multimember commission. Whether that conclusion is consistent with historical practice is debatable, as Kagan noted in her dissent in that case, but at least it is an intelligible legal and constitutional argument.

Now the court has abandoned such things. Its apparent goal is to destroy (or, as in these particular cases, make it easier for other constitutional actors to destroy) federal regulatory agencies as they have existed for nearly every American’s lifetime. It does not care that Congress has created them or that presidents signed them into law; it refuses to even acknowledge the elected branches’ real interests here. In Wednesday’s order, as I mentioned earlier, the majority explained that it thought “the government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.”

Kagan noted in her Wilcox dissent that this framing got the issue exactly and deliberately wrong. “On the latter side, the relevant interest is not the ‘wrongfully removed officers,’ but rather Congress’s and, more broadly, the public’s,” she explained, referring to the two fired NLRB appointees. “What matters, in other words, is not that Wilcox and Harris would love to keep serving in their nifty jobs. What matters instead is that Congress provided for them to serve their full terms, protected from a president’s desire to substitute his political allies.”

Nothing sums up how hackish and unjudicial the court’s approach has been more than its Federal Reserve exception in Wilcox. Many court-watchers had thought, especially after Selia Law, that the Supreme Court’s current roster would not overturn Humphrey’s Executor in its entirety, in large part because there would be no way to logically maintain the for-cause protection for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors if it did. Few things could more fundamentally disrupt and weaken American capital markets—and, by extension, the American economy—than giving a president direct control over the Fed’s monetary levers. Imagine if Trump could set interest rates like he sets tariff rates.

The NLRB members warned as much in their filings in the Wilcox case. So the conservative majority squared the circle by declaring, almost by fiat, that its implied overruling of Humphrey’s Executor did not apply to the Federal Reserve. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the court’s unsigned order said without further elaboration. Its sole legal citation for this point was a footnote in Selia Law where the court had assumed, purely for the sake of argument in response to a dissent, that the Fed could claim a “special historical status.”

This is one step above simply writing, “Why? Because the court said so, that’s why.” Kagan could barely contain her disgust in her Wilcox dissent. “And so an assumption made to humor a dissent gets turned into some kind of holding,” she wrote. “Because one way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey’s) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception). If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler—and more judicial—approach would have been to deny the President’s application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey’s.”

All of this represents a fundamental shift in how the Supreme Court operates. The court could have allowed the CPSC and NLRB officials to stay in office to preserve the status quo during litigation, heard their cases on an accelerated briefing schedule, and overturned Humphrey’s Executor while ruling against them on the merits. The court’s critics could have disagreed with the court’s ultimate reasoning, but they could have found no fault in how it operated to get there. Instead, the conservative justices simply did what they wanted to do because they could.

What a dizzying sensation that will be for any American raised in our civic faith. Covering the court for the last six months feels less like covering a court of law steeped in the Anglo-American legal tradition and more like covering the Soviet Union’s politburo or Iran’s Guardian Council from afar. The Supreme Court’s most impactful work this year has not been to decide actual cases and controversies on the merits, or to fairly balance the equities on shadow-docket questions, but to enforce a certain ideological vision upon the American constitutional order as quickly, as bluntly, and as hackishly as it can.

I do not write lightly that the central theme coming from the Supreme Court as of late is that Trump’s own vision for the country supersedes the laws that Congress has actually written—to provide for-cause removal protections, to create a Department of Education, to provide anti-torture protections for prospective deportees, and so on. As Humphrey’s Executor’s fate shows, that vision might even outrank the decisions of the high court itself when the justices agree with it. That raises an unsettling question: If the justices don’t respect their own precedents or procedures, why should anyone else?

The Epstein Files Can’t Save the Democrats - 2025-07-25T10:00:00Z

I sometimes wonder whether the advent of global warming might revive the climatological determinism of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron of Montesquieu, popularly known as the Enlightenment philosophe Montesquieu. Here in the global north, our ideas about governance seem to get shakier as the planet grows hotter, and there’s a cyclical aspect, as well. Notions that take hold in the months of July and August are apt to look silly come September. The current presumed centrality of the Epstein files to the fate of the Democrats is, I believe, a case in point.

Montesquieu argued in L’Esprit des Lois (1748) that despotism prevailed in warm climates because hot weather depleted those human qualities necessary to sustain enlightened governance. There’s much for a modern audience to object to here. Climatological determinism can be used to justify ugly prejudices against less developed nations. It also jibes poorly with early history, when advanced civilization flourished in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America long before it did in Europe. Democracy, meanwhile, was born in Athens, where the temperature seldom falls below 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

And yet.

Sometimes I think Montesquieu may have been onto something when I consider that the developed world is simultaneously growing both hotter and more despotic—and therefore (among many other difficulties) ever less competent to address climate change. The advent of air conditioning improved civilization in many ways, but it hasn’t improved democracy—not lately, anyhow. And at no time of year do Americans’ ever more sun-blasted crania entertain screwy notions as they do during high summer. Those of us in the press have long recognized this (going back to 1861) by calling July and August “the silly season.” Does our ever-warming planet make it sillier still?

These (possibly overheated) thoughts are prompted by news coverage suggesting the Democratic Party has found its way out of the wilderness by clobbering Donald Trump with the many salacious tendrils of the Epstein scandal. To which I say, Oh, please. I never thought the Democrats were so deep in the wilderness as conventional wisdom dictated. But setting that aside, exploiting MAGA divisions over releasing investigative files concerning the late plutocrat pedophile Jeffrey Epstein won’t solve the party’s problems.

To be clear, I don’t fault the Democrats for making hay out of the Justice Department’s failure to release the Epstein files. By spreading far-right conspiracy theories about a nonexistent Epstein client list, FBI Director Kash Patel, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi made their bed. Now they must lie in it.

Here’s Patel before he assumed office: “What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority. You can’t get the list? ... Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

Here’s Bongino: “What do Clinton, Obama officials, big money leftists, a former Prime Minister of Israel—why do they want to make this Jeffrey Epstein story go away so bad?”

And here’s Bondi: The list is “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Trump was more cautious, because he socialized with Epstein for years—a well-documented reality that MAGA bizarrely ignores—but Trump fed the conspiracizing too. In 2019, Trump reposted a tweet after Epstein hanged himself in jail that suggested Bill Clinton had something to do with Epstein’s death. In 2024, Trump pledged to release the Epstein files.

Now that these same conspiracy-mongers say there is no client list, they’re finding out the hard way that those geeked up on conspiracy theories don’t appreciate being told, “Nothing to see here.”

Trump is mentioned repeatedly in the Epstein files (Bondi warned Trump about that in May), though not in any seriously compromising way, apparently. That’s no surprise. Bill Clinton is surely mentioned too—again, not likely in any terribly compromising way. Trump’s presence helps explain why Bondi decided not to release the Epstein files, even though she knew sitting on them would incur MAGA’s wrath. Congressional Democrats are right to demand that Bondi release them, and to try to force House votes on the matter, because it makes congressional Republicans look stupid, most especially Mike Johnson. Johnson initially called on Bondi to “put everything out there and let the people decide,” but later he sent the House into early recess to avoid a vote about it.

But the benefit of these political theatrics is limited by the apparent reality that full release of the files would be irresponsible. That’s because (according to an FBI memo) the files “include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography.” The files also include “victim names and likenesses, physical descriptions, places of birth, associates, and employment history.” It’s in nobody’s interest to release such material, and it’s hard to imagine the government ever will.

The Democrats recognize this problem, and they’re signed on to excluding such material from public release. But conspiracists won’t be appeased by partial release, and at some point MAGA crackpots will blame both Democrats and Republicans for suppressing evidence. Also, although Trump’s reputation might be tarnished somewhat by the release of any additional proof that he socialized frequently with Epstein, so might Clinton’s. Would the MAGA cult even notice that Trump’s name is mentioned? Its reaction to The Wall Street Journal’s scoop that Trump wrote a vaguely naughty letter to celebrate Epstein’s 50th birthday suggests not. MAGA made it an occasion to rally around Trump, because MAGA hates the press even more than it hates Epstein.

What all this adds up to is that Democrats have little interest in continuing to press Bondi to release the Epstein files. They will try to pass a bill forcing her hand only so long as they know they won’t succeed. They’ll stop if any danger arises that they’ll prevail. For these reasons, I don’t expect to hear much about Epstein and his files after the House reconvenes September 2.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there are plenty of other ways to attack Trump. Trump is doubling the budget deficit and throwing 10 to 15 million people off Medicaid so he can give rich people a $4 trillion tax cut. Trump’s rounding up immigrants indiscriminately, the vast majority of them with no criminal convictions, so he can meet an arbitrary deportation quota of one million people per year. In the process, Trump’s eliminating jobs for almost as many native-born Americans (2.6 million) as foreign-born ones (3.3 million). Trump’s tariffs are bringing inflation back. Did I mention Trump is a convicted felon who’s using the presidency to enrich himself?

The Epstein files were a decent political target for a couple of dog-day weeks, but when the weather turns cooler there’ll be more important stuff to talk about. Montesquieu would understand.

JD Vance’s “Intellectual” Spin on the Racist Great Replacement Theory - 2025-07-25T10:00:00Z

Trump’s latest proposal to expel asylum-seekers to the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau continues the pattern of performative cruelty already well established by the illegal deportations, the establishment of a grifty concentration camp on American soil, the declaration that people previously granted legal entry are no longer entitled to be here, the grotesque mistreatment of foreign visitors and former aides to the U.S. military, and other outrageous actions by the present administration. It is already evident that Trump’s interlocking immigration schemes will drive up inflation in the United States and reduce economic output. In spite of Trump’s vow to go after “the worst of the worst,” most of those being deported and incarcerated have never been accused of any crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. Meanwhile, the need for a genuine, long-term policy to deal with immigration, asylum, and the existing undocumented population goes almost entirely unmet. So what is really behind the needless and public exercises in sadism that pass for immigration policy?

The short answer is a version of the “great replacement theory”: the idea that immigration is part of a deliberate plot to destroy the United States by replacing “real” or “true” Americans with aliens. The point of Trump’s immigration policies is to satisfy the desire, on the part of Trump’s base as well as nativist ideologues in his administration, to see pain inflicted on undesirables and their supposedly malevolent supporters—liberals, “the woke”—within the country.

The great replacement theory and its variants have a long history, and they have always been in the wrong. The nineteenth-century physician Horatio Robinson Storer, an early anti-abortion campaigner, lamented that “abortions are infinitely more frequent among Protestant women than among Catholic” and wondered whether America’s western and southern territories would be “filled with our own children or by those of aliens?” The sociologist and eugenicist Edward Alsworth Ross argued that Japanese immigrants should be banned from entering the country and coined the term “race suicide.” In Charlottesville in 2017, the neo-Nazi crowd chanted, “The Jews will not replace us.”

But this idea does have a polite version, an intellectualized variant, articulated at the kind of think-tank gatherings where people in suits and ties with advanced degrees from highly respected institutions can pretend that their dehumanizing and racist ideology is not, in fact, dehumanizing and racist.

By virtue of his Yale law degree and his apparent desire to make the “intellectual” case for a corrupt, kleptocratic, cronyist regime based on nationalist demagoguery and unhinged conspiracism, JD Vance has now presented himself as an exponent of the “thoughtful” version of replacement theory that now underpins the immigration policies of the present government.

In his speech accepting the vice presidential nomination, JD Vance casually sidelined the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address: that the United States is a nation dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. The purpose of America, he suggested, doesn’t have much to do with inalienable rights, or the right of people to govern themselves.

Rather, said our vice president, America “is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” At the Claremont Institute, he made the point even clearer. American identity as “purely an idea,” he said, is “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation” and would “reject a lot of people that the [Anti-Defamation League] would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.”

America’s Founders, he further argued in his Claremont speech, understood “that our shared qualities, our heritage, our values, our manners and customs confer a special and indispensable advantage.”  “Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” he added, “They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church.”

Vance is using a sleight of hand here. Of course social bonds form when people share things in common! Of course a nation consists of a group of people with a shared history and future! Those are just truisms. They say nothing about how we define the purpose and meaning of America. Maybe some other countries can define themselves according to the church their grandparents attended—but that’s not the America that Lincoln and Jefferson, among countless others, established. We the people have agreed to promote the general welfare not by conducting a survey of the views of some subset of ancestors who happened to be present at the Civil War, but by making laws through representative government based on the idea that all people are free and equal before the law.

Vance is a clever ideologue—Yale must count for something—and so he includes a pro forma nod to those who “gave their life to build the kind of society where his family can escape racial theft and racial violence.” But those people who gave their lives on the pro-slavery side of the Civil War, along with a great number of the people attending JD Vance–approved churches today—the same people that Mr. Vance says have a “helluva lot more claim to be American” than any recent immigrants—were in fact fighting to promote racial theft and violence.

To get an idea of what Vance’s version of the great replacement ideology looks like in practice, you need only look at the Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter feed. In one post, the words “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” appear above a painting, titled New Life in a New Land, by Morgan Wistling, of a young family in a covered wagon; in another post, the words “Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth defending” appear above the Manifest Destiny–themed painting American Progress by John Gast. Most of the rest are images of people of color whom they identify as criminals.

Versions of the Vance ideology show up throughout American history, and it has always been for the same malicious intent: to divide the “real” Americans from the ones who don’t belong.

The intent becomes clear the moment you ask the speaker who the “real” Americans are. Are they the descendants of the Mayflower? That’s just silly; those descendants would have represented a tiny minority even at the time of the American Revolution. Are the real Americans white? That’s not just racist but stupid; most Black Americans today have ancestors who lived in America significantly longer, on average, than white Americans, and their contributions to American culture and identity are immeasurable.

Would the real Americans be Christian? Consider that many Protestants in the early republic vehemently condemned the religion of America’s other Christian sects and would have viewed the quarter of the American population that identifies as Catholic as fake Christians. Are Latinos really American? Much of the Southwest, along with California, belonged to Mexico until 1848—and the largely white settlers coming from the existing states were the immigrants.

One story that these reactionary nativists tell is: Sure, there were different immigrant groups that originated in Europe and elsewhere, but somehow the “good” ones assimilated and became honorary members of the white Christian Pilgrim tribe. But that isn’t the way it happened at all.

When outsiders came in, pretty much wherever they came from, nativists greeted them with contempt. In the late nineteenth century and beyond, members of the Pennsylvania Dutch, for example, experienced rampant discrimination. Irish immigrants encountered employment ads that read, “No Irish need apply.” The early and mid-nineteenth century was marked by deadly anti-immigrant riots. The Southern and Eastern Europeans who poured in during this period were generally not considered “white.”

Later, when their descendants decided that they were white after all, what this really meant is that they were not Black. It did not mean that they had become copies of the Pilgrim tribe. On the contrary, American culture diversified and flourished.

The Know-Nothings were also keen on keeping “un-American” groups out—which would have meant keeping all those Catholics out of JD Vance’s home state of Ohio. The America Firsters of the 1930s liked the Nazi idea of keeping American racially pure—which is why the Nazis in Germany loved them back.

As a rule, the movements that rely on the great replacement theory and its variants involve an unhealthy dynamic between two distinct groups in society. To put it simply, it’s a story that a small number of big people push on a large number of little people to convince them that there is something in the system that works for them. Consider that all the riches of the slave system were concentrated in the hands of a tiny slaveholding elite, but the impoverished white majority could at least bask in the illusion that they belonged to a superior racial group. The stakes are very different now, but the process is still the same. Essentially, nearly all the benefits of the Trumpian economic policy will fall into the hands of a tiny financial elite, but the broad mass of Trump supporters can find happiness in the illusion that they will not be replaced by some inferior group—or at least they will be expected to do so.

It is not necessary for the elites who propound the noxious, anti-American ideology of the great replacement to actually believe in it for this kind of counterrevolutionary movement to flourish. They just need a critical mass of people in their thrall to believe in it. It should be noted here that Vance is married to a second-generation Indian American. Since she, along with her parents and his children, presumably share just a little bit less of our blessed American history, one has to wonder if he also draws the necessary inference that they are less American than he is.

We can’t know what’s in JD Vance’s heart. What matters is that he seems to believe that, to keep himself and his associates in power, the U.S. government needs to ship asylum-seekers off to random islands and engage in an ever-expanding menu of sadistic acts. Meanwhile, none of our actual immigration issues are resolved and the rest of us are simply forced to pay the price. Our rights are eroded, our economy is damaged, and our culture diminished—all to keep a corrupt regime in power and fund a massive welfare program for the cronies running America’s very own gulag archipelago. 

Trump Hit by Harsh Takedown on The View, Igniting White House Fury - 2025-07-25T09:00:00Z

A new Gallup poll finds that President Trump’s approval has dropped to 37 percent. But the White House has figured out how to get those numbers back up: by picking a huge fight with The View. This week, Joy Behar unleashed a striking takedown of Trump, mocking him mercilessly for being jealous of Barack Obama. This enraged the White House, which responded with name-calling and a veiled threat. Which got us thinking: Doesn’t the logic of the situation dictate that Trump’s authoritarian threats will of necessity escalate? We talked about all this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a good decoder of MAGA’s cultural hatreds. We discuss why Behar’s broadside was so perfectly aimed at Trump’s soft underbelly, why Trump’s only way forward may be more arrests, and how this whole saga shows that Trump thought the culture was moving his way—but it’s not, driving him into a fury. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Jerome Powell Calls BS to Trump’s Face as He Spouts Made-Up Numbers - 2025-07-24T21:36:53Z

Fed Chair Jerome Powell called out President Trump for lying about the cost of renovations to the Federal Reserve headquarters. 

Trump has been purposefully trying to increase the cost of the renovations so that he can blame Powell for mismanaging funds, as a pretext for firing him. 

“It looks like it’s about $3.1 billion, it went up a little bit. Or a lot,” Trump said to the press, while standing next to Powell wearing matching hard hats. “So the $2.7 is now 3.1.” 

“I’m not aware of that,” Powell interjected, looking visibly concerned. 

“It just came out,” Trump replied. 

“I haven’t heard that from anybody at the Fed,”  Powell said.

“It just came out,” Trump repeated, unfurling a piece of paper he had folded in his suit pocket and handing it to Powell. 

“This came from us?” 

“Yes. I don’t know who does that,” Trump said, pointing at the paper. 

“You’re including the Martin renovation, you just added in a third building is what that is. That’s a third building,” said Powell. 

“Well I know, but it’s a building that’s being built.” 

“No, it was built five years ago. We finished Martin five years ago.” 

“It’s part of the overall work.” 

“It’s not new.” 

“So we’re gonna take a look, we’re gonna see what’s happening, and it’s got a long way. Do you expect any additional cost overruns?” Trump asked.

“Don’t expect ’em. But we’re ready for ’em. We have a little bit of a reserve that we may use, but no, we don’t. We expect to be finished in 2027. We’re well along, as you can see.” 

Trump has targeted Powell for some time now, as the Fed chair has repeatedly refused to lower interest rates to help the president. Trump has made it known that he wants Powell fired, and this number fudging was purely antagonistic. At least Powell was there to fact-check him.

Trump: It looks like it’s about $3.1 billion

Powell: I’m not aware of that.

Trump: It just came out

Powell: You just added in a third building

Trump: It’s a building that’s being built

Powell: It was built five years ago. pic.twitter.com/aVZaZ9BD3T

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 24, 2025

RFK Jr. Captured in Old Photos Partying With Jeffrey Epstein - 2025-07-24T21:33:38Z

The commander in chief is not the only administration official with ties to the notorious late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

As President Trump is dogged by a scandal surrounding his relationship with—and perceived lack of transparency in the case of—the disgraced financier, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also facing renewed scrutiny for his Epstein connections.

Making the rounds again are photos of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at social gatherings with Epstein, which previously surfaced amid Kennedy’s short-lived 2024 presidential campaign.

In one photo, Kennedy is pictured chatting with Epstein at an event at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in March 1994. Beside them is Kennedy’s late second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who, he’s said, “had some kind of relationship with [now-convicted Epstein accomplice] Ghislaine Maxwell.”

In another, Kennedy appears to be seated at a table with Epstein at a 1994 fundraiser for the New York Academy of Art.

Kennedy also shares with Trump the distinction of appearing in Epstein’s “little black book,” which contains the names of various high-profile contacts.

Further, Kennedy has publicly admitted to having flown twice on Epstein’s infamous jet “before anybody knew about … his nefarious issues.”

He told Fox News’s Jesse Watters that he did so once in 1993, hitching a ride to Palm Beach to “visit [his] mom over Easter” and again, one or two years later, “to go fossil hunting” in South Dakota. Both times, he said, he was with family.

In March 2024, Kennedy was roundly mocked online for defending his interactions with Epstein by, oddly, listing numerous other figures accused or convicted of horrendous acts with whom he’s also had run-ins, such as Harvey Weinstein, O.J. Simpson, and Bill Cosby.

That bizarre remark aside, the health secretary’s past connections to Epstein still were seemingly not as deep as the president’s, who had a storied friendship with the disgraced financier. In fact, Epstein once told journalist Michael Wolff that he “was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

Still, Kennedy’s closet is full of skeletons, to use his own words. When Vanity Fair reported on a former babysitter’s sexual assault allegations against Kennedy, he did not deny them. Instead, the then-candidate said, “I am not a church boy.… I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that, if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

MAGA Rep Gives Scummiest Defense of Trump’s Friendship With Epstein - 2025-07-24T20:37:51Z

There’s nothing wrong with being friends with child sex traffickers, according to Representative Tim Burchett.

Speaking with Fox News on Thursday, the Tennessee Republican tried to brush off Donald Trump’s reportedly cozy relationship with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein by offering his own slimy admission.

“They knew each other, they ran in the same circles,” Burchett told the network. “It’s just like me, I know a lot of dirtbags myself.”

Burchett dismisses Trump being friends with Epstein: "It's just like me. I know a lot of dirtbags myself." 😳 pic.twitter.com/mgxKMxytOb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2025

Trump’s allies have been working overtime to explain away the MAGA leader’s various ties to Epstein, as pressure mounts within his base to make public the records pertaining to the government investigation into Epstein and his sex-trafficking empire.

Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he knew Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

Earlier this month, Burchett offered more convenient cover for the Trump administration after the Justice Department directly contradicted its leader, Attorney General Pam Bondi, on the existence of Epstein’s supposed “client list.” Speaking with NewsNation, Burchett said that he believed the client list was “destroyed” by the Biden administration and no longer existed.

When pressed why Bondi would not have said so if that was the case, Burchett responded that it was because “she doesn’t have any proof of it.”

GOP Senator Admits He Killed Epstein Resolution to Give Trump “Cover” - 2025-07-24T20:29:23Z

Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin just admitted that congressional Republicans are voting against efforts to release the Epstein files in full because they’re trying to give President Trump “cover.”

On Thursday, Mullin and Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego each put forth a resolution on the Epstein files that they claimed was transparent. While Gallego called for the DOJ to release all files in full without caveat, Mullin called on the department to release “all credible information” related specifically to Epstein’s sealed legal proceedings. 

“I’m sure this would be handled just like any other thing [the Democrats] have tried to go after like the baseless impeachments. Or the bases—baseless special counsels. Or the unbelievable amount of charges they tried to file against the president,” Mullin said while objecting to Gallego’s resolution. “I’m sure this would be handled the exact same way. What we’re simply wanting to do here, is give [Trump] cover.”

Mullin blocking Gallego resolution calling for release of the Epstein files: What we’re simply trying to do is give [Trump] cover pic.twitter.com/QzxffE821Z

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 24, 2025

What exactly do Trump and his administration need cover for? And what is the current GOP obsession with disqualifying Democrats’ calls for an investigation into Epstein on the grounds that former President Biden didn’t do it? That is a weak, lazy argument. Trump was also a former president, and Epstein killed himself during his first term.  

Mullin dismissed Gallego’s resolution on the basis of it being political theater. But it remains unclear just what about it is so theatrical. Gallego’s resolution attempted to get answers on a case that the Republican Party has absolutely bungled. Trump and his Cabinet broke a massive promise on these files, and it’s no wonder his base is angry. But Mullin is using technicalities and old excuses to prolong the process and provide cover for his dear leader. 

“All of us want transparency. We want to know actually what happened, the American people want to know what’s happened, but what [Senator Gallego’s] resolution does, is it actually is a blurred line between the separation of powers,” Mullin said. “When we start dictating to the Department of Justice what they can and can’t do, there’s a clear separation of power. We’re the legislative branch. That’s what we do. We make laws. We can’t dictate other branches on what they must and how they must do their job.…  A.G. Bondi, and the president has both already called on the judges to release this information. 

“What my resolution is simply saying, is we agree with the president, we agree with A.G. Bondi, on the judges and calling upon the judges to release it,” Mullins concluded. 

Gallego responded. 

“Let me explain to the American people what just happened. My colleague from Oklahoma refused to join me in calling on the DOJ to release all the Epstein files. Instead he offered his own resolution calling on the courts to unseal the records. When I asked if we did both, which I am asking to do both—I wanna call for transparency, and of course we could ask the Justice Department and the courts—he’s also gonna object.” 

This same conflict occurred a week ago, when Mullin also chalked Gallego’s efforts up to theater. 

MAGA Pulls Bonkers 180 on Ghislaine Maxwell to Help Trump - 2025-07-24T19:33:53Z

In an apparent effort to get out ahead of Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony, Donald Trump’s media allies have decided to saddle up beside the prolific sex trafficker.

The Justice Department is reportedly meeting with Maxwell on Thursday and Friday, ahead of her scheduled deposition with the House Oversight Committee on August 11. The interviews follow weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for more transparency regarding the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted prior statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed client list.

Offering Maxwell as fodder to Trump’s hungry followers is a fascinating carrot-and-stick option to alleviate some of that tension, but convincing her to talk would almost certainly require some kind of deal—an option that pro-Trump conservative media networks started to imagine this week.

On Monday, Newsmax host Greg Kelly had already started to dabble in the new media line, suggesting on air that Maxwell didn’t deserve her 20-year prison sentence and openly embracing the idea that the Epstein associate could be wrongly convicted.

“And then he’s got that girlfriend, Ghislaine—Ghislaine Maxwell,” Kelly said. “Right? She’s in jail right now for, like, 40 years or something crazy.” Maxwell is eligible for release in July 2037.

“And maybe she deserves it. Maybe she doesn’t. Again, not a very popular thing, but we’ll take a look,” Kelly told his viewers, even questioning if the child sex abuser had been legally tried in court. (She was.)

“She just might be a victim. She just might be,” Kelly said.

“How do you defend yourself?” he continued. “This is in the height of #MeToo. Does that sound right? Does that sound—maybe it’s legal.”

The 56-year-old former Fox & Friends co-host, who was investigated in 2012 on his own rape charges, also aired a clip of former Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz, who claimed that Maxwell “shouldn’t be” behind bars.

“She is really serving Jeffrey Epstein’s sentence after he committed suicide,” Dershowitz said. “There was no one else to prosecute … so they went after her, and they sentenced her to a sentence that would have been appropriate for Epstein but not at all appropriate for her.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse as Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and associate.

“She deserves to be out,” Dershowitz said, which Kelly repeated to his viewers.

Wow — “She just might be a victim” 🤔

As Trump prepares to cut Ghislaine Maxwell a deal to lower her sentence so she helps get him out of this scandal, @NEWSMAX host @gregkellyusa is positioning Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking accomplice as a “victim”

There is no bottom pic.twitter.com/tlnJ1aLp87

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) July 24, 2025

But Kelly wasn’t the only conservative personality who had bought into the unsavory angle. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk—who capitulated to Trump last week when the MAGA leader ordered Kirk to stop discussing the matter as it riled his base—claimed that deposing Maxwell was “definitely” something that is “worthy of praise” and “encouragement.”

“Maybe she wants immunity, maybe she wants some sort of protection, I don’t know,” Charlie Kirk said on his show Tuesday. “We just want the truth.… Some people say, ‘Can we trust Ghislaine Maxwell?’ Probably, but also probably not.”

But not everyone on the right has bought in. Laura Loomer claimed last week that it wouldn’t be long “before some lobbyists try to cook up a possible pardon campaign” for the imprisoned sex offender. And Whitney Webb similarly warned that the Trump administration’s renewed interest in Maxwell was suspicious, claiming that scapegoating the Epstein associate would be the perfect way “to both avoid releasing the bulk of Epstein documents still held by the government and still seem like they are pursuing ‘justice’ in the case.”

“This could also pave the way for the ‘Pardon Ghislaine’ movement,” Webb, a prominent conspiracy theorist, wrote on X Tuesday, theorizing that Maxwell would only unveil the names she’s instructed to so that she doesn’t end up like Epstein.

Meanwhile, Trump was almost undoubtedly in Epstein’s universe. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department had notified Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

White House Rages After South Park Episode of Trump in Bed With Satan - 2025-07-24T19:14:42Z

South Park’s latest episode parodied Donald Trump as a vain, thin-skinned bully. In a splenetic statement responding to the portrayal, the White House did nothing to dispel that description.

White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers on Thursday bashed the show and the political left in statements to Entertainment Weekly and other outlets.

“The Left’s hypocrisy truly has no end—for years, they have come after South Park for what they labeled as ‘offense’ content, but suddenly they are praising the show,” Rogers wrote. “Just like the creators of South Park, the Left has no authentic or original content, which is why their popularity continues to hit record lows. This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

The offending cartoon episode ridiculed Trump’s personality, as well as his failures and iniquities since taking office. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone also took aim at the show’s own parent company, Paramount, for its two capitulations to Trump: canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and settling with Trump over 60 Minutes’s editing of its 2024 interview with Kamala Harris.

Stone and Parker also delivered some lower blows, depicting Trump with a “teeny-tiny” penis and portraying the president literally in bed with Satan (a recurring character on the show).

“President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history—and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak,” Rogers’s statement continued.

But, as the Trump administration has bungled the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein (another topic South Park parodied in its episode), Trump’s supposed “hot streak” already seems thoroughly derailed.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Trump’s Justice Department in May informed the president that his name appears repeatedly in the Epstein files. (After that notice, the DOJ announced it would not release additional files and Trump deemed the case a “hoax,” deriding his supporters who remain interested in it.)

This is to say Trump’s White House already has much on its plate. But it’s apparently always willing to defend the ill-humored president’s honor at the drop of a hat, deepening the impression that he can’t take mockery in stride.

Tulsi Gabbard Is Pushing Debunked Russian Propaganda to Help Trump - 2025-07-24T18:41:16Z

If you thought Tulsi Gabbard’s claims that Hillary Clinton was taking a “daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers” while she was secretary of state sounded a little dubious, you’d be right.

The national intelligence director parroted the conclusions of Russian spies at a White House press briefing Wednesday, saying that Moscow had seen evidence of Clinton’s “psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.”

But what Gabbard didn’t seem to remember was that these same documents were reviewed and debunked by the FBI years ago, as pointed out Thursday by independent journalist Marcy Wheeler.

In 2018, the Department of Justice released the results of an FBI investigation into Clinton’s leaked emails and other related Russian intelligence reports that they had obtained. Parts of that report had remained classified until this month.

The FBI analysis finds that much of the Russian intelligence the bureau looked at was “objectively false,” and they never found the stolen documents on which the Russians’ conclusions were based. The 2018 report even says that it’s not clear “if such communications in fact existed.”

In Wednesday’s press conference, Gabbard quoted a different report from 2020—one conducted by the Republican-led House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that analyzed, in part, the DOJ’s 2018 report to assess the “manufactured Russia hoax.”

The House committee report plucked details from the Russian intelligence without acknowledging the context that the DOJ had already discovered: that what the Russian spies had written was just not true.

Alongside conspiracy theories about Clinton’s temperament and reliance on tranquilizers, Gabbard also said the report’s findings provided proof that former President Barack Obama had attempted a “coup” by alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election—interference that’s been verified by multiple other investigations, including one by then-Senator and fellow MAGA Republican Marco Rubio in 2020.

Obama’s office called the allegations “bizarre.”

Whether Gabbard’s uncritical repetition of Russian intelligence is a continuation of her sympathetic attitude toward Russia that members of her own party have described as “traitorous,” or just an attempt to distract from the Epstein chaos, we may never know. But we do know who we can thank for clearing up this conspiracy: Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, whose tireless work to declassify the 2018 report for his own ends has, in this case, worked in Clinton’s favor.

Trump’s EPA Is Now Flouting the World’s Highest Court - 2025-07-24T17:46:44Z

Sometimes a coincidence of timing is everything. The Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly drawn up plans to scrap a two-decade-old finding that underpins the government’s ability to regulate planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. The plan, first reported on by The Washington Post, will also dismantle any remaining limits on greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. Although it’s likely get hung up in court, the Trump administration’s attempt to demolish this foundational policy shows just how committed the White House is to trashing any and every climate protection. Hours after the news first broke, the International Court of Justice in the Hague—the world’s highest court—ruled that governments can be held legally responsible for climate inaction. Theoretically, that is, the United States could now be held liable for dismantling greenhouse gas regulations—and made to pay up.

“The failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system” from greenhouse gas emissions, wrote Yuji Iwasawa, the president of the ICJ, “may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that state.” While the unanimous, first-of-its-kind ruling is not legally binding, it lays the groundwork for countries to sue one another for failing to reduce emissions and regulate polluters, and establishes a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment” as a human right. Legal consequences for violating that right, the court wrote, could include “full reparation to injured states.”

Unfortunately, there’s ample reason to be skeptical about the power of ICJ rulings. Last year, another unprecedented advisory ruling from the court found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its expanding settlements there, violate international law. Earlier in 2024, the ICJ ordered Israel to restrain its assault on Gaza, and, in a separate case brought by South Africa, found that Palestinians have “plausible rights to protection from genocide.” Then–Secretary of State Antony Blinken—who frequently touted his department’s commitment to defending the so-called “rules-based international order”—rebuked that ruling, calling South Africa’s case “meritless.” Israel’s U.S.-funded destruction of Gaza and expansion of Israeli settlements into the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have continued ever since, and the U.S. has continued to defend those actions.

Whether on Palestine or climate, the U.S. is consistently happy to flout international law to further its own interests and those of its allies. Like its proposal to annex Gaza, the Trump administration’s war on climate policy is obviously heinous. On the latter front, at least, the Biden administration should get some credit for attempting to strengthen greenhouse gas regulations Republicans have now put on the chopping block. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the U.S. is indifferent to suffering—and willing to exacerbate it—only when Republicans are in charge.

For nearly as long as the United Nations has been discussing climate change, the U.S. has shot down legally binding agreements to act on it. The Paris Agreement itself was built to accommodate U.S. complaints over the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty signed by the Clinton administration in 1997 that was then unanimously denounced by the U.S. Senate. There are countless examples of America’s undermining of global efforts to acknowledge the rich world’s outsize responsibility for the climate crisis. Democrats create elaborate legal justifications for why they shouldn’t be made to phase out fossil fuels or help poorer countries adapt to and cope with the climate crisis. Republicans generally outright deny that that crisis is happening, and refuse to engage with multilateral processes to deal with it. The Democratic position on the matter might best be summed up by an offhanded comment Obama-era climate envoy Todd Stern reportedly made at climate talks in South Africa in 2012: “If equity’s in, we’re out.” The Republican position is a bit clearer: We’re out either way.

Consider the testimony of the United States in the ICJ case, submitted in 2024 by then–State Department legal adviser Richard Visek. After several pages touting America’s supposedly sterling record of fighting climate change, commitment to international law, and progress in corralling other countries to stem their emissions, the U.S. announced its opposition to the stance the court eventually adopted. “A recognition that anthropogenic climate change can adversely affect the enjoyment of human rights,” Visek wrote, “does not mean that States have international human rights obligations to mitigate” greenhouse gas emissions. In perfect legalese, Visek added that, while the U.S. “looks forward to working with other States to exchange views toward the development of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment … any such right remains a matter of lex ferenda [future law] rather than lex lata [current law].”

News of the ICJ ruling may or may not have crossed the desk of Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA. His—and MAGA’s—take on climate is rather blunter than Visek’s, but the positions are not misaligned. “The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas,” Zeldin said when announcing his plans for the greenhouse gas finding back in March. The “endangerment finding” in his crosshairs—which, in 2009, found that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants—has been a longtime target for MAGA world and its donors. The proposal to overturn that finding hasn’t been made public, and is almost certain to face court challenges. But the administration’s specific argument in this case rests on the idea that excess greenhouse gas emissions are not harmful because rising temperatures present no danger to public health and welfare.

Much of the outrage among climate advocates has historically centered on many Republicans’ refusal to recognize the reality that climate-fueled disasters are killing people in the U.S. and abroad. Ultimately, though, whether Zeldin and the rest of the Trump administration actually believe in the harms posed by greenhouse gases matters a lot less than the White House’s very real plans to make them worse. And at the end of the day, belief isn’t worth much in the other direction, either. When it comes to international affairs, especially, Democrats have asked the public to take their beliefs—in the rules-based international order, human rights, and climate action—at face value, even as they work to undermine all of the above when it suits their own interests and those of their allies.

The trouble with so much climate discourse orbiting around questions of belief and denial is that it can leave actions out of the equation. Whether it makes its case in high-minded legalese or MAGA bluster, a country that stands by while Israeli soldiers bomb hospitals and gun down civilians waiting in bread lines—and furnishes them with ammunition for both—is a country that will keep expanding fossil fuels as millions at home and abroad are displaced and killed by climate-fueled disasters. Whatever the people in charge believe while that happens is irrelevant. With any hope, the ICJ ruling can open the door to holding Zeldin, the Trump administration, and whoever takes their place accountable for what they’ve done.

American Car Companies Are Pissed About Trump’s Japan Trade Deal - 2025-07-24T17:21:22Z

U.S. automakers are reporting that Trump’s trade deal with Japan is favoring Japanese automakers over them in yet another reneging on the president’s so-called “America First” agenda.

Trump initially announced a 25 percent tariff on all foreign car imports in April. But on Tuesday, he announced a trade deal that lowered tariffs to 15 percent for Japanese automobiles and car parts. Meanwhile, U.S. car companies still have to deal with the 50 percent tariffs Trump placed on the steel and aluminum they need to actually build their product.

“We need to review all the details of the agreement, but this is a deal that will charge lower tariffs on Japanese autos with no U.S. content,” said Matt Blunt of the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis.

The United Auto Workers union has stated it is “deeply angered” by Trump’s deal with Japan.

“For decades, Japanese automakers have exploited open access to the U.S. market while failing to do right by American workers. Now, instead of addressing the problem, this deal gives them another break—at the expense of the very companies and workers that built the American auto industry into the global standard for good jobs and world-class products,” the statement read.

“A better deal would have held Japanese automakers to the same standards U.S. workers have fought for at GM, Ford, and Stellantis.… If this becomes the blueprint for trade with Europe or South Korea, it will be a major missed opportunity,” the UAW statement continued. “We need trade deals that raise standards—not reward the race to the bottom. This deal does the opposite.”

The president is folding to the countries he tried to strong-arm a few months ago, all while hurting domestic industry in the process. Trump plainly prioritizing Japanese cars over American ones is also likely to hurt working-class people who supported him in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, where auto manufacturing plays a crucial role in the economy.

Hulk Hogan, Enemy of Free Press and Rabid Trump Fan, Dies at 71 - 2025-07-24T16:31:35Z

Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, has died at 71. Audio obtained by TMZ revealed that the retired professional wrestler suffered cardiac arrest at his Florida home on Thursday morning.

His manager Chris Volo confirmed to NBC Los Angeles that he died in his home surrounded by loved ones.

Hogan will be remembered for his flamboyance in the wrestling ring—but Mr. America also made notable forays into politics and forever altered the media landscape.

Who could forget Hogan’s speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention?

“When they took a shot at my hero, and they tried to kill the next president of the United States,” Hogan said, tearing off his outer layers to reveal a Trump-Vance tank top. “Enough was enough, and I said, let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again!”

Wrapping up the rousing speech, Hogan referenced one of his WWE catchphrases: “Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?” Trump then blew the wrestler a kiss.

Also during the 2024 campaign, the wrestler threatened to bodyslam Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and made fun of her biracial identity, asking, “Is Kamala a chameleon? Is she Indian?”

And of course, back before the Trump era of American politics was in full swing, Hogan helped take down Gawker Media. After the publication leaked a sex tape of Hogan and a friend’s wife, the wrestler, bankrolled by ring-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, sued Gawker for $100 million in damages. The lawsuit eventually ended in a settlement that tanked the publication, in a significant blow to the free press.

Hogan’s Gawker suit led to the public disclosure of a recording of the wrestler on a racist tirade, in which he freely used the n-word.

“I guess we’re all a little racist,” Hogan said in the video, taped in 2007, and used the n-word to discuss his suspicions about his daughter’s sex life.

The scandal led the WWE to fire and distance themselves from Hogan, who called the remarks “the biggest mistake of my life” and was reinstated into the Hall of Fame in 2018.

This story has been updated.

Trump Team Pissed as L.A. Juries Refuse to Indict ICE Protesters - 2025-07-24T16:28:44Z

It seems the city that rose up to protect its neighbors from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is similarly protective of its protesters—especially when they’re being tried on trumped-up charges.

Donald Trump’s federal prosecutor in Los Angeles is struggling to get indictments for protesters arrested in anti-ICE demonstrations earlier this summer, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Grand jury indictments only require probable cause that a crime has been committed—a lower bar than the standard for a criminal conviction. And even so, out of the 38 felony cases filed by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, only seven have resulted in indictments.

In a recent case, the grand jury refused to indict a protester accused of attacking federal law enforcement officials. And Trump’s prosecutor was not happy: The Times described “screaming” that was “audible” from outside the grand jury room coming from Essayli.

According to legal experts interviewed by the Times, it’s incredibly rare that a grand jury wouldn’t indict in cases like these—which indicates weak cases brought by an attorney whose goal may be to promote Trump’s anti-immigration agenda rather than go after real crime.

Meghan Blanco, a former federal prosecutor in L.A., said the cases are “not deserving of prosecution.” Some may have even been based on faulty intel from ICE agents, the supposed victims of the alleged crimes.

Either “what is being alleged isn’t a federal crime, or it simply did not happen,” she told the Times.

In June, thousands of Angelenos took to the streets to protest ICE raids that saw the federal anti-immigration officers arresting people attending mandatory check-ins at a federal building and snatching people from Home Depot. Though the protests were largely peaceful, some escalated as ICE and the Los Angeles Police Department used tear gas and “less-lethal” munitions on the crowd.

Community organizer and protester Ron Gochez said at the time that it was “brutal violence” but that “what they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people would resist.”

To the Times, former prosecutor Carley Palmer said that Essayli’s struggle to get his cases through was “a strong indication that the priorities of the prosecutor’s office are out of sync with the priorities of the general community.” Yet again, the Trump administration has likely underestimated L.A. residents’ appetite for resistance.

Ted Cruz Admits Trump’s Treason Plot Against Obama Is a Bust - 2025-07-24T15:46:46Z

On Wednesday night, Senator Ted Cruz cast cold water on MAGA’s burning zeal to lock up former President Barack Obama for treason.

Joining Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Cruz acknowledged that the chances Obama is prosecuted for treason are slim to none.

In recent days, Donald Trump’s White House released evidence it claimed proves a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration to rig the 2016 and 2020 elections. The so-called evidence claims that Obama manufactured intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election “to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”

The president has seized on the purported findings, calling Obama guilty of “treason” and saying, “It’s time to go after people.” Over the weekend, the president took to Truth Social to share memes about imprisoning Obama. Obama’s office has dismissed the allegations, suggesting they’re “a weak attempt at distraction” from the Epstein scandal.

Dashing MAGA dreams of Obama behind bars, Ingraham on Wednesday said, “He’s not going to be prosecuted for treason. It’s not going to happen.”

Though Cruz floated other plans to go after Obama officials, he agreed. “He’s not going to be prosecuted in all likelihood for treason.”

“At all,” Ingraham added.

Cruz cited not the weakness of Gabbard’s madcap accusations—which he called “very important, troubling new information”—but the fact that the Supreme Court greatly expanded the powers of the presidency in its 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, which, per Justice Sonia Sotomayor, makes the individual holding the highest office a “king above the law.”

Cruz’s point is similar to one made on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which reminded Trump that the Supreme Court’s ruling applies to all presidents, not just to himself.

“Leave aside the narrow definition of ‘treason’ in the Constitution,” wrote the Journal’s editorial board. “Has Mr. Trump so quickly forgotten his victory at the Supreme Court in Trump v. U.S.? The Justices held 6-3 that a President can’t be prosecuted for exercising ‘core constitutional powers,’ and he has ‘presumptive immunity’ for ‘official acts.’ This surely includes Mr. Obama’s supervision of spy agencies.”

Trump Is Really Asking People to Venmo to Pay Off the National Debt - 2025-07-24T15:38:24Z

The Treasury Department wants you to Venmo it to help with the $36.65 trillion national debt.

On Wednesday, NPR’s Jack Corbett pointed out that there was an option on Pay.gov, the Treasury’s online payment platform, where Americans could go to throw their Venmo dollars at the gargantuan national debt. You can also use PayPal. The page is titled “Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt.”

The Treasury has run this program for years, and people have donated $67.3 million since 1996, a minuscule amount of the total debt. But the options to use Venmo or PayPal are new.

This is an absolute joke. Leaders on both sides of the aisle harangue Americans every day about the specter of the national debt while throwing billions of dollars at funding the military, funding Israel’s military, and funding Trump’s brutal immigration campaign. To even create this option when the majority of the country is working/middle class appears deeply unserious and tone deaf.

And even if people were feeling generous, it would be virtually impossible to make a dent in the debt given its current size and the fact that it is set to keep growing, and fast.

MAGA Rep Makes Stunning Admission About Ghislaine Maxwell Testimony - 2025-07-24T15:32:48Z

The best way to stop sex trafficking? Let the people who did it out of prison, if Republican Representative Tim Burchett is to be believed.

House Republicans may ask the Department of Justice to reduce convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentence in exchange for information about the so-called “Epstein files.”

Burchett acknowledged that Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and right-hand woman Maxwell is a “liar” and a “dirtbag,” but said that he and his colleagues do have some “leverage” to ensure she tells the truth.

“One thing we’ve got holding over her head is if we find out she lies, she goes back to her original sentence. That’s looking at lifetime. If she’s looking to parlay this into reducing her sentence, then we could have some leverage there,” Burchett said to the Daily Caller on Wednesday.

Luckily for Burchett, no one has ever lied in order to avoid jail time.

Maxwell is slated to testify before Congress in August from a Florida prison, where she is currently serving 20 years for crimes related to her time building Epstein’s pedophile network, and trafficking and abusing women and girls.

Regardless of what Maxwell reveals in her testimony, MAGA will likely be hanging on her every word: Donald Trump’s base has been clamoring for more information on Epstein ever since the president promised to release damning details on the powerful people who associated with the sex trafficker—and then backtracked in July, with Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that the so-called “client list” did not exist.

Since then, Trump has scrambled in vain to quell his base’s rage. He’s attempted different tactics: calling the investigation a “hoax” perpetuated by Democrats, saying that those still interested in the case were “bad people,” and eventually changing tacks to placate his base by requesting the release of grand jury testimony from Epstein’s first trial in 2006. (A judge has denied this request.)

The president purportedly didn’t even know that his DOJ was bringing in Maxwell to assist in the investigation, saying Tuesday that the move “sounds appropriate” but stressing that the Epstein fallout is “sort of a witch hunt.”

Trump’s seeming indifference to the potential bombshells Maxwell could drop speaks to the mindset of a man who, according to the The Wall Street Journal, was told by his attorney general in May that he’s mentioned in the Epstein files.

With each passing day, more information emerges on Trump’s relationship with Epstein, which the financier characterized as one of close friends. The Journal published a report of a “bawdy letter” that Trump sent to Epstein as part of a book for the latter’s 50th birthday—a book that the victims’ lawyer confirms exists. And back in 2002, Trump said to New York magazine that he had known “Jeff” for 15 years, calling him a “terrific guy” who likes “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

GOP Voters Are Blowing Up Congressional Phone Lines Over Epstein - 2025-07-24T15:23:21Z

Pressure is still mounting against conservatives to release the Epstein files.

On Tuesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene described the demand for transparency as “overwhelming,” noting that the call volume related to Epstein at her office has been “extremely high.”

“Since I became a freshman member of Congress—this is fascinating—I’ve tracked the calls to my office,” Greene told reporters. “I have a whole spreadsheet my staff maintains. They track all the calls coming in from the district and from outside the district. We categorize the issues, from past ones to current ones.

“The call volume on Epstein has been almost 100 percent—district and out of district—since this started. They’re demanding transparency,” she said.

Greene noted that many of her colleagues are “getting beaten up at home in their districts” over the Epstein files, as well.

The Georgia Republican has joined hands with a dozen other lawmakers in a bipartisan effort—H.Res.581, dubbed the Epstein Files Transparency Act—to make the Epstein case files publicly available.

Introduced by Representative Thomas Massie, who has a habit of actually standing up to Donald Trump, the bill aims to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices,” relating to child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

The text of the bill specifies the release of flight logs, travel records, the names of individuals and government officials connected to Epstein’s “criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings,” the names of corporations or organizations tied to Epstein’s trafficking networks, potential immunity deals or sealed settlements, as well as “internal DOJ communications.”

And if conservative lawmakers were prioritizing transparency, perhaps they would have pushed through a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files instead of blocking it last week, before the chamber recessed. The final vote was 211–210: Just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

Even if the new bill passes, Americans will have to wait a while for answers. Amid the Epstein-induced federal frenzy, House Republicans decided to start the lower chamber’s summer recess early, ushering lawmakers back home and away from the Capitol while the Trump administration flails in response to the mounting scandal.

A Quinnipiac poll published last week found that 63 percent of voters disapprove of the way that the Trump administration has handled the Epstein case, which has so far included the Justice Department backtracking on the existence of certain documents and the president chalking up Epstein’s notoriety to a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

Columbia Just Gave Trump a Truly Terrifying Amount of Power - 2025-07-24T14:48:47Z

Columbia University has handed the reins of its admission process to the White House.

One of the oldest educational institutions in the country agreed Wednesday to pay the Trump administration $200 million to settle multiple investigations and reinstate billions of dollars’ worth of federal grants.

But the agreement comes with an alarming clause that will deliver granular admissions data on every Columbia applicant to the Trump administration, effectively allowing the White House to decide if the school has admitted enough historically advantaged demographics—or needs to face further investigations.

The school, according to the settlement, must provide admissions data “consistent with 34 C.F.R. § 100.6 and similar regulations” to an independently appointed resolution monitor, alongside analysis of which students were rejected or admitted on the basis of their “race, color, national origin, grade point average” and test performance. The form will be due to the White House by October 1 of each year.

That data will also, subsequently, be made public, according to the settlement details.

But even abiding by the new system won’t save Columbia from future power trips by the White House.

“Nothing in this Agreement prevents the United States (even during the period of the Agreement) from conducting subsequent compliance reviews, investigations, or litigation into Columbia’s future admissions practices to ensure that those practices are in full compliance with all applicable laws and not a proxy for prohibited discrimination,” the settlement reads.

The university, however, did not interpret the contents of the agreement the same way, minimizing the impact of sharing applicants’ sensitive details with the government.

“Critically, Columbia retains control over its academic and operational decisions,” the school wrote in an email blast to students. “As part of the settlement, the University has not admitted wrongdoing and does not agree with the government’s conclusion that it violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”

Columbia has kowtowed and bowed its head repeatedly to the White House since the Trump administration made an example of it earlier this year, repeatedly attacking the institution over its response to a pro-Palestine protest that took place on campus in 2024. The Trump administration has accused Columbia of engaging in antisemitism for apparently failing to subdue the protests as aggressively as Trump would have liked.

On Tuesday, Columbia said it would be disciplining dozens of pro-Palestine protesters who participated in the occupation of Butler Library in May, which saw multiple arrests at the time. A pro-Palestine group on campus, Columbia for Palestine, said that 80 students had been informed of their punishments, and noted that the move marked “the most suspensions for a single political protest in Columbia campus history.”

Last week, Columbia further capitulated to the Trump administration, adopting a new campus-wide definition of antisemitism that conflates hatred of the Jewish people with general opposition to Zionism. It has also said it would no longer engage with the pro-Palestinian group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, permitted federal immigration officials into its buildings, and allowed the administration to attempt to deport foreign students who support the free state of Palestine, though those cases have encountered judicial roadblocks.

As per the terms of the settlement arrangement, Columbia will also institute a new liaison to the Jewish community in University Life.

South Park Eviscerates Trump and His “Teeny-Tiny” Manhood - 2025-07-24T14:24:59Z

South Park used its first new episode in two years to openly ridicule President Trump and Paramount, its own parent company. The episode, titled “Sermon on the Mount,” parodies much of the president’s first six months, portraying him literally in bed with Satan.  

In the episode, the parents of South Park protest against Trump’s insertion of prayer into their schools, and Trump threatens to sue them for $5 billion. Jesus himself then appears and asks the parents to simply capitulate.

 “I didn’t want to come back and be in the school, but I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount,” Jesus says. “You guys saw what happened to CBS? Well, guess who owns CBS? Paramount. You really want to end up like Colbert? You guys got to stop being stupid.… He also has the power to sue and take bribes, and he can do anything to anyone. It’s the fucking president, dude.… South Park is over.”

The episode also depicts Trump with an abnormally small penis, which he harasses Satan with while they’re in bed together. 

South Park drops its first $30M episode and it’s absolute chaos 😂🔥 pic.twitter.com/EcJglLbM1z

— lordoflolz (@lordoflolz1) July 24, 2025

This episode is particularly audacious, as it comes after Paramount made two major concessions to Trump by ending The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and settling for $16 million because he didn’t like the way 60 Minutes edited an episode with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. This also comes as South Park Digital Studios announced its own $1.5 billion licensing deal with Paramount. 

“Hard to think of anything more defiant in media & entertainment recently than Trey Parker & Matt Stone going scorched earth on Paramount in a South Park season premiere on the heels of netting a $1.5 billion deal with the very same company,” Puck senior correspondent Dyland Byers wrote on X. 

Epstein Victims’ Lawyer Reveals How to Find Trump’s Birthday Letter - 2025-07-24T14:22:06Z

Bradley Edwards, who’s represented hundreds of survivors of sexual abuse by notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, affirmed that Epstein’s 50th birthday book—which, The Wall Street Journal reported, includes a lewd message from Donald Trump—exists. He also shared exactly where one can find it.

Asked about the book by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Wednesday night, Edwards replied, “Yes, I know that the executors of [Epstein’s] estate are in possession of that book, and I think that after they turn it over, it should probably be set in the Smithsonian as an artifact at this point in time.”

Edwards had said moments earlier that anyone interested in seeing the book could simply reach out to Epstein’s executors, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, and, “If they didn’t just voluntarily turn over the book out of fear of reprisal, Congress could issue a subpoena to their attorneys at Patterson or at Troutman—those are the two law firms. I know those attorneys. They would turn the book over immediately. Nobody would have to guess. There wouldn’t need to be a lawsuit. There wouldn’t have [to be a] wait to [do] discovery. You would immediately have the answers. You could flip to the page. Is there a letter, is there not a letter?”

O’Donnell observed that the House Oversight Committee, which on Wednesday voted to subpoena the Justice Department for the Epstein files, might be interested in acting on Edwards’s tip. With confidence, Bradley said the lawyers of Epstein’s executors would comply “immediately,” citing his close working relationship with them.

Democratic Representative Rho Khanna, a member of the Oversight Committee who has led charges to force the Epstein files’ release, told MSNBC shortly thereafter that Edwards’s revelation is a “bombshell.” He indicated that the House Oversight Committee would look to subpoena Epstein’s estate for the birthday book, which, he added, would be much easier than subpoenaing the DOJ.

If Epstein’s birthday book is shared with the public, and it indeed includes Trump’s letter as reported by the WSJ (complete with its cryptic message and sketch of a naked woman), it would be a massive embarrassment for the president, who is currently suing the Journal for defamation over the story, which he asserts is “a fake thing.”

And such embarrassments are piling up for Trump in recent days, as his former friendship with Epstein is coming more clearly into view amid his administration’s scandalous lack of transparency on the deceased financier. On Wednesday, the Journal dropped another whopper, reporting that Trump’s Justice Department informed the president in May that his name is in the Epstein files—seemingly explaining the president’s outbursts and his team’s foot-dragging over the Epstein affair.

Trump Explains His Main Issue With AI—and It’s Nuts - 2025-07-24T14:07:16Z

President Donald Trump loves artificial intelligence, calling it “one of the most important technological revolutions in the history of the world” at an AI summit in Washington Wednesday.

But he’s got one big problem with the so-called revolutionary tech: its name.

“Everyone around the globe is talking about artificial intelligence…. ‘Artificial,’ I can’t stand it. I don’t even like the name,” he said. “You know, I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out please? We should change the name.”

Over laughter, he clarified: “I actually mean that.”

Perhaps the president is taking a page out of naturopathic health crusader and vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book. The health secretary too has a noted dislike of anything artificial, and has mandated that companies remove chemical food dyes from their products as part of his Make America Healthy Again initiative. (Though interestingly, Kennedy has displayed a disturbing willingness to rely on shoddy AI slop at the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Later Wednesday, Trump signed a trio of executive orders that would deregulate the AI industry and “[get] rid of woke,” as he said in his remarks. One order would ban federal agencies from contracting with AI companies that have so-called “ideological biases.”

We’ve been down this road before: After Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok partly blamed Musk and Trump for deaths in the aftermath of the Texas floods, X updated the chatbot to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.” This resulted in a chatbot that spewed antisemitic dogwhistles and white supremacy and started calling itself “MechaHitler.”

Not quite at Grok level, the president has different nomenclature in mind for the tech.

“I don’t like the name ‘artificial’ anything because it’s not ‘artificial,’ it’s genius. It’s pure genius,” Trump said.

Trump’s choice of name isn’t surprising. The president has long had an affinity for the word genius, calling himself a “very stable genius” in a 2018 tweet about his mental capacities. He also just signed the GENIUS Act, the first major cryptocurrency legislation.

If only he were still in cahoots with former buddy Musk, we could perhaps expect to see the debut of Grok 5: Stable Genius Intelligence.

Trump’s Relationship With Epstein Further Exposed in Bombshell Video - 2025-07-24T13:10:14Z

Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had a personal relationship, in Epstein’s own words.

In resurfaced footage of the pedophilic sex trafficker’s 2010 deposition, Epstein confesses to socializing with Trump—but refuses to answer whether or not they spent time with children.

“Have you ever had a personal relationship with Donald Trump?” the interviewer asked.

“What do you mean by ‘personal relationship,’ sir?” Epstein responded.

“Have you socialized with him?” the interviewer clarified, to which Epstein said, “Yes, sir.”

“Yes?” the interviewer pressed.

“Yes, sir,” Epstein repeated.

But Epstein wasn’t able to answer with such clarity when it came to darker topics.

“Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?” the interviewer asked.

After a brief pause, Epstein failed to answer in the negative, notably under the threat of perjury. Instead, he sidestepped the question completely.

“Though l’d like to answer that question, at least today l’m going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir,” he said.

🚨🚨🚨 Watch Jeffrey Epstein plead his Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights when asked if he and Donald Trump socialized with females under the age of 18 during a 2010 deposition:

Q: Have you ever had a personal relationship with Donald Trump?
A. What do you mean by "personal… pic.twitter.com/JyM5LYJ0C4

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) July 24, 2025

There is mounting evidence that Trump and Epstein had a remarkably close relationship, though the president has vehemently denied any such connection since his administration became consumed by an internal scandal over Epstein’s alleged “client list.” A Quinnipiac poll published last week found that 63 percent of voters disapprove of the way the Trump administration has handled the Epstein case, which has so far included the Justice Department backtracking on the existence of certain documents and the president chalking up Epstein’s notoriety to a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

Transcript: “Furious” Trump Spiraling Over Epstein Mess, Allies Admit - 2025-07-24T11:09:47Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 24 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Donald Trump is reportedly “furious” about his inability to make the Jeffrey Epstein scandal go away. Politico reports that Trump is angry and frustrated that his staff can’t get the story out of the news, and his own allies are privately admitting he’s vulnerable on it. This comes as The Wall Street Journal reports that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy privately informed Trump earlier this year that his name appears numerous times in the Epstein files. That strongly suggests this story is only going to get worse. One big question all this raises is this: Is Trump losing his supposedly superhuman ability to manipulate the media narrative? And how should Democrats exploit that now? We’re talking about all this with media strategist Tara McGowan, the publisher of Courier Newsroom, an anti-MAGA news site. Tara, thanks for coming on.

Tara McGowan: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with this Wall Street Journal report. To catch people up, for years, MAGA said the Epstein files—i.e., the trove of investigative information compiled by law enforcement on Epstein’s sex trafficking—would show evidence of elite Democratic pedophilia. But the Trump administration looked at the files and decided, No, we’re not releasing them after all. And now the Journal reports that Trump has been told by Bondi that his name is in there. While that doesn’t necessarily incriminate him, it means the media and members of Congress are going to start looking even harder at the story. Tara, what’s your reaction to all that?

McGowan: Unsurprised, Greg, but delighted nonetheless. I don’t think it should or does surprise too many people that Trump’s name appears. I’m glad that it’s being reported as such, but I’ve never seen anyone who has more selfies with Jeffrey Epstein than Trump. That have been on the internet for years and years and years. And of course, the story that came out earlier this week, or late last week, in The Wall Street Journal about the birthday card that Trump wrote to Epstein.… The evidence is mounting. And especially [for] folks that follow conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists themselves, where there’s smoke, they think there’s fire or there likely is. And so the compounding evidence, including coming from Bondi, is going to keep the story going.

And I will tell you—from our own audiences and the coverage that we’ve been doing of Epstein at Courier across our network—we’ve seen over 50 million views on our Epstein videos just over the past week and change, which is wild. The audience is following every twist and turn in the story. They are not moving on from it. And of course, that has made legacy media outlets like Wall Street Journal and others pay closer attention when I think they were likely not to touch it if they thought it was just a conversation in the really extreme political spaces on the internet. It is very mainstream right now. And you can tell by how Trump is reacting that he is crouched in a corner like a feral animal.

Sargent: And the Politico story really underscores your point about him being in a defensive crouch and understanding his own vulnerability on this. One person close to the White House tells Politico, “POTUS is clearly furious.” Trump obviously wants the media to be focused on his greatness and so forth. One White House ally says this is “a vulnerability” for Trump and that this is the fault of Trump and MAGA for originally hyping the Epstein files. That’s a White House ally speaking to Politico. One senior official says he’s frustrated with his staff for failing to tamp this down. Now Tara, we’ve been told for years that Trump wields magical powers over “the narrative.” That was always overstated, but now we’re really seeing that mythology get dispelled, aren’t we?

McGowan: Yeah, it’s actually one of the most interesting things to me as someone who has studied this person so closely for so many years; I started doing work essentially against him in 2015 when he first ran in the Republican primaries. He is incredibly brilliant at understanding narrative and marketing and [at] being able to control not only right-wing media narrative and benefit from that but also legacy media, mainstream media; [he’s] able to define the coverage in certain ways and [shape] the attention economy. And it’s really surprising to me as someone that has observed him so closely for so long that he did not anticipate this blowback from his base when he and all of the right-wing commentators and pundits who helped to get him elected were beating this drum on this story and his promise to immediately release the Epstein files consistently throughout his campaign. It was one of his top campaign promises. So to think that he could just make it go away by saying that there was nothing there, I’m even surprised that he is so surprised.

Sargent: I’ll tell you what, I just think that there are a bunch of boneheads who actually believed that stuff about Democratic pedophilia rings, and they thought they were going to go in there and blow the lid off this thing. That was the whole point of putting in Dan Bongino as deputy director of FBI and Kash Patel as director of the FBI. They were going to go in and be the scourge of the deep state and blow the whole thing wide open. They were just dumb enough to believe that shit. That’s what I think happened.

McGowan: Yeah, but the thing is, I don’t think Trump believed that stuff—because he knows so much and knew Epstein so well. So I think maybe putting Bongino and Patel in those positions was the concession. And he thought if the message came out from them, which it did, that there was nothing there that it would go away. And it has had the absolute opposite effect. It has really, really shaken the core of the MAGA base who believed deeply that he was going to rout out the deep state and shed light on all of this and confirm all of their darkest theories and conspiracy theories. And now it’s not that they feel like it’s debunked or those things are not true. Now they’re starting to realize that Trump might be complicit in it instead of the guy who’s going to actually rout out that deep-state corruption.

Sargent: So Trump’s frustration and the frustration of Trump’s team really came through at the White House press briefing. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing all this horseshit stuff about prosecuting Obama in order to boost her shaky standing with Trump. Remember, Trump dressed down Gabbard for admitting that Iran wasn’t on the verge of a nuke. Listen to Leavitt here.

Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): The only people who are suggesting that the director of national intelligence would release evidence to try to boost her standing with the president are the people in this room who constantly try to sow distrust and chaos amongst the president’s cabinet. And it is not working. I will just answer your question directly. I am with the president of the United States every day. He has the utmost confidence in Director Gabbard. He always has, he continues to, and that is true of his entire cabinet who is all working as one team to deliver on the promises this president made.

Sargent: So that sounds like a case of protesting too much. It sure sounds like we really are seeing internal strife among Trump’s team right now. Remember that Bongino is deeply angry over the Epstein fiasco. I’ve got to think there’s a lot of anger at Bondi in particular for mishandling her announcement that the matter was closed. That really stoked a lot of MAGA fury. I think it’s going to get worse for her now that this leak came out in The Wall Street Journal about her supposedly telling Trump that he’s in there. That’s going to seem like a leak from maybe DOJ. What’s your sense of what’s going on over there?

McGowan: Yeah, it’s absolute chaos, right? So Trump has not only lost the narrative and the ability to control it, but he [also] does not have control of his own staff or advisers or cabinet at this stage. And when people are sensing what is very much on the surface right now about fractures within their base of support that they have been incredibly.… There’s been so much hubris essentially about their mandate after the election to lead, etc., and now their base is turning on them. Their biggest talkers, pundits, podcasters are turning on them. You are seeing actual individuals within the administration turn on them with these leaks. And so they are in the most vulnerable position we’ve seen this administration in.

At the same time—I read this in Axios this morning in this sort of bloviating way, I thought—at a time where Trump really has been delivering a lot of “wins” in terms of his other campaign promises to his base, that’s why he’s also furious: He’s not getting any credit for it. So now he’s really experiencing what it is like to not actually be able to control the story or control your team. And this is where it’s going to get really interesting because the story, as we said, is not going away. So who is going to really defect? Who is going to get thrown out, because we know how he reacts when he’s angry, right? He starts firing. He starts demonizing. And he’s been doing his distraction strategy, and it isn’t working. So we’re going to start to see him, I think, act even more and more irrational, if that’s possible. I hate to say that there is fun and joy in this—but for those of us who have known what an empty suit he has been on so many of the promises he made to his base, there is a level of enjoyment, I think, we are all allowed at watching this go down. But I do think it’s incredibly important that all of us in media and advocacy also help keep this story and this momentum going.

Sargent: I want to get to that in a sec, but your point about his distraction strategy failing just reminded me of something that I think is essential. One of the sub-narratives of this idea of Trump as master media manipulator has always been that he’s got this magical distraction powers. And this is something pundits were incredibly credulous about for a long time. He would go out there and he would just try to change the subject and everyone would say, Wow, he’s distracting us. He’s weaving his spell again. And it was always garbage; that stuff doesn’t actually necessarily work for voters. But here, we’re seeing it fail in a particularly glaring and obvious way, right?

McGowan: Yeah, it’s definitely feeling desperate because he has not satisfied the base. And thus the media’s amplifying because his answer [shows] that he has continued to not evolve. In fact, he just got more angry at his base and continued to say, There’s nothing there, move on. Why do you care? That’s undressing his base, right? That’s like shaming and blaming them and turning on them, which, of course, is not going to calm them down. If it had been pure distraction to something that was equally important to them, which is difficult to do, maybe it would have worked—but he actually turned on them first. We started to see a little bit of a bump and a splintering of the attention away from Epstein with the Gabbard announcements of the files, but it didn’t last very long. Epstein was back taking the cake in terms of engagement pretty quickly, and they’re not able to get it off of that at this stage.

Sargent: Well, so where does that leave us with Democrats, Tara? This is something you have a lot of strong feelings about, the Democratic strategies and so forth. Democrats are obviously now calling for full release of the Epstein files and they’re doing a pretty good job of keeping it in the news, but then you’ve got people like Nancy Pelosi calling it a distraction. I feel like, on some level, the party is still internally conflicted about how and whether to go hard at something like this. What are your thoughts on that?

McGowan: Yeah. I deeply, deeply respect Nancy Pelosi in many, many ways. And I fundamentally disagree with her. This is not a distraction. This is important. We’re seeing it across all audiences. It is honestly the most unified and bipartisan issue. And I think that Democrats need to lean into this very heavily. I think there’s also just a “take party out of it” [element to this]. If you’re not talking about the Epstein story, that’s a little bit more concerning in certain ways to me than the people that are, right? Because we should all be aligned that whoever was involved with Epstein was not on the good side of society or history or the law—let’s say. I think that this is not only a really important story that is actually unifying people of all political and other backgrounds, but it is such a critical one for Democrats to lean in on—because this is the most potent example we have of the corruption of Trump in this administration. The through line for everything that also unites the left and the right is getting corruption out of politics, right? He ran as someone who was going to do that. Him being corrupt himself and finally looking very defensive and scared, frankly—people can sense that.

This is where the whole house of cards could fall down if everybody stays vigilant about it. I think that we are in that place right now, [and] that’s why any Democrat that’s calling this a distraction is deeply out of touch with where the American public is. And I think that is an indication and also just a reinforcing indication of the establishment Democrats. The folks in leadership in the Democratic Party have been very out of touch of where people are. They’ve been out of touch of how to communicate with them, what they care about, where to communicate with them for a while now. And that’s where we’re seeing really different camps in the really broad left: folks who are just ready to fight, actually have fight in them, know how to communicate authentically, and have a vision for the future and the ones who are still clinging to this old way that hasn’t existed for a long time, this decorum, this “we need to talk about kitchen-table issues.”

Actually, no. Right now, this is what we should be talking about. And that doesn’t mean that fast forward a year from now, when we’re just months out from the midterms, we shouldn’t be talking about the other really important issues like affordability, etc. We should be doing that too. But I absolutely disagree with Nancy Pelosi and think that every Democrat should be leaning in and continuing to amplify all of the new incoming information that comes out of this story. We rarely, rarely have the ability to be on offense and to have Trump and the right on defense—and that is the moment we’re in right now. We need to hold that leverage for as long as we can.

Sargent: Yeah. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Democrats should take the word “distraction” and ban it from their vocabularies forever—because I think it actually embodies two deeper, broader, very bad tendencies in the Democratic Party. One is this belief, as you said, that everything always has to be reducible to kitchen-table issues. And that sends the message that I just don’t think these other things are important. I don’t have convictions around these other things. And so when big things like this happen, they’re hamstrung and caught off guard. The other message that calling stuff like this a “distraction” sends is that Democrats think that they can’t win arguments with Trump about anything, right? They can only fight on the issues where they’re strong like health care. And we’re seeing the fallout from that now. Immigration right now is in many ways the biggest moral crisis of the moment. Trump’s crackdown on immigration is a massive moral crisis for this country. And Democrats tried their little thing about, You know, we can’t talk about that. It’s a distraction from the kitchen table. Well, voters care very much about that, right? Voters care about people getting kidnapped off the streets. And Democrats have to be able to speak to people’s feelings and values on that stuff.

McGowan: Yes, and sex trafficking young children and women. This is a really important issue. And again, it gets back to what I was mentioning before, which is: If you want to move on from this story, it really begs the question of why. And we all know that very likely there are Democrats in the Epstein files as well. This is why for so long all the conspiracy theories spread so crazy where we don’t know what’s true and what’s not—because both sides were in cahoots at protecting it. And that’s also why I think it’s so important that now, [with] time passing, we’re facing a very new generation of leadership in the Democratic Party that is really fighting to be able to get into positions of leadership and power against these folks that, frankly, have been the ones who have lost the trust and the support of the American people.

Lest we forget, Democrats have the lowest approval rating in the history of polling on Democratic approval ratings right now. So even though Trump’s support is flailing and his support is falling, especially around a lot of things his administration is doing related to ICE and other things, Democrats are not in any better shape. And I really fundamentally believe that is because of the folks that are out of touch—that are are still projecting that they might have some things that they don’t want to talk about or things from years ago they want to protect [for] establishment or former leaders in the party. And I think that’s actually how we unify the American people: the folks that are willing to come out and say, Corruption has no place in either side. That’s how we rebuild trust as a party and a movement.

Sargent: Yeah, and the story is about the fundamental problem of elite impunity. That’s a huge thing. It’s a real problem. So to close this out, what should Democrats be doing specifically? You take someone like Senator Ron Wyden. He just put out this great information. We reported on it at TNR.com. You can check that out. He put out this information about a whole lot of suspect Epstein financial transactions that are on the file at the Treasury Department. Wyden’s pushing hard on those specifics, trying to get Treasury to release the financial transactions, which would show all sorts of stuff. I feel like Democrats could be using their power more like that—to try to shed light on what specifically is being covered up. What are your thoughts? What do you think Dems should be doing specifically?

McGowan: Yes to all of that. I think any calls for investigations hearings—similar to what Democrats were doing [of staging] their own hearings that weren’t official committee hearings because they’re not the party in power to choose those.… They should also just very simply be talking about this every day, everywhere. Like, you want an excuse to go on a go-everywhere media tour like Pete Buttigieg does or others do? Book yourself everywhere online and in broadcast and radio and be talking about this. Be asking, If he has nothing to hide, why won’t he release the information? Are we taking him out his word on this? It doesn’t seem like that. Literally, there’s so many ways to talk about this with new information coming out every day that we just need to keep the conversation going. And I really think that there is not a good argument that I have heard or could imagine hearing as to why they shouldn’t be when most of us dream of having an opportunity like this: to be able to stay on offense, to keep the attention of the American people on something that is very much a clear, evident vulnerability for this administration.

Sargent: Yes. And I think Democrats have to figure out a way of talking about this as if they really mean it. It can’t be like, Look at me, I’m at the podium now and I know Trump’s in trouble. I’m going to be clever and I’m going to do 11-dimensional chess and put Trump on the defensive on an issue involving elites. Democrats have to summon from inside actual feelings and thoughts and values about this scandal and talk about it to the American people. That’s what I think has to happen.

McGowan: Yes. And connect it to all of the other corruption that has been unprecedented in this administration and the other abuses of power, right? There is a way to very succinctly connect all of the dots and threads of everything horrible coming out of this administration to show that this is why he is abusing his power. It’s like we all stopped talking about the fact that the major reason Donald Trump was always running for president again was to keep himself out of jail. He has gotten himself into a position of the greatest power in the world when he was likely to spend time in jail had he not won that election and been able to get immunity by his rigged Supreme Court. So this is the fact: We have folks in his base moving away from him, becoming more skeptical, more doubtful and angry about how they’re not feeling heard or respected anymore by this president. That is the opportunity we’ve all been waiting for—to help them, to bring them, in an inclusive way, into this movement against corruption, frankly, on both sides to be able to find a way forward.

Sargent: Well, Tara McGowan, I really hope Democrats are listening to you. Thanks so much for coming on. Great discussion.

McGowan: Thanks, Greg.

Lena Dunham’s Too Much Is Exactly Enough - 2025-07-24T10:00:00Z

What even was Girls? One of the features that notoriously distinguishes online writing about art and culture is its speed. In comparison to the kinds of slow, roiling debates among public intellectuals of previous eras, today’s discourse explodes in enlivening and exhausting near-simultaneous waves of point and counterpoint. There’s no better example of this kind of breakneck colloquy than the reception, in spring 2012, of the very first episode of Lena Dunham’s infamous HBO series Girls. Like the Big Bang for people who read recaps of episodes of television they’ve already seen, whole galaxies of discourse were born within the space of only a few days and weeks, left to expand over the course of years, and, in many ways, supplant the original text. As I’ve watched Dunham’s excellent, vexing return to long-form TV, Too Much, I’ve thought a lot about the degree to which those couple of weeks in 2012 have haunted everything Dunham has done since.

A few events happened in quick succession. In late March 2012, several weeks prior to the debut of the program itself, TV critic Emily Nussbaum published a glowing profile of Dunham in New York magazine that set the expectation for the series as a radical act of feminist art-making in a moment when women were finally breaking into key roles in TV production. Over the next couple of weeks, several reviews ran in legacy magazines that drew (somewhat disapproving) attention to the show’s exhibitionism and the cringe of its sex scenes. (Frank Bruni wrote, “Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?”) Then it actually premiered. The following day, The Hairpin’s J. Wortham praised the show’s quality while bemoaning its narrowness of vision and its lack of any characters of color. The day after that, Gawker began running episodic recaps that obsessed over the actors’ nepo baby status. Throughout, nearly every writer writing about the show wrestled with the unlikability of the main characters. These various claims, in many ways, came to characterize and constrain Dunham’s entire career. The show is brilliant and good for women. The show is luridly sexual and bad for women. The show is too white. The show is too privileged. The show is too irritating for any of that other stuff to matter.

These are oversimplifications, but the series’s reputation as problematic fave stuck with it until relatively recently. Over the past few years, critics and ordinary viewers have been returning to Girls. Rewatch podcasts have sprouted up, critical reassessments abounded around its tenth anniversary, HBO reported significant viewership spikes in 2023, Gen Z viewers discovered the show as a fascinating “period piece” about 2010s New York, and clips of its funniest and cringiest moments seemed to flood TikTok. In general, these revisitings have echoed Lili Loofbourow’s question about the initial reception: “How long did it take critics to realize that the protagonists in Lena Dunham’s Girls were supposed to be unpleasant?” In other words, why was it so difficult to imagine that the irritatingness—and the privilege and the whiteness—that critics and viewers called out about Girls was on purpose?

It’s 2025 now, and Lena Dunham is back with her first big television series since 2018’s surprisingly inert, one-season Girls follow-up, Camping. Too Much, which Netflix debuted this month, is an ambitious, sprawling rom-com about a thirtysomething American woman (played by Hacks supporting standout Megan Stalter) either finding love or having a quarter-life crisis in London (unclear which). The show is sometimes howlingly funny and sometimes unwatchably awkward; it’s comfortable and confrontational—it’s the Lena Dunham special. Thinking about the long shadow of Girls, about what we learned and didn’t learn from the conversations surrounding it, I’ve approached Too Much assuming that Dunham’s choices in it are deliberate. The show seems both more expansive and more self-aware than anything Dunham has yet done. That said, I’m not sure what it all means.

Girls, Tiny Furniture, even Catherine Called Birdy—Lena Dunham has often focused on subjects society might deem small-scale or insufficiently grown up, conceptually and linguistically diminutive. But in spite of or perhaps because of this miniaturist approach, her work has often been both pilloried and praised as excessive. She is, in fact, the subject of the final chapter of Anne Helen Petersen’s 2017 Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. So calling her new series Too Much functions as both a statement of knowing introspection and as, well, bait.

Is it too much to say that Too Much is a bit too much? It’s certainly the best way to describe Jess (Stalter), the show’s protagonist and, to some degree, Dunham’s stand-in. At the start, Jess has just gone through a rough breakup. Her boyfriend, who was once dreamily devoted to her, grew steadily colder and meaner until their relationship disintegrated. Now he’s dating a social media influencer named Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), and she’s sharing their picture-perfect relationship all day every day online for Jess to watch. The series is narrated by way of a succession of enraged responses Jess records to Wendy’s posts that she buries on her private account. It’s a mildly funny joke that the show overcommits to in a way that doesn’t quite ever work.

Jess, you see, is “too much.” She overshares with new acquaintances, she smothers or shrieks at loved ones, she wears bunny ears to a work event, she does too much coke and ketamine, she dresses her hairless dog in “precious gowns,” she affects a bad British accent to British people, she speaks in what one character describes as “Tourette’s-style” fits and starts, she puts on a piece of sexy satin lingerie that for some reason has a hood. Back at home in the United States, she’s friendless. The only person she seems comfortable around is her older sister, played by Dunham. And it’s not any better in London. Her new colleagues appear ambivalent at best toward her. Most of the neighbors in her council estate categorically refuse to talk to her. We even see the exuberantly welcoming wife of her boss (Naomi Watts) send looks to her husband (Richard E. Grant), as if to say, What the hell is going on with this woman?

The only one who seems to appreciate her at all—outside of her hairless dog, whose mere image is a potent punch line in nearly all her scenes—is Felix (Will Sharpe) a moody, emotionally damaged singer-songwriter. The two fall in love essentially the first night they meet, and the series tracks the ups and downs of their condensed, not particularly novel courtship. Jess needs constant affirmation and reassurance; Felix is neither particularly affirming nor reassuring. A compulsive overreader of facial expressions and social cues, Jess is alternately flummoxed and turned on by Felix’s flatness and deadpan demeanor. “I’ve always found, like, engaging with people’s inner lives is kind of a waste of energy,” Jess’s co-worker tells Felix at a dinner party. “I can go deeper by staying on the surface.” Felix’s surfaces aren’t expressive enough, while Jess’s are arguably too expressive. One of the best scenes in the series occurs when Felix makes Jess a mix CD. The camera hovers above them as they lie on the bed, facing the ceiling. As Jess listens with headphones, her face silently cycles twitchily through a dozen aborted expressions: joy, gratitude, terror, excitement, uncertainty, love, even physical pain. It’s a symphony of discomfort that Dunham—who directs most of the show’s episodes—lets play out at length, uninterrupted.

You might like Jess, or you might not. While it would be tempting to think of the character as a retread of Hannah Horvath, a new-generation update of Dunham’s original “unpleasant” protagonist, Jess is meaningfully different. Stalter is a sensational comic performer, and one of the things she’s best able to do is to convey the frenzied insecurity of her character. Hannah was insecure, sure, but part of what made her such a prickly watch was the blithe confidence of her narcissism. Jess is, from the moment we meet her, going through something. To be this way, for Jess, is both natural and painful. She has, somewhere deep inside her, the self-awareness that Hannah Horvath famously lacked. And it’s a curse.

So Jess is “too much,” but so is the show she’s on. Dunham’s aesthetic point of view, it seems, is to triple down on every directorial and writerly choice almost to the point of parody. The camera swirls—several laps more than you’d expect—around Jess and Felix as they make out in the street. The series features not one but two bacchanalian drug trip episodes back-to-back. Every episode is named, punningly, after a famous romantic comedy. (The pilot is called “Nonsense and Sensibility,” for instance.) And the show is littered with cinematic references and half-references. It’s important to say, though, that it’s not much of an homage to these classics, to which Dunham has an ambivalent relationship. Their invocation is a reminder of how different Too Much is, a revision as intimate and unrecognizable as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, her feminist alt-rock response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. The rom-coms are a set of beloved touchstones and a list of targets.

It’s one thing to say that the response to Girls ultimately obscured the show itself, its genuine strengths and weaknesses. But Dunham is also a provocateur by artistic temperament. There were just as many critics who found damning faults in her work as there were critics who walked directly into her traps. It was both a show that was hurt, in the moment of its release, by misreadings and a show that lustily invited misreadings. From the perspective of 13 years, I think it represented as much, if not more, of a paradigm shift in television as Game of Thrones, HBO’s defining 2010s series, which debuted the year before Girls. Both have many imitators; neither has a true heir.

Too Much is not that. In her recent book, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, the critic Becca Rothfeld writes, “All things are too small for us because each of us can only be one paltry person at a time.” Too Much looks and acts like a romantic comedy, but it’s also a kind of tragedy of the self, along the lines Rothfeld describes. The mistake critics made in reading Hannah Horvath was in assuming that Dunham meant for her to be more—more representative, more culturally significant—than just “one paltry person.” But Jess, as a character, is hyperaware of her own paltriness—whether it’s through her own nagging self-doubt or other characters’ constant reminders of how small she is—and it is too much for her to bear. To see an unattainable romance in movies is one thing, but to see life roiling around you, bonds of kinship and friendship transformed into multiplying ensembles of care and intimacy, and to be rejected from those ensembles, left stranded in their midst, is another thing entirely. It’s somehow, improbably, more than I expected.

The Abuses at ICE Detention Centers Fulfill a Trump Campaign Promise - 2025-07-24T10:00:00Z

On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded the private company Acquisition Logistics a contract to build the largest immigrant detention facility in the United States—giving $1.26 billion, as Bloomberg reported this week, to a Virginia-based company that “doesn’t appear to have any experience with detention.” The proposed camp, meant to hold 5,000 people in tents adjacent to an airstrip, sounds more similar to the new ICE concentration camp in the Florida Everglades than to most other existing ICE detention facilities. With such facilities, dangerously inadequate and quickly erected, ICE is entering a new phase of rapid mass detention.

The news of this camp coincides with the release this week of a report from Human Rights Watch that offers a damning picture of what ICE detention has become since Trump assumed office in January. It is now routine for basics like access to time outside of cells and meetings with lawyers to be denied. Medical emergencies are dismissed or met with punishment. Lockdowns are declared to cover for ICE’s being short-staffed. One man reported that he and others were forced to eat “like dogs,” bent over with their hands restrained behind their backs.

The Acquisitions Logistics camp will be constructed within the second-largest Army base in the United States, Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, and the southern border. While El Paso’s county jail currently imprisons immigrants on behalf of ICE, this new camp is very different. Like the Everglades camp, it is meant to intern thousands of people arrested by ICE outside the existing immigration detention system, in order to remove them from the country as swiftly as possible. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved plans to use part of the base for a new immigration detention facility in March, and two weeks later, Stars and Stripes reported that Army engineers were “removing shrubs and leveling sand on a desolate 60-acre stretch.” ICE is now prioritizing such mass tent camps, The Wall Street Journal reported, “because it allows them to create large numbers of new beds concentrated in a few locations, rather than finding smaller numbers of jail cells scattered around the country.”

If built as planned, the Fort Bliss camp would be big enough to hold roughly 10 percent of the nearly 57,000 people that, as of July 13, ICE currently has locked up in detention facilities across the United States. That’s close to the highest number on record the government has ever held in immigration detention in U.S. history. Of course, ICE is tasked with keeping that number growing, and it’s doing so, according to data obtained and analyzed by the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse. With each passing month of Trump’s second term, ICE has been arresting and detaining thousands more people.

It seems unlikely, however, that any contractor has the capacity to build and staff camps at a speed that can match the extraordinary pace at which the Trump administration wants ICE to work. “I am deeply skeptical of this small contractor’s ability to get the hundreds of staff necessary to operate a detention complex of 5,000 beds,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Not only does Acquisition Logistics not have experience in detention, according to Bloomberg, this government contract is “by far the biggest ever” for the firm.

ICE detention facilities vary greatly. Some are purpose-built and privately operated “processing centers” incarcerating a thousand people or more. Others are federal prisons authorized to jail people for ICE alongside other prisoners. A detention site can even be just a few dozen cells that a county jail rents to ICE. But whether ICE has built upon existing carceral infrastructure or is doling out contracts for private prison companies to make more, it is clear that the agency is locking up far more people than it has room for.

Detention centers and camps, distinct as they appear, may also share certain brutal features, including tents. When ICE jailed hundreds more people than space allowed at the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, operated by Akima Global Services, it put up a “soft-sided structure”—a large outdoor tent to hold 400 people. In early June, dozens of people jailed there protested their confinement in the recreation yard, forming the letters “SOS” and the word “LIBRE” with their bodies. Some weeks later, tents went up at a site about 30 miles away in the Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”—an American concentration camp. On June 26, a 75-year-old Cuban man died at Krome. He was the thirteenth person to die in ICE custody this year.

Krome’s conditions are “abusive and degrading,” according to the new Human Rights Watch report:

Individuals described prolonged confinement in frigid, overcrowded processing cells without bedding, adequate clothing, or access to hygiene. Women were also detained there for processing despite its being a male-only facility. They had no showers or privacy, and some were exposed to voyeurism by male detainees. This processing took place over a matter of days, not hours. Overcrowding persisted beyond intake, with cells holding more than double their intended capacity.

Those interviewed by HRW described punishing days and nights in ice-cold cells, sleeping on the floor without bedding or proper clothes. At times, ICE crammed 30 people into one small cell. The lights were always on. There would be a single toilet in a cell, without any privacy. One woman said she and her cellmates asked for cleaning supplies to clean their single filthy toilet for themselves, to which officers responded sarcastically, “Housekeeping will come soon.”

Despite ICE’s efforts to stop them, people inside Krome and numerous other detention sites have been able to get documentation of conditions and rights abuses out to the public. In New York, videos shared with the press by the New York Immigration Coalition show an emerging pattern: Here too, ICE is using cells that were meant to hold people for a matter of hours to keep them detained for days or more. People are forced to sleep next to toilets, without adequate clothing or bedding. (ICE claims that there is no detention center in this building, and denies charges of inhumane conditions.) In Massachusetts, at an ICE office in Burlington that is now similarly serving as a detention facility, one woman who was recently released from there described a similar situation: a freezing room where women had to sleep on the floor, a single toilet. “We slept close and huddled together—the line of women reaching all the way to the bathroom,” she told WBUR this month.

In light of these very similar stories, along with the questionable new contract for a concentration camp in Texas, it is not difficult to conclude that the current conditions in ICE detention centers are an intentional part of Trump’s promised “mass deportations,” even as they show how weak those plans are. Unable to fully deliver on mass deportation, ICE is ramping up its precursor: mass detention. Perhaps the administration still lacks the coordination and capacity to carry out mass deportations, which were always meant to be punitive, always intended in part—if not primarily—as a cause for Trump’s supporters to rally around. Each detention center’s abuses exposed, each shoddy new camp toured, fulfills Trump’s promise to scapegoat and punish immigrants. This fact does not undermine the importance of recording the brutal realities people face in these jails, “processing centers,” and camps, especially when the stories are told from their own point of view. The accounts may help reveal something more: that there is no “humane” solution to mass detention—a project that violates people’s dignity by design—without its abolition.

How Brett Kavanaugh Is Putting His Thumb on the Scale for Trump - 2025-07-24T10:00:00Z

Justice Brett Kavanaugh does not work for the Trump Justice Department or the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel. Yet he helped them out quite a bit last month when, in an unrelated case, he effectively argued against using one of the Supreme Court’s most prominent doctrines to limit the president’s ability to impose tariffs at will on other countries.

In FCC v. Consumers’ Research, Kavanaugh opined in a concurring opinion that the major-questions doctrine—a tool used by the court to strike down a wide range of significant policies under the Biden administration—does not carry as much weight when a president is acting on national security or foreign policy grounds.

“The canon does not translate to those contexts because of the nature of presidential decisionmaking in response to ever-changing national security threats and diplomatic challenges,” he wrote.

The Justice Department happily cited Kavanaugh’s opinion in a filing before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week. The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in May that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose onerous tariffs on imports with little to no warning went beyond what Congress had authorized under both the major-questions doctrine and a related one known as the nondelegation doctrine. (More on the latter doctrine later.)

“Plaintiffs invoke the major-questions doctrine, but it is inapposite here,” the department claimed, referring to the companies and states challenging the tariffs. “The delegation here is to the president, not an agency; the president’s exercise of power under IEEPA is not a novel invocation of an apparently narrow statute; and it is particularly inappropriate to construe narrowly a delegation in the arena of foreign affairs and national security, where the President’s expertise and independent constitutional authority are at their apex.”

The government’s sole citation for this point was Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion. That opinion is not binding on lower courts, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the other eight Supreme Court justices, all of whom declined to join it last month. Even so, it shows how the relationship between Trump and the Supreme Court is increasingly more collaborative than confrontational, even in the face of acts that appear to be illegal, unconstitutional, or both.

The Consumers’ Research case in which Kavanaugh wrote centered a legal challenge to the Universal Service Fund. Congress established the fund under the Federal Communication Commission’s authority in 1996 to provide telecommunications access to low-income and rural Americans who might otherwise be underserved by market forces. By law, every telecom company in America contributes to the fund.

The FCC, which supervises the fund, permanently transferred day-to-day control of it to the Universal Service Administrative Company. Justice Elena Kagan described the company as a “private, not-for-profit corporation” in her majority opinion. In addition to its administrative functions, the company helps the FCC determine the rate at which telecom companies must contribute to the fund. After announcing the new rate for 2022 four years ago, Consumers’ Research sued to overturn the funding scheme under the nondelegation doctrine.

In its most basic form, the nondelegation doctrine holds that one branch of the federal government cannot permanently or unconditionally transfer its core powers to another branch of the government. This is a logical outgrowth of the Constitution’s separation of powers: Congress could not, for example, pass a law that automatically approved all of the president’s Cabinet and judicial nominations without individual votes.

At the same time, basic governance requires that Congress give a certain amount of latitude to the executive branch and the judiciary when interpreting and applying federal laws. Good government relies on discretion when faced with unusual circumstances and adaptability when dealing with new situations. To that end, the Supreme Court has long held that the nondelegation doctrine does not kick in so long as Congress—and it is almost always Congress at issue here—provides an “intelligible principle” to guide an agency like the FCC when exercising power delegated to it by the legislature.

Not everyone is happy with that framework. Consumers’ Research is a right-wing group that shambles around Washington, D.C., in the skin of a defunct consumer-protection organization, much like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. In its lawsuit, the group argued that the twin delegations—from Congress to the FCC, and then from the FCC to USAC—went too far, even if both were acceptable on their own. To no one’s surprise, that argument received a favorable reception from the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the funding scheme was unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Kagan, writing for the 6–3 court, drew the opposite conclusion from the interplay between the two delegations at issue. Since each of them were constitutional on their own, she reasoned, the plaintiffs could not defeat them by arguing that they were somehow unconstitutional together. “Contra the Fifth Circuit, a meritless public nondelegation challenge plus a meritless private nondelegation challenge cannot equal a meritorious ‘combination’ claim,” Kagan explained.

In his concurring opinion, Kavanaugh agreed with the majority opinion in full. He wrote separately to give a more comprehensive view on how the nondelegation doctrine applied to modern American governance. Notably, Kavanaugh wrote in favor of the “intelligible principle” test from a conservative perspective—a break of sorts with some originalists who want it scrapped in favor of a tougher standard.

His rationale was a largely pragmatic one: The test has had “staying power” over the past century in part “because of the difficulty of agreeing on a workable and constitutionally principled alternative,” and in part because a “stricter test” could “diminish the president’s longstanding Article II authority to implement legislation.” Though the justices theoretically write for any American to read and understand, Kavanaugh was apparently speaking to his fellow travelers in the conservative legal movement.

The intelligible principle test, he noted at one point, was “accepted and applied over the years by Justice [Antonin] Scalia, Chief Justice [William] Rehnquist, and Chief Justice [William Howard] Taft,” whom he described as three jurists with executive branch experience who “deeply appreciated the risks of undue judicial interference with the operations of the presidency.” This sort of judicial name-checking is weird and unpersuasive in a formal opinion because the argument itself, not the person making it, is what actually matters. Only if you’re trying to persuade your fellow guests at the next Federalist Society gala that this decision is a defensibly conservative one do the other justices’ identities matter.

Kavanaugh also opined that there was not as much need for a rigid test because the Supreme Court had other tools to use to enforce the separation of powers. He pointed to the demise of the Chevron doctrine last summer and the rise of the major-questions doctrine as evidence that “many of the broader structural concerns about expansive delegations have been substantially mitigated.” The court’s conservative majority, in other words, has plenty of finer-wrought weapons to wield against disfavored regulations and policies without relying upon the blunt instrument of nondelegation.

As part of this throat-clearing exercise, Kavanaugh then offered a limiting principle to the major-questions doctrine. That doctrine generally holds that Congress must “speak clearly” when authorizing federal agencies to regulate on matters of “vast economic and political significance.” The doctrine’s vague phrasing, combined with Congress’s habit of legislating in broad terms, effectively gives the court a freewheeling veto over policies it doesn’t like. To that end, the six conservative justices have used it in recent years to quash all manner of policies from Democratic presidents, from the provision of student-loan debt relief to the regulation of carbon emissions from power plants.

I emphasize that the major-questions doctrine applies to “policies from Democratic presidents” because it has yet to be used to strike down a Republican president’s policies. Trump’s tariffs seemed like the best opportunity for the court’s conservatives to demonstrate some intellectual consistency. IEEPA’s relevant text does not mention tariffs by name at all. The government argues that the power to “regulate ... importation” works the same, but the “vast economic and political significance” of that question should counsel against adopting that interpretation, right? Not so, says Kavanaugh, because of national security reasons:

“In addition, the major questions canon has not been applied by this court in the national security or foreign policy contexts, because the canon does not reflect ordinary congressional intent in those areas,” he wrote. “On the contrary, the usual understanding is that Congress intends to give the president substantial authority and flexibility to protect America and the American people—and that Congress specifies limits on the President when it wants to restrict presidential power in those national security and foreign policy domains.”

This is an extremely helpful interpretation for the Trump administration, which has often relied on dubious claims of national security threats to advance its trade policy. When Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports from Canada at one point during his first term, for example, former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked the president in a telephone call what national security rationale could possibly justify them. “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” Trump reportedly replied, an apparent reference to the War of 1812.

Some observers noted that this was not technically correct: It was British soldiers who burned down Washington in 1814, and the attack took place more than a half-century before Canadian confederation. I spent a significant amount of time in Canada during the War of 1812 bicentennial, and I can assure my fellow Americans that Canadians claim credit for burning down the White House often enough that Trump is spiritually correct on the matter. The Trump-Trudeau exchange still highlights the flimsy pretextual nature of Trump’s national security claims—and underscores the risks of deferring to them so freely on actions that would otherwise be unlawful.

Kavanaugh did not explicitly link this point to the ongoing tariff litigation, though he was undoubtedly aware of it and the legal questions involved. The justices rejected a motion to fast-track a separate tariff-related legal challenge on June 20, one week before the court’s decision in Consumers’ Research was handed down. They have yet to consider the U.S. Court of International Trade’s ruling on the matter; the Trump administration has asked the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn it first.

It is far from certain that Kavanaugh’s nonbinding argument will persuade the appeals court. As the lower court explained in its 49-page opinion, there is ample precedent and legislative evidence to suggest that Trump’s claimed tariff powers go far beyond what Congress and the Constitution authorized under IEEPA. The Supreme Court would be justified in rejecting the tariffs on those grounds alone, as well, regardless of whatever bespoke exceptions Kavanaugh can come up with.

A defter bench of conservative justices may also realize that invoking the major-questions doctrine to strike down a major Trump administration policy—and an economically damaging one, at that—could help legitimize the doctrine in other cases down the road. (For one thing, it would certainly stop me from pointing out that the court has never used it against a Republican president.) After the court’s handling of disqualification, “presidential immunity,” and nationwide injunctions, it is no longer clear if the court cares about such things. Upholding Trump’s tariffs even when they violate the conservatives’ preferred doctrines would further prove that the court cares more about facilitating his actions than upholding the law. And at least one justice is already happy to help.

Donald Trump Is in a Tailspin - 2025-07-24T10:00:00Z

When House Speaker Mike Johnson addressed the press on Tuesday, you would have had no idea that, two weeks earlier, he had notched the biggest legislative accomplishment of his career. There was little talk of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a mammoth tax cut for the rich that will eliminate health care for millions of Americans. Instead, a visibly beleaguered Johnson said he was shutting down Congress for the summer, all but admitting that it was because Democrats kept calling votes to release files related to the late pedophilic financier Jeffrey Epstein—files that mention Donald Trump among many others, according to a Wednesday report from The Wall Street Journal.

“We want maximum transparency,” Johnson claimed. But then, in a lengthy, mealy-mouthed statement, he instead insisted he was delaying the release of the Epstein files to “protect victims” and pledged that he would not “play politics” over the issue, as his Democratic colleagues were. This is more than a bit rich. For years, Johnson’s Republican colleagues have been ignoring the humanity of those victims as they have spun elaborate, fanciful conspiracy theories about Epstein and his clients—many of whom were rumored to be powerful Democrats, including Bill Clinton, and Democrat-aligned figures. Now that the leader of the GOP was implicated, Johnson himself was playing politics by trying to shut down a story that in two short weeks has upended the ruling party.

The Epstein story is now bigger than the files—at least until we know everything that’s in them. It’s grinding Republican governance on Capitol Hill to a halt, and it’s dragging down the Trump administration. His approval rating is tanking, which is due to a combination of factors—including the backlash to the big budget bill, ICE’s immigration crackdown, and Trump’s tariff chaos—but the Epstein affair is playing a key role. There are signs, in opinion polls but also in the MAGA swamps online, that Trump’s hold on his base is slipping, which could have disastrous consequences for the GOP in the midterm elections. Trump could well be in a moment analogous to the one Joe Biden faced after the disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan—the start of a tailspin that he may never recover from.

The fault for Trump’s precipitous decline is his alone. It is Trump who ordered masked thugs into American cities and towns to hunt for any undocumented immigrant they could lay their hands on. It was Trump who forced Johnson to push through a flawed, deeply damaging bill that will have a catastrophic impact on health care and the economy. It was Trump whose moronic belief in the power of tariffs is currently causing the dollar to collapse and prices to skyrocket. And it was Trump who forced Johnson to shut down Congress so that Republicans wouldn’t have to vote on any more Democratic amendments that put them on the spot about releasing the Epstein files.

As I argued last week, there’s no way out for Trump now that he has declared the story a “hoax” and a witch hunt on par with “Russiagate.” He can continue to stonewall the release of the files, making himself look guiltier by the second—which is the approach that he has taken. Or he can release the files and cross his fingers. Even if the files reveal the bare minimum—i.e., what we already know, which is that Trump had a decade-plus friendship with Epstein, which included the period of time that Epstein was allegedly trafficking and raping dozens of young girls—there would be questions that Trump has refused to answer. Most importantly: What did he know about his good friend’s activities? The result is a cancer of a scandal, one that will continue to metastasize throughout his administration, the Republican Congress, and even his MAGA base.

It is also a gift to the Democrats, who are powerless in the minority and abject at messaging. They have thus far struggled to harness popular anger over the administration’s immigration policies, ruinous legislation, gutting of the federal government, and more. But the party has effectively weaponized Epstein, aided by popular interest and the fact that, well, the president certainly seems to be up to something shady.

House Democrats’ push to release the files was so successful that it caused Johnson to literally run away. He will presumably spend the summer recess thinking about how to respond to Democratic efforts to divide his caucus and push for the full release of the files, but it’s not clear that there is anything short of “full transparency” that can do that. He’s caught in a bind. At the same time, investigative efforts—particularly the House’s plan to subpoena the Department of Justice for its Epstein documents, and perhaps Senator Ron Wyden’s suggestion that the DOJ “follow the money” with Epstein—may very well be fruitful. The House Oversight Committee’s subpoena of Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell may or may not be as fruitful, depending on what deals she makes before her testimony. (Regardless, it will continue to fuel interest in the story, even if it’s a dud—because if she doesn’t reveal anything it will be assumed that Trump’s allies at the DOJ got to her.) In any case, this is a huge story that will likely ensnare several powerful people and hold the public’s attention—and, in doing so, will serve as a continual reminder that the president of the United States was close friends with the twenty-first century’s most notorious pedophile.

For Democrats, the Epstein story does pose risks, as well, many of which should be familiar to anyone who remembers the long investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Here, as was true then, the most likely result is something that is damning but far less salacious than what is rumored. In 2016, it turned out that Trump was openly encouraging and attempting to benefit from Russian efforts to interfere in the election—but not that he was a compromised, blackmailed puppet of Vladimir Putin (or, for that matter, that he had paid Russian sex workers to pee on a bed Barack Obama had slept in). What we know about Trump is damning enough—being friends with Epstein is bad, and reporting suggests that he and others in Epstein’s orbit had a good enough understanding of what he was up to—even if no evidence emerges that he was one of his “clients,” which is not a revelation that Democrats should hold their breath for.

This story may resemble Russiagate in another way: It likely won’t end Trump’s presidency, and Democrats would be foolish to suggest that it will. But a precious gift has fallen in their lap: a scandal that’s very easy for voters to understand and extremely hard for Trump and the Republicans to make go away. May it undermine this fascist administration for years to come.

“Furious” Trump Vents at Epstein Mess as Allies Admit He’s Vulnerable - 2025-07-24T09:00:00Z

President Donald Trump is “furious” about his inability to make the Jeffrey Epstein scandal go away, Politico reports. He’s frustrated with his staff’s failure to tamp down the uproar, which continues to consume his base, and his allies are admitting this has become major problem—with one telling Politico that Trump understands that “this is a vulnerability.” This comes amid new reports that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy privately informed Trump earlier this year that his name appears numerous times in the Epstein files, suggesting this story will get worse. We talked to media strategist Tara McGowan, the publisher of the pro-democracy Courier Newsroom. We discuss why this scandal is dispelling the myth of Trump’s superhuman control over media narratives, how Democrats must seize this moment, and why they should treat this scandal as a genuinely important story that really matters to many Americans. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Pete Hegseth’s Signalgate Saga Somehow Gets Worse - 2025-07-23T21:16:15Z

A new report pokes gaping holes in the Trump administration’s already unconvincing assurances that no classified information was disclosed during the March “Signalgate” fiasco.

The Washington Post reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s infamous Signal messages regarding strikes on Yemen—which were shared in a group chat that inadvertently included Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg—derived from a classified email from General Michael Kurilla, according to evidence obtained by the Pentagon inspector general’s office.

Notably, Kurilla’s email was classified as “SECRET/NOFORN,” with the “SECRET” label indicating material whose unauthorized disclosure “could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security,” and “NOFORN” (for “No Foreign Dissemination”) denoting information that is not to be disseminated to non–U.S. citizens or foreign governments, nationals, or international organizations.

Trump officials have, time and again, insisted that nothing classified was shared during the debacle. Hegseth, for his part, dodged questions about the classification level of the information he shared during a June congressional hearing.

During an exchange with U.S. Representative and Marine veteran Seth Moulton, Hegseth claimed that whether the information was classified was not something “that would be disclosed in a public forum.”

Moulton pushed back, observing, “You can very well disclose whether or not it was classified. It’s not classified to disclose whether or not it was classified. And in fact, DOD regulations state that any classified information has to be labeled with its classification—was it classified ‘secret’ or ‘top secret.’”

“What’s not classified is that it was an incredibly successful mission against the Houthis,” Hegseth replied, leading Moulton to conclude, “OK, so it was classified,” before asking, once more, if the defense secretary was “trying to say that the information was unclassified.”

“I’m not trying to say anything,” Hegseth said.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is Finally Coming Home to Maryland (for Now) - 2025-07-23T21:02:31Z

A federal judge has barred ICE from detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia should he be released from custody in Tennessee, ordering Wednesday that he be returned to Maryland to “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been before he was wrongly sent to El Salvador,” in accordance with the Supreme Court’s prior ruling.  

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis issued a memorandum prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security from “taking Abrego Garcia into immediate ICE custody in Tennessee.” The judge added that Abrego Garcia must be restored to his ICE Order of Supervision in Baltimore.

The judge also ordered that if the government were to initiate proceedings to remove Abrego Garcia to a third country, as they’d previously threatened to do, they would need to provide 72 business hours’ notice to the plaintiff and his counsel. 

“Defendants have done little to assure the Court that absent intervention, Abrego Garcia’s due process rights will be protected,” she wrote.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys had previously requested a 30-day stay on his release from pretrial detention, claiming that he feared immigration authorities would immediately deport him again. DHS officials confirmed this was their plan but were unable to offer any details as to where they hoped to send him. 

Meanwhile, it seems that after months away from home, Abrego Garcia may finally be headed back to Maryland. 

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee denied a motion from the government to revoke a magistrate judge’s order for Abrego Garcia’s release Wednesday, ruling that the government had failed to meet the burden to prove Abrego Garcia was a flight risk or danger to the community. The judge said Abrego Garcia could be released on bond with conditions.

Crenshaw found there was evidence that Abrego Garcia had smuggled individuals from the border but not that he was a member of or affiliated with any gang, as the government claims. Crenshaw referred to testimony provided by a Homeland Security agent who said that Abrego Garcia transported Barrio 18 and MS-13 gang members, claiming it “cuts against the already slim evidence demonstrating Abrego is a member of MS-13.”

“For the court to find that Abrego is a member of or in affiliation with MS-13, it would have to make so many inferences from the Government’s proffered evidence in its favor that such conclusion would border on fanciful,” Crenshaw said. 

The Name You Thought Was in the Epstein Files Is in the Epstein Files - 2025-07-23T20:46:20Z

Well, The Wall Street Journal has confirmed what has been apparent for quite some time: President Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files multiple times.

An exclusive Wednesday report in the Journal states that Attorney General Pam Bondi notified the president that his name was in the files back in May. The report directly contradicts Trump’s claim that Bondi told him he was not in the files, which he told reporters last week.

This revelation offers some explanation as to why the Trump administration, after years of promising to release the files, abruptly decided that there was no further work to be done on the matter. It also may explain why the president himself has been so quick to anger and defensiveness in recent days any time the subject of his friendship with the defamed sexual predator has come up. The confirmation of Trump’s presence in the infamous documents comes just as Speaker Mike Johnson ended a legislative session early just to avoid voting on whether to release more files.

All of the internal uproar over this, from FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino going AWOL at work, to Trump calling anyone who is still worried about this code red–level issue a “bad person” can be linked back to the fact that Trump does not want people to know that his name is in the files. If past is prologue, the administration will likely dismiss this report as “fake news” from a biased outlet. But those charges likely won’t stick with an issue of this magnitude. In fact, the president seems to only be driving attention to the story at this point, as each distraction Trump has brought up since he decided to close the case has only led to increased scrutiny from the press—as well as both his most vehement enemies and his most loyal supporters.

Tulsi Gabbard Starts Wild New Conspiracy About Hillary Clinton - 2025-07-23T19:52:32Z

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard went full Russian asset Wednesday during a wild White House press briefing. 

Standing behind a White House podium, Gabbard started quoting old Russian intelligence and claimed that Moscow’s foreign intelligence agency SVR was in possession of “high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary’s ‘psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers.”

That strange little detail came from the freshly declassified 2020 report by the House Intelligence Committee that Gabbard insists holds evidence that former President Barack Obama committed a so-called “coup” against Donald Trump by alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

According to the report, ahead of Trump’s ascendance to the White House, Obama asked for an Intelligence Community Assessment to “review their work to date” on Russia’s influence campaign. Gabbard claims that issues with the production of that January 2017 report are evidence that the Obama administration plotted to spread a false narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to see Trump in the White House—a preference that the foreign autocrat readily admitted.  

When asked about it Wednesday, Gabbard could not account for why Trump had not declassified these supposedly damning materials during his first term. 

She was also unable to provide any explanation for why Trump’s secretary of state, former Florida Senator Marco Rubio, had made opposite findings when he spearheaded a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report. That report found that Putin had directed an “aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election” and had done so with the intent of weakening Clinton’s campaign and seeing Trump elected. 

It’s also probably worth remembering that Trump’s first-term White House was reportedly “awash in speed,” handing out powerful sedatives and stimulants like candy.

It should come as no surprise that Gabbard is already parroting Russian intelligence because it’s exactly the kind of thing that concerned critics of her nomination—and enthused Moscow. 

Gabbard has previously defended Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, claiming that the U.S. had provoked Russian aggression and that Ukraine housed U.S.-funded biolabs that were developing secret bioweapons—a piece of foreign state propaganda that earned her the reputation as a Russian asset. 

Former Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger sounded the alarm about Gabbard on MSNBC in November, noting that, if confirmed, Gabbard would be responsible for putting together the president’s daily briefings and would likely include Russian propaganda. 

Republican Senator Calls on Trump to “Release the Damn” Epstein Files - 2025-07-23T19:39:43Z

Outgoing Republican Senator Thom Tillis just wants President Trump to “release the damn files” in regard to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophile and Trump’s former friend.

“The promise to release the files during the campaign was either overplayed and we got a nothingburger if the files get released, or it’s something really disturbing and that’s actually an even more compelling reason to release it,” Tillis said at an Axios event on Wednesday.

Tillis, a North Carolinian who has said he will resign at the end of his third term next year, is one of the few Republicans in the Senate who has been consistent on this, as the rest of the party capitulates to Trump and attempts to distract the public by voting against further inquiries into the files’ release.

Tillis also noted that he doesn’t see this issue just going away during Congress’s summer recess, as House Speaker Mike Johnson hopes it will.

“I think the files should be released, let the light of day, let the sun shine through, and that’s the best way to get past it,” Tillis said. “Otherwise, if anybody thinks that this is going to go away because the House left a day early or something, it’s going to be like those zombies in The Walking Dead: Every time you think you’ve killed it, another one is just going to come running out of the closet after you.”

Tillis recently made waves for his spirited opposition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the senator referred to as a betrayal of Republican promises.

Trump Just Lost One of His Most Famous Followers: the QAnon Shaman - 2025-07-23T19:20:27Z

Even Donald Trump’s most sycophantic followers are turning on the president.

Jacob Chansley—better known as the QAnon shaman—denounced the MAGA leader Wednesday morning, responding to a post of Trump’s 2023 mugshot by decrying the president as a “fraud.”

“Fuck this stupid piece of shit,” Chansley wrote in a since-deleted post that accrued more than 34,000 views.

In a follow-up post, Chansley wrote: “Oh yea & Fuck Israel! And Fuck Donald Trump!”

Chansley captured national attention when he stormed through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an elaborate, horned fur headdress. In the aftermath of the attack, a face-painted Chansley emerged as one of the central figures of the revolt. Once at the Capitol building, Chansley was in the first group of rioters to break inside. Wielding a bullhorn, he worked to “rile up the crowd and demand that lawmakers be brought out,” according to a sentencing memo.

In late 2021, a federal judge sentenced Chansley to 41 months in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection. But that was undone hours after Trump was inaugurated at the start of this year, when he included Chansley in a clemency order for some 1,600 of his supporters who were involved in the riot.

Trump has held messiah-like status within QAnon’s conspiratorial circle for years thanks to their principal belief that, despite being named and photographed as an associate of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Trump would rid the world of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run the government and media.

In turn, Trump readily welcomed the cockeyed adoration. In 2020, he offered the movement plausible deniability at an executive level—claiming that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its theories. Just two years later, Trump was regularly circulating bits of the conspiracy on TruthSocial and reposting images of himself wearing Q pins emblazoned with the cult’s messaging, “A Storm Is Coming,” referring to Trump’s supposed final victory, when QAnon supporters expect him to mass-execute his opponents.

QAnon supporters turned out en masse in November to help Trump return to the Oval Office. But Trump’s sudden backpedalling on unearthing records related to the Epstein investigation has left a bitter taste in those supporters’ mouths. Their relationship was further strained when Trump referred to his Epstein-minded allies as “stupid,” “naive,” and “foolish,” accusing them of being “duped” by Democrats who he claimed invented the Epstein “hoax.”

But Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

This story has been updated.

Tulsi Gabbard Flails When Asked What New Info She Has on Obama - 2025-07-23T19:11:38Z

The Trump administration’s highly advertised investigation into former President Barack Obama has come up remarkably short.

Speaking at a White House press briefing Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly accused the former president of initiating a “coup” against Donald Trump’s political aspirations—though she was pretty thin on evidence.

“What do you now have that refutes” previous investigations into the matter, inquired a reporter.

“I will encourage you, in my role as director of national intelligence—my job, again, I said when I came into this role, was to make sure we are telling the truth to the American people, and that we are ensuring the intelligence community is not being politicized,” Gabbard began, before handing off the burden of responsibility for proving her theory.

“So I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” she continued. “I’m asking you in the media to conduct honest journalism, and the American people, to see for yourself in the documents that we’ve released—now, close to 200 pages—that point in multiple references, multiple examples, to include comments that have been made by senior intelligence professionals, who are some still working within these agencies today, that confirm the conclusions that we have drawn: that President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a yearslong coup to undermine Trump’s presidency.”

The reporter then pressed if Gabbard believed that previous investigations, which included probes by special counsel Robert Mueller as well as a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee led by now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had either “missed that” or “covered it up.”

“Look at the evidence, and you will know the truth,” Gabbard responded.

Last week, Gabbard declassified a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, leveraging the document as evidence that Obama had pushed for an Intelligence Community Assessment to be released in January 2017 before Trump was to be inaugurated. Days before releasing the report, Gabbard wrote on X that Americans would “finally learn the truth” of how Obama had, according to her, “invented” the Trump-Russia “hoax.”

Trump picked up the theory and ran with it, using the new conspiracy as cover from his own explosive scandals. Deflecting a question about his widely reported ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday, Trump claimed that the only “witch hunt” America’s press should be focused on is the one in which he claimed his administration “caught” Obama “absolutely cold” trying to “rig” the 2020 presidential election.

Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush excoriated the administration in turn, referring to the allegations as “a weak attempt at distraction.”

“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Rodenbush said Tuesday in a statement, underscoring that any treason charges would also implicate Rubio—the second-highest-ranking official in Trump’s Cabinet.

When asked to clarify how Obama could be charged with treason when he has presidential immunity, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she trusted the Justice Department to sort it out.

Federal Judge Kills Trump’s Plan to Get Out of Releasing Epstein Files - 2025-07-23T18:57:16Z

President Trump’s recent bid to quell outrage over his administration’s perceived lack of transparency about the late sex criminal (and the president’s onetime friend) Jeffrey Epstein has hit a stumbling block.

Trump over the weekend requested that grand jury transcripts related to United States v. Epstein be unsealed—a seeming sop to his angry supporters that falls far short of the release of all Epstein-related Justice Department files, which many are demanding. But on Wednesday, a federal judge in Florida denied the DOJ’s request.

In a 12-page opinion, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg wrote that “the Court’s hands are tied,” as Trump’s DOJ failed to argue that its request fell under an exception to “the general rule of secrecy” governing grand jury materials, instead invalidly claiming “special circumstances.”

The Trump administration even acknowledged that its petition wouldn’t pass muster, Rosenberg wrote, as the DOJ conceded that the court couldn’t flout existing precedent regarding grand jury materials. So, Rosenberg ruled, “consistent with [that precedent] and the Government’s concessions, the request to disclose is denied.”

The Justice Department has filed two other requests for Epstein grand jury testimony, both in New York. While those are still pending, the Florida decision is bad news for the president, who’s surely hoping for as swift an end as possible to MAGA’s fury over the Epstein story.

Trump’s EPA Plans to Kill Rule Critical to Fighting Climate Change - 2025-07-23T17:20:20Z

The Trump administration reportedly plans to eliminate an Environmental Protection Agency rule that’s crucial to the federal government’s ability to combat climate change.

According to The New York Times, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is anticipated to officially do away with the agency’s “endangerment finding” in the coming days. The landmark 2009 rule scientifically establishes greenhouse gases as hazards to public health and welfare, and serves as the backbone of the agency’s ability to regulate such gases under the Clean Air Act.

The news of Zeldin’s plan comes on the very same day the United Nations’ top court ruled that countries have a “duty” to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Those that fail to take steps to protect the planet from climate change, the International Court of Justice said, may run afoul of international law.

Zeldin in March announced that the EPA was reconsidering the endangerment finding as part of a broader effort to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

The planned move shows Trump’s EPA acting in accordance with the president’s long-standing conviction that climate change is a hoax. His administration’s second term priorities have included—among other iniquities—increasing American reliance on fossil fuels, gutting climate research, passing the “most anti-environment bill in history,” per Sierra Club, and once again withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

RFK Jr. Is Letting AI Help Run the FDA. There’s Just One Problem - 2025-07-23T17:13:09Z

Reliance on artificial intelligence is breaking down the Food and Drug Administration.

Health officials in the Trump administration have vaunted the burgeoning technology as a way to fast-track and streamline drug approvals, but that hasn’t been the case. Instead, the program is cooking up nonexistent studies, a process referred to as “hallucinating,” according to current and former FDA officials that spoke with CNN.

“Anything that you don’t have time to double-check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently,” one agency worker told the network.

Insiders claim that the program, Elsa, is helpful when it comes to summarizing meetings or email templates, but its usefulness ends there.

“AI is supposed to save our time, but I guarantee you that I waste a lot of extra time just due to the heightened vigilance that I have to have” regarding fact-checking potentially fake or misrepresented studies, another FDA employee told CNN.

Hallucinations are a known problem with generative AI models—and Elsa is no different, according to Jeremy Walsh, the head of AI at the FDA.

“Elsa is no different from lots of [large language models] and generative AI,” Walsh told CNN. “They could potentially hallucinate.”

It’s not the first time that the Department of Health and Human Services has majorly fumbled its use of artificial intelligence.

In May, AI researchers claimed there was “definitive” proof that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team used the tech to write his “Make America Healthy Again” report, and had completely botched the job in the meantime.

Kennedy’s report projected a new vision for America’s health policy, taking aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods, and pesticides. But a NOTUS investigation found seven studies referenced in Kennedy’s 68-page report that the listed study authors said were either wildly misinterpreted or never occurred at all. Researchers noted 522 scientific references in the report that included the phrase “OAIcite” in their URLs—a marker indicating the use of OpenAI.

At the time, administration officials brushed off the controversy as a temporary flub. But the new over-reliance on the tech indicates that the MAHA report was actually a horrifically dangerous precedent, allowing the White House to tiptoe into the realm of unvetted and unverified AI usage to form the basis of America’s public health policy.

Trump’s Prison Swap Welcomed a Convicted Murderer Back to U.S. - 2025-07-23T16:59:07Z

The Trump administration’s massive prisoner swap last week, which saw 10 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents imprisoned in Venezuela freed in exchange for about 250 Venezuelans deported and detained in El Salvador amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, has been framed as an effort to keep America safe.

But as part of that exchange, Trump freed one man convicted of a grisly murder. Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Venezuela, was not a political prisoner. Rather, he was convicted of brutally murdering three people at a law office in Spain in 2016, El País reported. Ortiz is exactly the kind of person Trump lies about every immigrant south of the border being, and yet he’s being welcomed back on American soil with open arms and warm smiles.

Ortiz, a former Marine, was convicted and jailed for a triple homicide in which he axed one man in the head, slashed a woman’s throat, and beat another woman to death before lighting the office on fire. Ortiz then fled to Venezuela, where he had dual citizenship and could not be extradited. He was arrested shortly thereafter and last year was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Thanks to Trump, the convicted murderer barely served his sentence. And even if you think the Venezuelan government’s conviction of Ortiz was unreliable, consider that the Spanish government tried to arrest him first.

Ortiz can be seen smiling for a picture on a State Department plane with the nine other freed prisoners, holding an American flag.

The Trump administration rounded up immigrants without due process and sent them to rot in one of the most inhumane prisons in the world, only to use them in a prison swap that freed a convicted murderer. Just as every other action he’s taken has proved, it isn’t actually about keeping violent, dangerous criminals out, it’s about making sure more people of color don’t come in. If the former were true, Ortiz would still be locked up in Venezuela right now.

Guess Who Was the Only President Less Popular Than Trump Right Now? - 2025-07-23T16:53:31Z

Donald Trump’s approval rating has officially reached an all-time low—for his second term in the White House, that is.

“The USS Donald Trump is taking on a lot of water,” said CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten Wednesday. He reported that Trump’s net approval rating had sunk to -11 points.

“His net approval rating has dropped nearly 20 points in the aggregate since the beginning of his presidency,” Enten said. “The American people do not like what they’re seeing, and Donald Trump’s administration is in a ton of trouble at this point, in the minds of the American voters.”

Enten reported voters had come to disapprove of Trump on practically every single issue of the day. Trump had a net approval rating of -14 points on the economy and foreign policy, with his never-ending tariff negotiations earning him a -15 point approval rating on trade. On immigration, which is arguably Trump’s best issue, his net approval rating was only -5 points.

But Enten did have one piece of good news to offer.

“There is one other presidency that has a lower net approval rating at this point than this one,” Enten said. “The bad news is that it was Donald Trump’s other presidency, his first presidency.”

At this point in Trump’s first stint in the White House, Trump had a net approval rating of -16 points. Enten added that since 1953, the average U.S. president has had a net approval rating of 27 points, placing Trump laughably behind.

Unsurprisingly, the issue voters felt Trump was performing the worst on was Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker whose ties to the president have been resurfaced amid the Trump administration’s hapless flip-flopping on the release of materials related to Epstein’s crimes.

This is bad news for Republican lawmakers who have thrown their lot in with Trump. The House GOP is delaying, perhaps indefinitely, its own nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents, and previously blocked a Democratic attempt to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files, with zero Republicans supporting the measure.

CNN’s Poll of Polls, which tracks Trump’s average approval and disapproval rates in national polls, found that only 41 percent of voters approved of Trump, while 57 percent disapproved.

Last month, Enten analyzed five recent polls that cumulatively indicated that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was historically unpopular, with 49 percent of the country believing it will hurt their families as opposed to the 23 percent who think it will help them.

Tulsi Gabbard Boosts Trump’s Obama Gambit to Distract From Epstein - 2025-07-23T15:52:30Z

In the government’s latest bid to distract from Donald Trump’s emerging ties to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard unveiled supposedly “new evidence” Wednesday that members of the Obama administration had pushed the “lie” that Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton. 

Gabbard declassified a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee report that found former President Barack Obama had pushed for an Intelligence Community Assessment to be released in January 2017, ahead of Trump’s presidency. The assessment produced by the CIA, FBI, and NSA determined that Putin had “aspired” to see Trump enter the White House, while the House Intelligence Committee had not previously been made aware of Putin’s preference for Trump, according to the report. 

The House report found that the Intelligence Committee assessment was prepared by only five CIA analysts and was “not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.” Some CIA officers expressed concerns that the expedited timeline meant the assessment did not meet publication standards.

Gabbard seems to think this is an incredibly damning revelation and that the report alleges Obama ordered a so-called “rewrite” of the intelligence assessments. Her office has the conspiracy-style infographics to prove it—even the White House shared a cringey meme depicting a “Russia Deep State Starter Pack.” 

Gabbard claimed on X that Obama had ordered the Intelligence Committee to produce an assessment that “they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.”

But it’s not clear that Obama ordered any changes to the committee’s assessment at all, instead simply ordering it to review its work to date. 

The committee also found that former CIA Director John Brennan had ordered the publication of 15 supposedly “implausible” reports referring to Putin’s preference for Trump.

Maybe instead of all of the speculation over Putin’s hopes and dreams, someone should just ask the foreign dictator whether he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election? Oh wait, someone did. 

“Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal,” Putin said during a 2018 press conference with Trump. Maybe that could help settle things? 

Last week, Gabbard released a declassified report alleging that members of the Obama administration had “manufactured and politicized” intelligence to create the narrative that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. It’s also worth noting that shortly after the 2016 election, the Obama administration insisted that hackers had not affected the vote tallies.

This is the third week of fallout from the Justice Department’s memo announcing that Epstein kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following. Now Trump said he hopes to shift the attention away from his administration by setting the mob on a new political witch hunt.  

73-Year-Old Republican Senator Disassociates in Middle of Interview - 2025-07-23T15:29:06Z

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy appeared to have a mental episode live on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Tuesday, adding yet another entry to the long, bipartisan list of alarming age-related lowlights from our country’s leaders. 

“I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks—everybody else …” said Kennedy, 73, before trailing off. You can see it in his face—his eyes and mouth particularly—as he struggles to remember what he meant to say or where he is before ultimately giving up and freezing. 

things are going great on Larry Kudlow's show pic.twitter.com/synJiuE38z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 22, 2025

The broadcast quickly got Kennedy off the screen while Kudlow blamed technical difficulties. 

What Kennedy meant to say was “Jesus loves him, but everyone else thinks he’s an idiot,” a phrase he’s repeated countless times over the years. Kennedy’s moment is reminiscent of Mitch McConnell freezing multiple times in 2023, and with the same dissociative look as Kennedy, simply trailing off mid-sentence, looking as if he forgot who or where he was. 

Gerontocracy has been an issue for some time now, as leaders with clear and obvious health issues often remain in office for far longer than they should, usually out of pride and denial.  Representative Gerry Connolly, Dianne Feinstein, and most famously President Joe Biden are other examples. 

ICE’s Suggestion for How to Get Revenge on Your Ex Must Be a Sick Joke - 2025-07-23T15:08:01Z

The Department of Homeland Security is urging Americans to dish the dirt on their undocumented ex-lovers.

“From domestic abuser to deported loser,” the official X account for the agency posted Tuesday, sharing the contact number for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tip line.

The unsavory ploy was in response to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who recounted a recent incident in which he said his office “got a tip from someone whose abusive ex overstayed a tourism visa.”

“He is now cued up for deportation,” Uthmeier wrote.

ICE handles more than 15,000 calls per month, according to the agency’s tip line FAQ.

Federal authorities have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—but actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful temporary residents possessing visas or green cards.

But the new urgency behind deportations under the Trump administration has not brewed a happy scenario behind the scenes for federal immigration agents. Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor Veronica Cardenas told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale at the moment.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic reported that ICE agents were considering quitting the agency altogether, calling the job “infuriating.”

“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” one agent told the magazine, complaining that his focus had been redirected to “arresting gardeners.”

Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney who had resigned from the agency’s legal department, told The Atlantic that the operation had become “a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.” Miller was embroiled in another callous scandal last week when video footage of him as a teenager resurfaced in which he referred to the torture of Iraqis as a “celebration of human life and dignity.”

“We still need good attorneys at ICE,” Boyd said. “There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

Trump Is Secretly Furious That People Are Still Talking About Epstein - 2025-07-23T14:54:00Z

With the Jeffrey Epstein affair having now put President Trump in the rare defensive position for multiple weeks, the president is seething, per Politico’s conversations with unnamed sources within and close to the White House.

In recent days, the president has endeavored to draw national attention to anything other than his perceived bungling of the case of the late notorious sex criminal and his former friend.

But try as Trump might to bend the news cycle to his will, the public eye remains trained, for the time being, on the Epstein issue.

A source close to the White House reportedly told Politico that Trump “is clearly furious,” and it’s “the first time I’ve seen [the Trump camp] sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official reportedly said the president “feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention.” Regarding Trump’s current mindset, the official said, “When you’re working 12 to 15 hours a day to solve real problems and you turn on the TV and see people talking about Jeffrey Epstein, that’s frustrating.”

The frustration is, in part, a recognition that the Epstein issue is “a vulnerability” for the Trump administration, added another source—this one a “White House ally,” who described the controversy as an unforced error on the part of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, both notable (but far from the only) examples of Trump officials who previously stoked the Epstein flames now scorching the president.

“They’re the ones that opened the can of worms on the Epstein conversation. No one made them do this, which makes it sting even worse,” the source said. Trump’s team “would like to move on and talk about the things they think are Ws,” but remains bedeviled by this “overshadowing news cycle.”

Indeed, as congressional Democrats seize on the issue—with some Republican colleagues also joining the charge—the press is, seemingly by the minute, unearthing details about Trump’s relationship with the disgraced financier, and the president’s base is as fired up over the matter as ever. Epstein’s ghost isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Oath Keepers Founder Pardoned by Trump Warns Him Over Epstein Files - 2025-07-23T14:25:31Z

Stewart Rhodes is as dyed-in-the-wool MAGA as it gets.

The Yale-educated founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group embraced Donald Trump in 2016—sharing his animus toward the supposed “deep state” cabal controlling Washington—then, naturally, took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. (“We should have brought rifles.… I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost,” he told fellow militia members days later.) Trump, in turn, commuted his 18-year sentence.

Now, Rhodes has joined the ranks of MAGA faithful urging the seemingly reluctant president to provide full transparency on the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Justice Department and FBI earlier this month roiled his base with a memo dismissing conspiracy theories alleging that Epstein had kept a client list and did not commit suicide in prison. The president has, in recent days, taken to calling what was once a cause célèbre in Trumpworld a Democratic “hoax.”

At a meeting of the anti-government True Texas Project last week, per video obtained by The Daily Beast, Rhodes expressed his disappointment that Trump was, by his reckoning, being led astray by the deep state.

“I believe 90 percent of his own base understands that Epstein was up to something, and we know that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rhodes said.

“It’s really disheartening to see President Trump just declare that to be a hoax. I don’t think it is. And I think it’s going to cause him trouble in his own base. It already is,” he continued, per the Beast. “Someone in his circle has convinced him that, ‘Oh this is like Hunter Biden’s laptop story.’ It’s not. This is the deep state’s dirty laundry in the deep state’s greatest Achilles’ heel.

“Their job now is to distract him, run the clock out until he’s gone without him actually going after the root of the deep state, the heart and soul of it,” Rhodes went on. “And I do believe the heart and soul of the deep state is all the dirty laundry that’s held in all those files in the FBI, CIA, NSA against all these political elites.”

Rhodes evidently maintains his faith in Trump as a noble crusader for the truth. In the comments reported by the Beast, he ignores the prospect that Trump’s foot-dragging on Epstein could, possibly, owe to the so-called Epstein files’ inclusion of embarrassing disclosures about the president—who, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased financier that new reporting is bringing more clearly into view.

Attributing Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt to divine intervention, Rhodes remarked, “God saved him for a purpose, and that purpose is to defeat the deep state. It’s not to make great trade deals. It’s not to have a great economy. It’s not any of that stuff. The real heart and soul of it is to defeat the deep state, because if he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be exponentially worse for all of us.”

He urged those in attendance to “keep pushing.”

Epstein’s Brother Exposes Just How Close Epstein and Trump Really Were - 2025-07-23T14:09:08Z

Nearly three weeks of distraction and denial from President Trump have only raised more questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Epstein’s own brother Mark took to CNN to confirm what Trump wants everyone to forget: He and the pedophile financier were quite close.

“From what you know, from what you saw, how close was your brother to Donald Trump?” CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Mark Epstein on Tuesday. 

“They were very close. They were good friends,” Mark replied. “Jeffrey used to sometimes tell me things that Donald said that were funny. I know Donald was in Jeff’s office a lot back in the ’90s.… It’s documented that Jeff—Donald flew on Jeff’s plane a number of times. I don’t know if they ever checked, but I know Jeff flew in Donald’s plane also, I don’t know if they’ve ever looked at his flight logs. They were good friends.” 

This comes right as CNN released previously unseen images of Trump and Epstein from Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, a connection that was not previously public knowledge. 

Mark Epstein went on to tell Burnett that he had actually taken a flight with his brother and Trump. 

“A couple weeks or a week before that flight I was talkin’ to Jeffrey, and he told me that he was talkin’ to Donald and that he asked Donald, ‘How can you sleep with so many married women?’ And Donald’s answer was ‘because it’s so wrong.’ Now amongst guys that was a funny line, and then when we were on the plane … Jeffrey asked Donald the same question … so that I could hear Donald say it.… For Jeffrey to ask him that question, number one: He would have to know that Donald slept with a lot of married women, and he probably got that information from Donald.” 

“It implies a confidence,” Burnett interjected. 

“That’s not the kind of question you ask a casual acquaintance.… That’s a question that you ask a good friend that you can get away with asking those kinds of questions.”

Mark later said Epstein went on to say that the president is just “trying to cover his butt.”

Just two weeks ago, Trump was acting like he’d only heard of Jeffrey Epstein in passing. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey … Epstein?” he said, pausing as if the name was unfamiliar to him. Now it’s all but obvious that Trump was a confidant of the man responsible for victimizing over a thousand women and girls for years. Feigning ignorance and throwing your base unrelated bones doesn’t work as well when the evidence saying otherwise grows more damning by the day.  

Trump Crashes Out Over Damning Resurfaced Photos With Epstein - 2025-07-23T13:35:18Z

The president’s reportedly close history with Jeffrey Epstein is becoming harder to refute.

CNN published videos and little-known photographs Tuesday of Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, proving that the pedophilic sex trafficker was in attendance at Trump’s ceremony at the Plaza Hotel. It was previously not widely known that Epstein was a guest at the wedding.

The network also found video footage of the two men laughing and chatting together ahead of a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event.

But when the network rang to inquire about the images, Trump exploded.

“We were not on the phone very long,” reporter Andrew Kaczynski told CNN host Erin Burnett. “I think our call was about 30 seconds or so. But when I asked him about the wedding photo, he said he sort of paused for a second and then said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’ before calling CNN ‘fake news’ and then hanging up on me.”

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, ferociously spit back at the network, decrying the images as “nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events.” He accused CNN of leveraging the images in its reporting to “disgustingly infer something nefarious.”

“The fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media,” Cheung told CNN.

But Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he knew Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

Trump Fails Basic Math Problem Trying to Brag About Drug Prices - 2025-07-23T13:09:54Z

Donald Trump won’t stop lying about his dangerous plan to decrease drug prices in the stupidest way possible.

“This is something that nobody else can do,” Trump said during a reception with members of Congress Tuesday night. “We’re gonna get the drug prices down. Not 30 or 40 percent, which would be great, not 50 or 60, no. We’re gonna get ’em down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.”

He bragged that he could use a “certain talent” to reach “numbers not even thought to be achievable.” If anything, the president’s certain talent is to offer hyperbole in place of actual policy.

Trump’s phony math didn’t stop there. “We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000 percent, by 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 700, 600; not 30 or 40 or 50 percent but numbers the likes of which you’ve never even dreamed of before,” he added later.

Is it all of those numbers? Is it any of them? In reality, the president’s disastrous tariff policies have threatened to send drug prices skyrocketing. A report commissioned in April by a group of pharmaceutical companies found that even a 25 percent tariff on pharmaceutical imports would raise drug costs by $51 billion annually. Trump’s latest proposal involves a 200 percent tariff on pharmaceuticals, with little concern for the Americans who need regular access to prescription medications.

On Tuesday, Trump also said that he would use import restrictions to force foreign drug suppliers to cut prices, which seems at odds with his own designs to boost domestic drug manufacturing.

The issue of prescription drug prices being nearly three times higher for Americans than consumers in the rest of the world is gravely serious, but the president has chosen to meet the moment with made-up statistics.

Trump has a penchant for inventing numbers to oversell his economic policies. He previously claimed that he’d already struck 200 trade deals—but he’s signed fewer than 10. And he won’t stop claiming that gas prices across the country have dipped under $2, when in reality, the lowest state average is $2.71 and the national average is over $3.

Transcript: Trump’s Fury at Obama Unnerves Experts: “We’re in Trouble” - 2025-07-23T10:54:45Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 23 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

In the last few days, we seem to have crossed a threshold. President Trump is ratcheting up the authoritarianism and threatening to arrest his enemies in a new kind of way. He’s angrily hinting at arresting Barack Obama and other members of his administration. He’s openly saying that Obama committed sedition. And he’s raging that Senator Adam Schiff is also guilty of crimes, explicitly calling for him to be put in “prison.” Critically, however, all this has been accompanied by a new type of manipulation of the bureaucracy, one clearly designed to manufacture pretexts for the prosecutions of those enemies. Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, put it all very starkly on Bluesky, saying that authoritarianism is “right here in front of us.” Ryan added this: “You either fight it or you accept that this is our future.” So we’re talking to Ryan today about his warning. Thanks for coming on, Ryan.

Ryan Enos: Yeah, thank you. I’m glad to be here talking about this.

Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s threat toward Barack Obama. The basic gist of this is that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, put out this supposed finding that the Obama administration faked the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. A reporter asked Trump about Tulsi Gabbard, who referred this to the Justice Department for prosecution. Listen to this.

Reporter (audio voiceover): Tulsi Gabbard has submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice. From your perspective, who should the DOJ target as part of their investigation, what specific figures in the Obama administration?

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Well, based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it. And Biden was there with them and [James] Comey was there and [James] Clapper. The whole group was there. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.

Sargent: Ryan, what makes all this so preposterous is that a Republican-led Senate committee concluded that Russia sought to interfere on the 2016 election to help Trump, as well. Your reaction to all this?

Enos: Well, yeah. Of course, we have to first start by saying this is a pretext, as many of Trump’s attacks on his political opponents and on civil institutions he doesn’t like are: There’s no basis for this. As you mentioned, this is something that we’ve gone over in the past nine years at this point over and over again. And there’s no doubt that Russia had a preference for Donald Trump and that they acted on that. And why would we expect anything different out of one’s geopolitical opponent? That’s the way they do things. But more importantly—and this is the thing that we should be so worried about as Americans—this is what authoritarians do. They threaten to arrest their political opponents.

Sargent: Well, just to bear down a little on the facts here, Gabbard’s charges are snake oil. She mixes up two different claims: one that Russia hacked the votes and the other that Russia tried to swing the election. As The New York Times points out, Gabbard holds up a supposed admission by an Obama official that Russia failed to successfully hack the votes as proof that the whole claim about Russia is made up, but the Obama administration never claimed Russia successfully hacked the votes. The whole thing is made up, as the ranking Intelligence Committee Democrat Mark Warner notes. Ryan, isn’t the brazenness of the swindle itself almost the cause for concern?

Enos: Well, yes. There’s so many things that Donald Trump has … claims he’s made to the American public that are frankly preposterous. In some ways, it shows the lack of respect he has for the American voter and the American electorate. But I think that in many ways, it raises something larger where he doesn’t feel like he has to make claims that have any type of validity, which is what people do when they’re not worried about the repercussions and public opinion and in the ballot box. When you can trump up flimsy claims that can be easily disproven, that once again is a signal that somebody is operating as an authoritarian.

Again, we can go back to these examples over and over again—where, when opposition politicians have been arrested in other countries, it’s often using preposterous claims. And when Donald Trump trots something out that is so preposterous, it gives us a concern that he doesn’t care about the facts. Now, of course, we should say that Donald Trump either believes or acts like he believes all kinds of conspiracy theories, ones that are convenient for him, like that he won the 2020 election. So one interpretation is that Donald Trump just doesn’t have a command of reality. But that, of course, is concerning as well.

Sargent: And I wonder if that almost lets him off the hook. To me, what I’m seeing here, and you can maybe talk about this as a scholar of government and authoritarianism, is that the brazenness is the whole point. The brazenness of the swindle is an assertion of power in its own right. He’s basically saying, Yes, I’m making stuff up about the opposition as a pretext to arrest them, and I can do that. Tough. Now he doesn’t say it quite that way, but the preposterousness of the claims says that. Can you talk a little bit about that as a symptom of authoritarian breakdown?

Enos: Yeah. When [people] talk about the breakdown of democracy or the breakdown of democratic norms, when people are commenting on it, they will often use these terms such as a “test” or a “trial balloon” or something like that. And what they mean is that somebody is trying something and seeing whether they can get away with it, essentially. And it’s never clear how much somebody doing something like that actually has that logic going through their head. But if you’ve ever raised children, for example, you know that they take signals from what they can get away with to understand what they can get away with next.

And what Donald Trump is doing—and in many ways this makes it sound too anodyne, too unimportant—is he is testing the legal limits of the presidency. [That] is the kind of language people use, which is a nice way of saying he’s doing things that should be illegal, or at least should be things that should be condemned by all the democratic norms of this country that have operated for more than 200 years. And yet he does them. And if he does something that is so brazen, and his party and the people that he has appointed to the bureaucracy go along with it rather than saying, You can’t do this, or I condemn you breaking these democratic norms, then that’s a signal that he can do it again. So every time somebody does something that pushes the limits of what is acceptable, does something that seems brazen, and, as you mentioned, does something that seems to assert their power—in many ways, if it is not pushed back on, that becomes a new power they have. If we don’t condemn it, if it’s not something that is shut down, all of a sudden that new power is something that is adopted by that would-be authoritarian. And it seems very clear that that is what Donald Trump is doing.

Sargent: Just to tease that out a little more, if I understand you correctly, you’re basically saying that Trump is testing both the Republican Party but also, in an important respect, testing his underlings. If he just preposterously invents pretexts for prosecuting opponents, will his underlings go along? Well, here it sure looks like Tulsi Gabbard, one of those underlings, is very much going along. I don’t know what DOJ will do, but if we understand what Trump is doing as a test, the absurdity of the claim, the absurdity of the pretext tests whether the underlings will carry out lawless actions based on them, correct?

Enos: Yeah, that is correct. And in many ways, that’s one of the most concerning things about what is going on in this second Trump regime: the fact that he has gutted the independence of the bureaucracy. Now, one of the first checks that went away—and this, in many ways, went away during the first four years of Trump...was that his party failed to oppose him and slowly the people that did oppose him left and they fell into line. And the Republican Party became totally subservient to Donald Trump. What was still the case, though, in the first Trump administration, as it should be in a functioning democracy, is that you had an independent bureaucracy that would not carry out illegal orders. They would not do things that they have sworn an oath to the Constitution not to do, and they had civil service protections and other things that make them independent of these political persecutions. But for all the different reasons that we’ve seen unfold in the last six months, that has gone away.

And he was able to stock things like the Department of Justice—and this is very concerning when you think about it for the rule of law—with people that seem to be more loyalist than anything else. So when he puts out these orders that a person that believes in democracy would say, I will not carry out, he is testing to see if people will carry him out. This, again, is part of the problem: He’s putting these things out there and see if people will oppose them. And he’s shown a very open willingness to fire people that he considers insufficiently loyal. That increases the probability that whoever’s left after everybody has been fired, people like Tulsi Gabbard and all these other folks that we have running these places now and the people under them, will carry out orders even if they are illegal and damaging to democracy.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to more of Trump talking about Obama. Here’s what he told reporters.

Trump (audio voiceover): This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up. This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.

Sargent: Ryan, there he accuses Obama of sedition, treason, and all the rest of it. Can you put that charge in a broader context for us? Is this something that is symptomatic of authoritarian breakdown in and of itself?

Enos: Yes. And we could dwell on the more technical components of this, as well, which, of course, is the case that the sitting president of the United States—which I think is the claim, that Obama did this when he was the president—looking into the attack on the election integrity by a foreign government is not something that could possibly be seen as treasonous. That would seem like actually one of his duties. So there’s something convoluted about it anyway, but I think in many ways that is also important because it shows how this claim of treason—something where somebody is making an attack on not just the officeholder or something like that but an attack on the country itself, doing something that’s un-American [and], in some ways, treasonous—is something that is symptomatic of what happens in other countries during democratic breakdown.

This is what happened in Hungary, for example. Viktor Orbán, when he was taking apart Hungary’s democracy, would often accuse his opponents of doing things that were … I can’t remember exactly the words he used, but something like anti-Hungarian is essentially what this would translate into. Saying, He was doing things that were against the Hungarian state.… Often, this is the case: They say, You’re doing something that is treasonous to the people or treasonous this larger project of the country. And it very much fits that because it’s something that is trying to capture this populist attack on the rule of law.

Sargent: So on this point about manipulating the bureaucracy, we have this Adam Schiff matter. Trump is now claiming that Schiff committed mortgage fraud based on him identifying two different residences—one in Maryland just outside D.C. [and] the other in California—as primary residences on loans. Schiff flatly denies any misrepresentation, and it’s common for members of Congress to have two residences this way. But that aside, a government entity called the Federal Housing Finance Agency produced the supposed evidence of this. We have a piece on this up at tnr.com. You can check it out. It was then referred to DOJ for prosecution. Now, that aside, here again, you have Trump using the bureaucracy to create reasons for DOJ to prosecute his enemies. Your thoughts on this one?

Enos: Yeah. In many ways, I find this one even more concerning than Trump’s rantings about Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. What we see here is an attack on a sitting member of the opposition—a sitting politician, a prominent one that is a member of the opposition to Trump. And that, again, is something that is directly out of the authoritarian playbook where you try to silence politicians and the other party—and not retired politicians, in this case. It’s very concerning in that respect as well, but it’s also concerning for the reasons you highlighted, which is that we’re seeing a weaponization of the bureaucracy here. Even with the way the Trump administration has taken apart the federal bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy still is involved in so many aspects of every American’s life, right? It handles things like our mortgages; it has oversight over our insurance, our paychecks, in many cases, through Social Security, our taxes, everything else. So you can think about all the ways that federal bureaucracy can be made to trump up charges against individuals if they’re willing to ignore the reasons they shouldn’t be doing that, which are often illegal in many cases. But Trump has ignored those.

There’s a lot of cases of this. For example, one of the more prominent examples is Trump’s attacks on my employer, Harvard University, where he’s pulled out every stop he possibly can to think about, How can the federal government try to punish this institution that I don’t like? And you could see if it wasn’t a mortgage thing that Trump could start digging through Adam Schiff’s taxes or whatever else he wanted to do to try to find a way to punish him. As we know, if you try hard enough, I guess I should say, it’s not impossible to find reasons that somebody technically broke the law, but we have norms against prosecuting people and trying to dig up reasons to prosecute them. Trump simply ignores those because he doesn’t believe that this damage that would happen to democracy is important.

In that sense, I worry more about this one. One more thing I’ll say against this attack on Schiff than I do these other things is that, ultimately, somebody like Adam Schiff … now [Trump] could actually prosecute him. And Trump doesn’t control the judiciary—at least not top to bottom—so there’s a good chance this could go to court and it could get thrown out. But a politician, of course, might have to decide the next time he’s ready to run or to criticize Trump or to do whatever that this just isn’t worth it. Who wants to subject themselves to that kind of disruption of their lives, to have to pay for lawyers, to have to worry about whether or not they could possibly go to prison if they don’t get the right judge, for example? And that kind of thing is what undoes the opposition to authoritarian leaders. Everything Trump would be doing could be technically perfectly legal in a certain respect—but once you weaponize the bureaucracy to say, I’m going to [go] after my political opponents, it makes life very hard on those opponents in a way that undoes their ability to be political opponents. And at that point, when you don’t have opposition, you’re undoing democracy.

Sargent: Hugely alarming. And I think this really is underscored by Trump talking about Schiff, which we’ll listen to right now.

Trump (audio voiceover): Now it looks like Adam Schiff really did a bad thing. They have him. Now let’s see what happens. It’s not up to me. It’s not up to … I stay out of it purposely, but it’s mortgage loan fraud. It’s a big deal.

Sargent: Ryan, what strikes me about that is him saying that he’s staying out of the decision whether to prosecute, which is pretty hilarious given that he’s openly and explicitly urging the bureaucracy to find reasons to prosecute. Can you talk about that?

Enos: Yeah, I was very struck by that as well because, of course, he almost directly contradicted himself afterward. And I think what that signaled when he said he was going to stay out and then, of course, he said, But you should prosecute him, and here’s all these things we know and he’s going to be prosecuted and found guilty and such, is it shows this tension of this moment we’re in where the U.S. is in a moment where we see our democracy slipping away into the state of what we call competitive authoritarianism. But that democracy is still there and functioning.… It’s in a very concerning point, but it’s still out there. And so these norms still operate somewhat, where Trump is trying to signal, Well, I’m staying out of it. He’s trying to give this air of legitimacy to it as we would expect in a democracy where these things happen impartially and not for political reasons.

But then of course, he then goes and bulldozes right over those norms because Trump doesn’t actually believe in those. It, again, is this problem where even if nothing happens—even if it’s just a bunch of hot air and we never even see any attempted prosecution—imagine you’re the next Democrat that wants to run for office. [You’d] think, Well, is this really worth it? If I come into Trump’s political crosshairs and he’s going to criticize me and threaten to persecute me like that, then it just might not be something I want to do. Maybe I won’t run for office.

Sargent: Well, I want to ask you about how Democrats should respond to this. The hook is that just moments ago, Obama’s office responded to Trump’s charge of treason. I’m going to read the whole statement from Barack Obama’s office, “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction. Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.” Point being Rubio is now secretary of state. You’d think he’d be asked about this. Do you think that response is good enough, Ryan?

Enos: Well, I think it’s OK. I do wish that Democrats would more often call this what it is and point out that when you are threatening to prosecute your political opponents that we’re slipping into authoritarianism. And often, I think that people like Barack Obama maybe think they’re above the fray or something, so they don’t want to say that—or just that Democratic leaders don’t recognize this moment we’re in. And I think that’s often the problem we see coming out of many prominent Democrats in Congress and other places. So I do worry about the fact that they are not strong enough in these statements. But I do think it’s worthwhile noting that Trump, I should say, is in a remarkable moment of political weakness right now, where he is on the defensive. And it doesn’t take a lot to imagine that the reason he is putting out all these crazy things right now is because of him being on the defensive because of this Epstein stuff. And I would point that out too. I think Obama came close to saying that—that he’s trying to do this as “a distraction.” But he’s trying to do this [as a] diversion because Trump is the one that has a lot to hide at this point. And I think it’s important that Democrats are willing to point that out.

Sagrent: I agree 100 percent. I think maybe Democrats like Obama … by the way, I should point out that Obama has in some of his other public statements, seems to indicate an awareness of the moment we are in. I wonder whether some Democrats are thinking to themselves, Well, we don’t want to make Trump look too strong. It’s a bit of a jujitsu calculation that gets you to that point, but I worry that that’s what they’re thinking; that it’s something along the lines of, OK, we know we’re in real trouble here, but we want to respond with ridicule to make Trump look weak and little, an impulse that I get. But the moment demands more.

Enos: Yeah, I would agree with that. At some point, I think we have to think past the exact political calculations of it and just recognize the moment we’re in. And I should say that I think that largely, the American people do respond to these threats to our democratic norms. They respond to them negatively. And you can see this in Trump’s poll numbers. You can see this in the fact that the people that he has attacked in this authoritarian manner have largely been supported by the American people. This includes universities and things like that that have been attacked. And I think that’s because with all the faults we have as the American electorate—like we elected this guy twice—at the same time, Americans don’t take well to people that are trying to attack our democracy. At least the majority of them don’t. Of course, Democrats are thinking about the next election—but they also just have to think about the state of our democracy. And often those two things are compatible with each other. You can point out that somebody is damaging the system that we all value, and that hurts that opponent electorally. And that’s very clearly what Trump is doing in this case.

Sargent: I would add to all that by saying that Democrats have a responsibility as public officials and as leadership figures to communicate to the public what our situation is. So to close this out, and not to get too technical with the language here, but are we fucked or are we not fucked?

Enos: Well, as an academic, I always have to take the either-or/middle-ground type of response to that. But I would say that we’re in real trouble in the short term—fucked, if you will—in the sense that every democratic roadblock we thought we would have that would stop Donald Trump has failed us and has done so more quickly than we thought it would. One of the things that alarms me the most is how quickly all these things have fallen apart. And we could list them: from our political parties to our independent bureaucracy, to our judiciary, to many aspects of our civil society.

I do think, though, that it takes a lot. And this isn’t just me speaking off the cuff; this is something there’s political science research on. It takes a lot to bring down 250 years of democracy. We have a lot of norms that are failing us right now, but they are ingrained into the American people where we do believe in democracy. It’s not like we’re perfect, but a lot of people do believe in democracy and do value it. And we do see opposition. And it’s going to be tough. It’s going to be a tough next three and a half years. But if I had to guess, I think we’re going to come out from it OK. It’s just a guess. I think we’re going to come out from it OK in the long run. I think at the end of this three and a half years, we’re going to have a lot of rebuilding. And where we go in the future is going to depend a lot on what changes we make to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Sargent: Yes. And I think that the chances that we come out OK are reinforced if people stay in this and remain engaged. That is one of the most critical things here. Ryan Enos, it was an enormous pleasure to talk to you, man. It was really interesting. Thank you.

Enos: Yeah, thank you.

Yet Another Way Republicans Are Making Life More Expensive - 2025-07-23T10:00:00Z

The dollar cost of climate change usually comes in the form of numbers so big they’re nearly impossible to understand. The price of global warming will add up to $38 trillion by 2049, one study projected. By 2090, it might reduce global gross domestic product by 70 percent, experts in risk management have calculated. These figures are mind-numbingly huge. They’re also abstract—as abstract, you might say, as pledges to cap emissions at 1.5 or two degrees Celsius, or achieve “net-zero” emissions sometime in the future. If we don’t start doing something now, the numbers suggest, then someone at some point will have to pay a lot of money to deal with the problem. But these stupendous losses are not something we’ll begin to feel at some distant point in the future: They’re already here. Day by day, we’re experiencing them incrementally—and painfully—at the grocery store.

On Monday, an interdisciplinary team of researchers in Europe and the United Kingdom published a study in Environmental Research Letters tracking the impact of 16 climate-fueled extreme weather events on rising food prices around the world from 2022 to 2024. After the Horn of Africa’s worst drought in 40 years, which occurred in 2022, food prices in Ethiopia rose 40 percent by the next spring. In September 2023, following the country’s record-breaking temperatures the previous month, rice prices in Japan climbed 48 percent. As the result of intense droughts across Southern Europe in 2022 and 2023, olive oil prices rose by 50 percent. In California and Arizona, prolonged drought in summer 2022 caused vegetable prices there to rise by 80 percent as growers faced water shortages, extreme heat, and dried-out soil. And in Pakistan, in August 2022, monsoon rains that were 547 percent wetter than average led to devastating floods and much wetter soil, which drove rural food prices up by 50 percent.

Central banks charged with maintaining price stability, meanwhile, have been relatively slow to recognize the challenge climate change poses to that mandate. Wonkish conversations about central banks’ responsibility vis-à-vis climate change have tended to focus on systemic risks that climate policies could pose to fossil fuel assets on bank balance sheets (for example, how a high carbon tax might devalue bank-financed coal, oil, and gas infrastructure), or the considerable threats extreme weather poses to real estate investments. But there’s been comparatively less attention paid to questions of price stability. (One of the researchers on the Environmental Research Letters paper is affiliated with the European Central Bank, although its findings are “not necessarily those of the European Central Bank nor its Governing Council.”)

Financial institutions haven’t been especially proactive about addressing climate risks of any kind. Several of the world’s largest banks—including JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley—have rolled back climate pledges in recent years, in part due to pressure from Republicans and, now, the Trump administration. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has never been thrilled about the idea of the Fed considering climate change, and recently, amid mounting criticism from the White House, he reiterated that position on Capitol Hill. “It is a big risk to our independence if we were to stray into areas where we shouldn’t that really aren’t part of our mandate,” Powell said, in response to Republicans’ hostile questions about the Fed’s modest moves asking banks to study their exposure to climate change and climate policy. “I would agree that climate is the biggest risk,” he said, not to balance sheets or prices but to central bank independence.

For farmers and those of us who buy their products—so, everyone—climate change isn’t some far-off threat or ideological belief but a real-time drain on resources and monthly bills. In February, farmers with the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, alongside the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, sued Trump’s Department of Agriculture over its attempts to ax climate-related policies and datasets. Plaintiffs argued that the administration’s purge denied farmers the information they need to make business decisions regarding their own risks from heat waves, floods, and other kinds of climate-fueled extreme weather. In May, the USDA relented, and said it had already begun restoring the data in question.

Of course, Republicans are still attempting to ban federal agencies from discussing climate change, and halt any modest progress the U.S. has made to deal with it. As the costs of rising temperatures continue to add up on grocery store receipts, insurance premiums, and rent checks, the main problem with the GOP’s climate denial isn’t that they don’t believe in science but that their policies are—day by day, family by family—making life more expensive. Republicans’ war on climate data and policy makes it even harder for people to connect the dots between the heat waves that are driving up their electric bills and pricier hamburgers. And as long as people don’t know the real reasons food is getting more expensive, Republicans can cast the blame for rising costs onto Democrats or some other enemy of their choosing. In reality, the GOP has spent decades conspiring with its corporate donors to block climate policy and pad polluters’ bottom lines—and, as a result, drive up the cost of your dinner.

Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb - 2025-07-23T10:00:00Z

A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.

The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.

Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.

“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.

The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”

Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful. This comes after Bondi’s recent announcement that there’s no evidence of any Epstein “client list,” which appeared to close the door on any release of the “Epstein files,” the trove of evidence gathered by law enforcement in connection with his arrest. That has persuaded much of the MAGA movement—and many liberals and Democrats—that a lot is being kept hidden about his activities that would implicate other elites.

Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.

For instance, Wyden suggests that DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents should “immediately investigate the evidence contained in the Treasury Department records on Epstein.” Wyden’s investigators know of these records because his office has been examining Epstein’s financial transactions for several years. In February 2024—when Democrats controlled the Senate—Wyden’s staff viewed in camera (that is, privately) thousands of pages of Treasury files documenting those transactions.

That review brought to Wyden’s attention the $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions flagged to Treasury by big banks, which is detailed in the Times report. Wyden’s letter fleshes out these revelations, noting starkly that Treasury’s “Epstein file contains significant information on the sources of funding behind Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.”

That appears to mean Wyden’s investigators saw evidence in those SARS that a large chunk of the money that passed through Epstein’s network was related to that sex trafficking. As the letter notes:

Epstein clearly had access to enormous financing to operate his sex trafficking network, and the details on how he got the cash to pay for it are sitting in a Treasury Department filing cabinet.

To be fair, it’s unclear whether DOJ has or has not examined these Treasury files; it’s possible it has done so. But Wyden’s office notes that at minimum, DOJ has a responsibility to say whether it has done this and, if so, what this review unearthed. DOJ has not replied to Wyden’s questions in this regard, his office says.

Wyden’s letter also lays out other lines of inquiry for DOJ, urging examination of a number of specific payments to Epstein by several wealthy financiers that his investigators discovered. The letter also suggests subpoenaing banks that filed these SARS, in case they failed to report on Epstein-related transactions that remain unknown.

In an intriguing move, Wyden also presses DOJ to examine “hundreds of millions of dollars in wire transfers” discovered by his investigators that passed through “several now-sanctioned Russian banks.” The latter adds suggestively: “It appears that these wire transfers were correlated to the movement of women or girls around the world.”

Wyden also urges DOJ to investigate banks that failed to report on suspicious Epstein transfers in a timely manner and to depose bankers who presided over large Epstein-related transactions, among other things.

All this could worsen this fiasco for Trump. Right now the White House insists that he personally favors transparency on the Epstein files but is letting Bondi, DOJ, and the FBI decide how to proceed. Miraculously, they are opting not to divulge the files beyond moving to release grand jury testimony, the one thing Trump has ordered them to seek, as it’s unlikely to be revelatory.

Given Trump’s professed desire for transparency, it’s unclear why he won’t simply order the full files released. With new reporting suggesting Trump might have been closer to Epstein than previously known, the possibility that Trump himself is in the files—whether in incriminating fashion or not—can’t be dismissed.

Wyden is also demanding that Treasury release to Congress these SARS documenting Epstein’s transactions. Yet Treasury is apparently refusing, making the administration’s obfuscation look even darker.

In that regard, Wyden’s office also offers another revelation. In the Times piece, a Treasury spokesperson dismissed Wyden’s demand for release of these documents, insisting that when Joe Biden was president, Wyden “never asked” for this information, exposing the demand as “political theater.”

But Wyden’s office says this is false. The in-camera review by Wyden staffers of Treasury documents in February 2024 itself shows that Wyden sought this info from the Biden administration—and that he got access to it.

What’s more, a Wyden aide tells me that in 2024, soon after Wyden’s staff viewed these Treasury documents in camera, Wyden actively moved to get the Senate to subpoena their release. Because Finance Committee rules require bipartisan support for subpoenas, Wyden sought the backing of several GOP senators on the committee, including now-chairman Mike Crapo and Marsha Blackburn. But none would support a subpoena, the aide says.

That also has very dark implications, and you’d think MAGA would now intensify pressure on Senate Republicans to seek access to these Treasury documents as well. But with the Epstein scandal now threatening Trump with serious political damage, a subset of powerful MAGA influencers—ones who initially thought the files would expose pedophilia among elite Democrats—are suddenly losing their zeal to see them divulged. House GOP leaders just scuttled a vote on compelling their release.

That’s why moves like this one by Wyden are important, and why Democrats should use their limited power to do more of them. This would keep the spotlight focused where it counts: The Trump administration possesses large amounts of information about Epstein’s corrupt and depraved dealings with unidentified members of the global elite, and Trump and his top advisers—with active GOP acquiescence—are now all in on the elite cover-up.

An Altogether Different Kind of Abundance Agenda - 2025-07-23T10:00:00Z

Back in 1935, on the pages of The New Republic, the editors wrote that the United States was in desperate need of “a party with real possibilities of becoming powerful in elections in the not distant future, and devoted to the purpose of establishing collectivism so that the working masses may produce abundance for themselves.” Those words ring as true today as they did when they were first published 90 years ago.

You might have noticed the word “abundance” lurking on TNR’s pages lately. While abundance is all the rage as a political clarion call these days, its modern iteration is entirely disjointed from a long history of the word’s use on the left to call for a very different political program from the one imagined by current abundists like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson discussed on their Citations Needed podcast, the term was long used in social justice circles as a foil for focusing on growth or wealth building. We should prioritize ensuring widely shared prosperity over the generation of new wealth, the argument went.

Last winter, I chanced upon a copy of The New Republic, Volume 83, from the summer of 1935 while doing some Christmas shopping in a neighborhood antiques store. As I perused the volume, I was struck by how often the word abundance was used to describe the purpose of a proposed new political party on the left. By this point, I had been following the rise of our modern abundance movement for the better part of two years. The abundance called for in the pages of TNR in 1935 is strikingly different from the abundance called for today by a loose coalition of (largely) centrist liberals and libertarians.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been frequently invoked by both proponents and critics of the abundance movement in recent months. Critics point to the New Deal as a paradigm that we should strive to replicate, where capital is disciplined, wealth redistributed, and direct government action used to build critical infrastructure the private sector won’t. Proponents retort that such public investment was only possible because of how many fewer bottlenecks to public policy existed during FDR’s time than do today and that the emphasis on disciplining capital belies a “monomaniacal” disdain for the private sector.

But that entire debate is tainted by a modern conception of Roosevelt as the left edge of the political system, whereas, at the time, many on the left were so unimpressed that they devoted a lot of ink to thoughts of launching a new political party on the Democrats’ left flank. The columnist Max Lerner summed up Roosevelt’s political program as “the middle road of the New Deal.” In fact, the editorial “Toward a New Party” noted, in May 1935, that “disappointment with the New Deal is growing just as rapidly on the Left as is opposition to its declared aims and measures on the Right.”

On April 29, 1935, Senator Huey Long, leader of the populist Share the Wealth campaign, headlined the annual conference of the National Farmers Holiday Association, whose president opened by “deprecating the reports that a third party was to be born that day.” Next came a priest who declared that Jesus had come “not only to save the souls of men, but also to introduce an economy of abundance.” The association’s president introduced Senator Long as God’s ordained champion, given to compensate the American people for “Roosevelt, [Secretary of Commerce Henry] Wallace, [Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford] Tugwell, and the rest of the traitors.”

When Long took the stage, he called for capping the amount of wealth any individual could hold (at 300 times the mean level) and giving everyone a home and a guaranteed income reminiscent of modern universal basic income proposals. He asked the crowd, “Are you going to let a little bloated plutocracy control the United States government?” Where today’s abundance agenda’s champions evince skepticism of campaigning against “oligarchs,” the champions of abundance in 1935 were seeking a showdown with them. (Long’s populism, however, should be viewed with skepticism; while railing against a parasitic elite, he helmed a political machine that had violently overthrown the Reconstruction-era state government and was no stranger to political cronyism.)

“A new party is in the air,” declared the May 22, 1935, issue of The New Republic. “It seems to be the logical sequence to the independent success of the La Follettes in Wisconsin, of the Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota, of various movements in industrial regions.”

While Long was the central figure in speculation of a left third party, he was not alone. Other prominent politicians and activists in this loose abundance faction included New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Wisconsin Governor Philip La Follette, Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette (Philip’s brother), Montana Senator Gerald Nye, and Father Coughlin.

That sundry group boasted an array of political affiliations. Olson was the figurehead of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party (a direct ancestor of the state’s current Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party). The La Follettes and their political machine were the engine of Wisconsin’s Progressive Party. La Guardia and Gerald Nye were prominent progressive Republicans. The singular Huey Long branded himself as a populist Democrat.

The “left” in 1935 was very different from today’s version. In particular, while the figures discussed here were all avowed (at least facially) economic populists, several would be persona non grata (properly; yes, some “purity tests” are warranted) in the modern progressive movement, particularly for their views on racial issues. Father Coughlin would, just a few years on from the events detailed herein, go on to air vile antisemitism on his radio program and voice support for the Nazi government. Farmer-Labor Senator Henrik Shipstead was also a noted antisemite. Even La Guardia, among the most sympathetic of the bunch to a modern audience, helped raise funds to support the invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy.

Long, in particular, had several closetfuls of skeletons that run counter to his professed “man of the people” persona. John Ganz has an account of some of Long’s most notable sins; he opposed a federal anti-lynching measure, killed a pension plan because too much money would go to Black recipients, and imposed martial law to help secure a contested election.

Even while The New Republic was making the case for its third party, its writers were not particularly enthused by Long so much as begrudgingly accepting of him as an element of the economic populist left. In the June 5, 1935, issue, the editors express exasperation at Long getting his own law firm placed in charge of state tax collection. In the weekly dispatches at the top of the issue, TNR laid into the Louisiana Democrat, sarcastically writing, “Yea, verily, the wealth must be shared.”

This new leftist third party was to be based in the “American tradition of democracy and equality,” particularly with respect to democratizing economic life. The TNR editors argued, “We have lost—indeed, for the most part, have never exercised—the right of democratic control of our economic lives.”

This party’s fundamental purpose was “to arrange industry so that it may produce the abundance it is technically capable of producing, and thus may provide material security for all.” The editors continue:

What we want is an economy planned to produce abundance. That implies an industrial system operating according to a social plan, a plan that visualizes in advance the amount of production and employment, the wage policies and price policies, the interrelationships among industries and financial institutions. The very reason we need collective ownership is that private industry cannot and will not operate according to such a plan.

Talk of a socialist or leftist political party was nothing new in the 1930s. The United States is actually rather odd historically (among Western nations that industrialized early) for not having a prominent labor/socialist party that rose to prominence following industrialization. Most peer nations saw insurgent left factions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often displacing more mainline liberal factions. In perhaps the most intuitive example, the British Liberal Party collapsed spectacularly in 1924 after being the ruling party for most of the previous two decades, with an ascendant Labour Party displacing it.

But in early July 1935, a convention in Chicago sketched out what a new party could look like and what its founding principles would be. The final platform had 14 planks, some of which appealed to an economy of abundance. For instance:

Plank 1: “As a means to transition to an economy of abundance we favor unlimited production for use by and for the unemployed.”

Plank 3: “We declare for complete economic security for all through abundant provision for needs and emergencies such as maternity, infancy, education, sickness, accident, old age, and unemployment.”

Even in those invocations of abundance, the stark differences between the socialist abundance movement of 1935 and the moderate abundance agenda of 2025 are apparent. The concept of “production for use” is in contrast to the capitalist profit motive. In socialist thought, one of the core issues of a capitalist economy is that profit motives result in wealth accumulation becoming divorced from the creation of actual economic value. A production for use system makes production and allocation decisions based on need (or “use value”), rather than market prices.

Note, also, the call for “abundant provision.” Where Klein, Thompson, and company argue that the center-left must reorient its focus away from welfare state–style programs and toward policies that boost supply and growth, the socialist abundists pointed to such mechanisms as the central pillar of shared prosperity.

In case the point was not quite clear, the platform stated in its tenth plank, “We favor immediate public ownership and operation of natural resources, transportation and communication, public utilities, mines, munitions plants and basic industry.”

To The New Republic editors, this collectivist faction that championed an economy of abundance was the “true opposition” to Franklin Roosevelt’s ruling coalition. In Congress, this left opposition included several dozen members of the House of Representatives, collectively called “the Mavericks” after Representative Maury Maverick (whose grandfather, Samuel, is where we get the term maverick, after the cattle he left unbranded). In the Senate, the left featured figures like Robert La Follette, Henrik Shipstead, and, of course, Huey Long.

Despite efforts to coalesce all of these various figures and movements into a durable left party proving abortive, the summer of 1935 saw an energized left, fed up with Roosevelt being insufficiently radical and invigorated by widespread labor and political organizing.

Robert Cantwell, in the May 22 issue, wrote of the turnaround for the left in California, which in recent months had seen an “astonishing and heartening” transformation from being in full political retreat to being energized, organized, and mobilized. Cantwell attributes the reversal to Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign. Sinclair, a long-standing socialist best known as author of The Jungle, ran on the Democratic Party platform for his third attempt. While he didn’t prevail (and faced backlash from the Socialist Party), the campaign got over 800,000 votes and saw volunteers mobilized in numbers greater than the Democratic Party infrastructure was able to coordinate. The experience resulted in “an enlightened, disillusioned, politically experienced electorate.”

Sinclair fell short, but many other left-wing collectivists were winning across the United States. Progressive Republicans from northern states like La Guardia and Nye, populist Democrats (following the legacy of William Jennings Bryan) like Maverick and Long, and Midwestern third-party collectivists like Olson and the La Follettes parlayed similar tactics and grassroots support into electoral wins.

The abundance movement of 1935 may not have had a party line or formal infrastructure, but it had a strong electoral track record, a strong popular base of support, and a well-defined platform.

The left-abundance party did not come to fruition, through a combination of historical unpredictabilities and well-known problems.

Even as they were writing in support of the new party in these pages, The New Republic’s editors were acutely aware of the obstacles it faced. For a start, while the rank and file of progressive and labor groups were agitating for the third party, the abundance politicians were far more hesitant. Some of this was because figures like La Guardia, Olson, and Phil La Follette had a strong incentive to stay on Roosevelt’s good side, as they needed federal aid money for their states (or city, in La Guardia’s case). Governor La Follette explicitly came out in opposition to a left third-party challenge in the 1936 election.

But it was the assassination of Senator Huey Long that buried the idea of mounting a serious challenge to FDR from the left in the 1936 election. Long’s death made a daunting prospect harder. And with one of the most vocal potential rivals within the Democratic Party silenced, it strengthened Roosevelt’s position.

And while Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice did form the Union Party, it proved to be a nonfactor beyond denting Roosevelt’s vote share in the 1936 election. Following FDR’s reelection, both the NUSJ and the Union Party disbanded.

It is ironic that the modern abundance movement is animated by many of the things that the original abundance faction detested. Huey Long called for eliminating oligarchs, while the new abundance movement is funded by them. A key tenet of Klein and Thompson’s approach is to reorient left-of-center politics away from redistribution to create abundance. In the 1935 telling, redistribution was the mechanism of abundance. The 1935 abundance faction was ardently populist—Governor Olson once threatened to invoke martial law to forcibly seize and reallocate wealth—while our current version is specifically intended to combat populism.

In the June 12, 1935, issue, John T. Flynn lambasted the National Recovery Administration as a means of empowering business interests under “pretenses of a great liberal movement.” There is no better articulation of why critics on the left distrust Klein’s movement than that it is a front for monied interests—with the facade of a great liberal movement.

RFK Jr.’s Policies Are Inflaming the Threat of Covid - 2025-07-23T10:00:00Z

Leigh Haldeman, a nurse at a hospital in Seattle who is 32 weeks pregnant with her second child, was advised in early June by her medical team to get vaccinated for Covid. This was not idle medical advice: She’d had complications in her first pregnancy that made her high risk if she were to get Covid. Her midwife advised her to get the vaccine while she was still pregnant, to avoid getting Covid in her third trimester and to protect her newborn.

What should have been a straightforward vaccination turned into a Kafkaesque runaround—one that portends the chaos to come for people trying to get Covid vaccines now and come the fall. The result will be lower rates of Covid vaccination and higher rates of transmission, long Covid, hospitalizations, and deaths with a summer surge already underway.

In late May, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had taken to X to announce that Covid vaccinations would no longer be recommended to pregnant people or healthy children, although long Covid is now the most common chronic condition among children.* A week before, the Food and Drug Administration had also announced that healthy people under age 65 would not be eligible for the shot.

The announcement raised a flurry of questions and panic within the public health community: Notwithstanding the fact that this abrupt announcement occurred on social media rather than any official channel, it preempted the late June meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, a team of experts who have handled annual vaccination recommendations for the past half-century. It also, of course, went against the hundreds of studies on the Covid vaccine’s safety and efficacy. Recent data on last winter’s Covid shot showed 30–40 percent additional protection against urgent care visits and 40–70 percent additional protection against hospitalizations and ICU stays, with protection lasting six months or more.

The directive was also contradictory, marking an unprecedented divergence in the guidance from public health experts at the CDC and competing information coming down from RFK Jr. and the FDA. The CDC clearly lists pregnancy as an underlying qualifying condition for a Covid vaccine, and did not remove its recommendation for vaccination in children from its vaccine schedule.

This all left Haldeman in a tough position. At work at the hospital, she and her colleagues in infectious disease medicine had no idea if she would be allowed to get the vaccine, although they all agreed she should. Haldeman previously had no issues getting vaccinated or boosted for Covid-19, and received a booster during her first pregnancy.

She made an appointment and went to the closest Walgreens. The staff there immediately noticed she was pregnant and told her they couldn’t administer the vaccine—they could only give it to her if she was immunocompromised, and they did not consider pregnancy to fall under that category. “It was very frustrating,” she said.

When asked for comment, a Walgreens spokesperson said that “Walgreens is proud to continue serving our patients as a trusted and convenient resource for immunizations” and will “continue to closely monitor and review all federal and state guidance related to vaccines.” The spokesperson clarified that the policy varies, state by state.

After being turned away, Haldeman called her primary care doctor to see if they could give her the vaccine, but they told her they didn’t have it in stock. The midwifery clinic didn’t either. No one had good advice to offer, other than calling around pharmacies until someone would do it.

So she called a nearby Safeway pharmacy. The person on the phone first said no, but when she objected, she was transferred to a pharmacist. The pharmacist said maybe she could get the vaccine if she got a prescription from her provider and brought that with her to the pharmacy, but didn’t guarantee it would work.

Armed with a prescription, she went to the nearest Safeway, only to discover that it didn’t have the vaccine in stock. At the second-closest Safeway, staff noticed she was pregnant and panicked, and had her sit in a waiting room. “I was in tears at this point, just so frustrated,” she said. “I wasted so much time.”

Haldeman eventually succeeded in getting her vaccination on her fourth attempt, but the experience left her unnerved and upset. “I had to advocate for myself so much to actually get the vaccine,” she said, recognizing that most people, especially those who are hesitant about vaccines in the first place, would likely give up. Moreover, the experience made her feel criminalized: “If someone’s treating you like you’re doing something illegal, then you’re going to assume that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing, even though the evidence is clearly very much in support of getting vaccinated while pregnant,” she said.

A company spokesperson told The New Republic that Safeway is “committed to providing care that aligns with the latest public health recommendations … in accordance with CDC guidance.… Currently, individuals, including those pregnant, with specific medical conditions that increase their risk of severe illness remain eligible for vaccination.” Still, Haldeman had to get a prescription from a doctor to obtain the vaccine.

Haldeman’s experience makes clear that medical professionals, pharmacies, and people trying to get vaccinated are all weathering the fallout of RFK Jr.’s announcement restricting Covid-19 vaccines and the muddle that followed, and trying to figure out how to proceed amid the confusion.

“Secretary Kennedy’s decision is already causing substantial uncertainty and access issues,” said Doris Reiss, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and expert in legal issues around vaccines.

Just days before the ACIP committee was set to meet, RFK Jr. abruptly fired all 17 of its members—all of whom were preeminent vaccine experts—and appointed eight new ones. Of the new appointments, most were prominent vaccine skeptics, many of whom had clear conflicts of interest. Amid the egregious diversions from established procedures, it has gone virtually unnoticed that the new slate of ACIP members didn’t even meet a voting quorum.

The meeting went ahead, despite objections, and the committee ended up postponing the vote on Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant people and children.

“I am not sorry that this group—several of which have clear anti-Covid-19 vaccine biases—did not vote on the issue,” said Reiss. “Apart from Dr. [Cody] Meissner, committee members lack subject matter expertise and several have clear anti-vaccine biases.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, boycotted the meeting—“We won’t lend out our name to a system that is being politicized at the expense of children’s health,” said the AAP president in a video posted before the event.

The Evidence Collective, a group of public health experts and communicators, logged 50 falsehoods stated during the two-day meeting. “The members didn’t seem to understand basic vaccine studies,” said Jonathan Howard, a neurologist in New York and author of the book We Want Them Infected.

Though the committee did vote to approve RSV shots and (most) flu shots, the new ACIP chair, Covid and vaccine skeptic Martin Kulldorff, a statistician and epidemiologist, announced two new working groups that would reassess children’s vaccines schedule recommendations.

Both Reiss and Howard commended the CDC staffers for presenting information in an informative and accessible way, despite the significant challenges they faced.

Reiss said that the vote for Covid vaccines could be held in October, when the next quarterly ACIP meeting is scheduled, or sooner at a separately scheduled meeting. Until then, as Dr. Angela Branche, an infectious disease expert at the University of Rochester Medicine, told Rewire, “we are basically operating blind.”

In early July, the American Association of Pediatrics—along with several doctors, including a pregnant plaintiff doctor who also had trouble getting the vaccine—sued HHS, arguing RFK Jr.’s directive and firing of the ACIP members was “arbitrary and capricious” and has caused significant harm to doctors looking to stock and administer the vaccine.

Reiss added that having a plaintiff with standing, or one like the pregnant doctor, “Jane Doe,” who has clearly been directly impacted by the directive, strengthens the lawsuit. (Reiss is not affiliated with the lawsuit.)

“Pregnancy increases the risk of severe illness and complications from infectious disease, including preterm birth and stillbirth,” the lawsuit text states. “However, the Directive creates barriers to access to the vaccine and has left Jane and her husband overwhelmed with stress and uncertainty. Her worries are not just for herself, but also for the health and safety of her unborn child.”

The strongly worded lawsuit underscores the importance of ACIP not only in establishing vaccine recommendations but also in determining insurance coverage, state and local laws, and vaccination requirements in schools and medical settings.

RFK Jr.’s directive restricting vaccine access via X “breaks the promise that the Secretary made to the Senate and the American people not to make it difficult to get vaccines or discourage them,” the text states. “The Directive, unless vacated, will result in preventable deaths, including the unborn and newborns under six months old.”

It continues: “The Secretary’s dismantling of the vaccine infrastructure must end.”

Reiss thinks it’s highly possible to prove RFK Jr.’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious.” As she explained to The New Republic, “In both the video and the directive, Secretary Kennedy provided very little explanation, let alone a thorough consideration of the existing evidence and a justification for deviating from past agency positions.”

In response to the lawsuit, the so-called “MAHA Institute” sent an unconvincing rebuttal to its subscribers.

Until a judge halts RFK Jr.’s directive, it will stand. Meanwhile, 80 medical associations reaffirmed their commitment to vaccination, while the University of Minnesota–based Vaccine Integrity Project is working with a number of partners to offer its own vaccine recommendations regardless of what the now-compromised ACIP decides.

The antidemocratic, anti-science actions at HHS go beyond RFK Jr., who has appointed like-minded henchmen like Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Vinay Prasad at the helm of the influential Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research arm of the Food and Drug Administration, or CBER.

Prasad, who I have written about in these pages, is overseeing a “consolidation of power” at CBER. He has repeatedly overruled FDA experts’ recommendations for Covid vaccines. He is behind the decree that they be restricted to people over 65 and those age 12 to 64 with underlying health conditions, according to Biospace, a life science news site. A July 9 memo by Prasad, riddled with egregious inaccuracies, argued that he felt “differently about certain aspects” of the FDA reviewer’s conclusions that Covid vaccines should remain broadly available.

“I think there has got to be a ton of frustration at the FDA with Prasad overruling them all based on vibes,” said Howard.

This alarming growth of authoritarianism at HHS is just the beginning. Although the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, believe vaccines are safe, there will be considerable fallout from giving anti-vaxxers a mainstream platform of authority. In addition to confusion and mistrust, such sentiments have already led to a measles outbreak, which RFK Jr. is grossly mishandling, and the looming threat of bird flu.

The consequences of these policies will be more transmission of preventable diseases and death, in a time when accessing health care is about to become more difficult, with the largest Medicaid cuts in history imminent.

Amid the horrors, it’s easy to forget that Covid-19 remains a threat. “We’ve all sort of gotten numb to it,” said Haldeman. But without tools available to fight it, we’re walking straight into another public health disaster: “It’s really dangerous.”

* This article originally mischaracterized Kennedy’s May tweet.

Trump’s Rage at Obama Explodes, Unnerving Experts: “We’re in Trouble” - 2025-07-23T09:00:00Z

In the last few days, we seem to have crossed a threshold. President Trump is ratcheting up the authoritarianism and threatening to prosecute his enemies in a new kind of way. In a series of angry new rants, Trump accused Barack Obama and other members of Obama’s administration of serious crimes. He’s also calling for Senator Adam Schiff to be put in “prison.” Critically, all this has been accompanied by unabashedly corrupt manipulation of the bureaucracy that’s designed to manufacture pretexts for the prosecutions of those enemies. Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, put it very starkly on Bluesky, saying that authoritarianism is “right here in front of us.” So we invited Enos on the show. He explains why “we’re in real trouble in the short term,” how Trump compares to other authoritarians around the globe, and why our only choices now are to fight the takeover or “accept that this is our future.” Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Columbia Punishes Dozens of Student Protesters as It Caves to Trump - 2025-07-22T22:11:39Z

Columbia University just jeopardized the academic careers of dozens of its own students for protesting against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

On Monday, more than 70 Columbia students were notified that they would be suspended, placed on probation, expelled, or even have their degrees revoked for taking part in an occupation of Butler Library in May. The students entered the library’s main room in protest, chanting slogans and occupying it for a teach-in in honor of Bassel al-Araj, a Palestinian activist assassinated by Israeli soldiers in 2017. Unidentified police officers physically clashed with the students until they started making mass arrests. 

“Columbia responded to the teach-in by illegally kettling and body slamming protesters who asked to leave, resulting in hospitalization of four students with concussions,” the Columbia University Apartheid and Divest group, or CUAD, wrote in a statement on Tuesday. 

This move comes as the university is completely bending the knee to Trump in order to restore $400 million in federal grants that the administration is withholding. It also comes just days after the university already ceded a major deal with the Trump administration to crack down on what the administration perceives as antisemitic activity on campus. The president spent months calling out the university, baselessly accusing student protesters of collaborating with Hamas, among other allegations. 

The university’s sanctions this week demand that students apologize for protesting if they want their punishment to be lightened. 

“The sanctions are believed to be part of a federal deal Columbia is about to announce that includes a formal partnership with the zionist Anti-Defamation League and an agreement to use the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s]  definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with discrimination against Jews,” CUAD wrote in the same statement. “In collaboration with the Trump administration, Columbia’s Acting President and Board of Trustees Co-Chair, Claire Shipman, illegally restructured the University Judicial Board (UJB) and removed student members and faculty oversight to pursue exceptionally harsh sanctions against its own students. The UJB’s Rules Administrator, akin to a prosecutor, filed charges after protestors flooded Columbia’s largest library to share a syllabus and readings about al-Araj and demand Columbia divest from the Israeli war machine.” 

This is the same university that sold Mahmoud Khalil, one of its own graduates, out to ICE for simply being a politically active pro-Palestinain voice on campus. While devastating for these students, it’s unsurprising that the Ivy League institution would rather sacrifice students who are peacefully protesting to please the Trump administration. This was a heavily coordinated attack not only on free speech but on any criticism of Israel and the current destruction it’s leveled against Gaza for nearly three years now. And aside from caving to the Trump administration, the university has worked with Columbia Alumni for Israel, which is believed to rely on the shadowy blacklist Canary Mission to identify students to punish.

“Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry. This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure,” CUAD’s statement read. “We will not be deterred. We are committed to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” 

Obama Breaks Silence and Slams Trump’s “Weak Attempt at Distraction” - 2025-07-22T21:03:21Z

Barack Obama is hitting back at the Trump administration for accusing the former president of treason.

Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, last week shared documents that she misleadingly claimed proved that the Obama White House manufactured intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election “to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”

The president seems keen on using this purported evidence of “sedatious” activity (as he inventively put it Tuesday) to force the national conversation off his perceived lack of transparency regarding the case of deceased sex criminal and his former friend Jeffrey Epstein.

The president on Sunday shared memes about imprisoning Obama. On Tuesday, he told a reporter with an Epstein-related inquiry that Gabbard’s story is what they “should be talking about” instead.

Later Tuesday, Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush responded to the attacks with a statement excoriating Trump’s allegations as “bizarre,” “ridiculous,” and “a weak attempt at distraction.”

“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the statement reads. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one.”

Rodenbush continues: “Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”

“These findings,” he also points out, “were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee,” which was then chaired by Marco Rubio—meaning that, somewhat uncomfortably for Trump, Gabbard’s accusations of “treasonous conspiracy,” taken at face value, would implicate the second-highest-ranking official in his Cabinet.

The Surprising Bill Uniting MTG, Nancy Pelosi, Lauren Boebert, and AOC - 2025-07-22T21:00:27Z

Bipartisan interest in publicizing the Epstein files has brought together the most unlikely of allies.

Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jamie Raskin, Lauren Boebert, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are just some of the names who have co-sponsored H.Res.581, dubbed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Introduced by Representative Thomas Massie, who has a habit of actually standing up to Donald Trump, the bill aims to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices” relating to child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

The text of the bill specifies the release of flight logs, travel records, the names of individuals and government officials connected to Epstein’s “criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings,” the names of corporations or organizations tied to Epstein’s trafficking networks, potential immunity deals or sealed settlements, as well as “internal DOJ communications.”

A dozen Republicans have signed on to the effort in total, including Representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Jeff Van Drew, Eli Crane, Cory Mills, Tom Barrett, Max Miller, Nancy Mace, and Keith Self.

But the effort isn’t likely to get off the ground anytime soon. House GOP leadership announced Tuesday afternoon that “votes are no longer expected in the House on Thursday,” with last votes taking place on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ET, ending the schedule a day early and starting the beginning of a five-week summer recess.

“I think everyone wants to see the information that was sealed away,” Greene told reporters inside the Capitol Tuesday morning, highlighting that at minimum, the prospective legislation would have to wait for the courts to reply to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request to unseal the documents. “I’m all for voting on it, I’m all for transparency. We just have to be a little patient.”

House Republicans did already have a chance to stand up for transparency last week, but 211 of the caucus’s 212 members voted to block a Democratic-led effort to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.

Trump Pays Eye-Watering Amount to Build Biggest Immigration Camp Ever - 2025-07-22T20:11:47Z

Donald Trump’s administration has signed off on building the country’s largest immigrant detention center, a sprawling tent camp at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

The Department of Defense awarded the Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics a nearly $232 million contract to establish and operate a 5,000-bed short-term detention facility, according to a contract notice Monday. In total, however, the contract is worth closer to $1.26 billion, two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named publicly told Bloomberg.

The new tent camp is estimated to be completed by the end of September 2027. Sitting close to the Mexican border, and with its own airport, the new facility would serve as a deportation hub for the Trump administration’s purge of immigrants from the United States.

For scale, an estimated 700 detainees are currently held at “Alligator Alcatraz,” but the Trump administration’s wetland-themed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades is also expected to have a capacity of up to 5,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Acquisition Logistics has no experience in detention, according to Bloomberg. The company specializes in supply chain and project management, as well as technical and engineering services, and has previously received $29 billion worth of contracts from the DOD for jobs such as providing logistical capabilities, or lodging and conference room services for the agency’s work at the Southern border.

Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, expressed grave concern to Bloomberg over the government’s plans to house immigrants in tents. “All the reasons why you and I live not in tents but in homes are going to inevitably come up in a facility that doesn’t offer people walls and floors and insulation,” she said.

“It’s very hard to imagine how soft-sided facilities could satisfy even the low detention standards that are reflected in ICE’s most recent standards,” Winger added. This latest contract comes amid reports of inhumane conditions at ICE facilities, where detainees have alleged physical abuse, medical neglect, and psychological torture.

Acquisition Logistics’ startling lack of experience setting up a detention facility, as well as the government’s own wavering commitment to safe conditions for detainees, ought to spark grave concern as the rate of immigration arrests and of deaths in ICE facilities continues to rise. The government has greenlit yet another concentration camp—and this one is on track to be the largest so far.

This latest contract comes as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that two army bases would be used to house immigrant detainees, one in New Jersey and the other in Illinois. The moves severely undermine his supposed commitment to maximizing so-called military “lethality,” by transforming his own training facilities into pit stops for his boss’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. Like those facilities, Fort Bliss had previously housed Afghan refugees as part of the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome.

The government previously operated an Emergency Intake Site at Fort Bliss under the Biden administration, erecting a tent city to house unaccompanied migrant children. One whistleblower account revealed horrific living conditions similar to those in ICE facilities now, with children subjected to constant light, collective punishment, and even burns from unsafe materials.

GOP Senator Falls for Obviously Fake Resignation Letter From Powell - 2025-07-22T19:49:32Z

An obviously fake image, purporting to show a resignation letter by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, made the rounds in MAGA circles on X Tuesday. Among the duped was Republican Senator Mike Lee.

Among other eyebrow-raising details, the letter includes an abundance of end-of-line hyphens, as well as punctuation errors (e.g., “Over the past years. I have worked alongside …” and “public confidence in its independence and effectiveness, My decision comes from …”) and an awkward line break causing an apostrophe-s to appear alone at the beginning of a new line.

Most egregiously, the words encircling the seal of the Federal Reserve System at the bottom of the letter are largely gibberish—ridden with the glitchy characters one often finds in AI-generated images containing text.

Nonetheless, Lee shared the letter on X, with the caption “Powell’s out!” flanked by (false) alarm emojis. According to Politico’s Jordain Carney, the senator decided to delete the tweet shortly thereafter “out of an abundance of caution.” Lee also told reporters, “I don’t know whether it’s legit or not.”

MAGA influencer Benny Johnson similarly shared the image with an alarm emoji, writing, “BREAKING: Fed Chair Jerome Powell has resigned,” before removing the post. “Sorry. Bad look,” Johnson wrote in a follow-up. “I still want Jerome Powell to resign really bad.”

It’s no wonder many Trump supporters got over their skis, losing any eye for detail at the whiff of Powell’s fictitious departure. The Fed chair has been persona non grata in Trumpworld in recent months, with the president calling him just about every insulting name in the book (“numbskull,” “dumb guy,” “major loser,” “low IQ”) for the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates (a decision that seems to be a cautious reaction to Trump’s capricious tariffs).

Doctor Denies Woman Prenatal Care Because She’s Unmarried - 2025-07-22T19:46:01Z

A Tennessee medical provider allegedly refused to provide prenatal care to an unmarried pregnant woman because it went against the doctor’s “Christian values.”

Speaking at a town hall in Jonesborough, Tennessee, last week, an unnamed 35-year-old woman claimed that she was forced to seek care in Virginia after her local medical provider effectively claimed religious exemption.

“I just found out that I’m pregnant again,” the woman said. “I’ve been with my partner for about 15 years though we’re not married.

“I just had my first visit and that provider told me that, thanks to that fact, they were not comfortable treating me because I am an unwed mother and that went against their Christian values,” she continued. The woman and her partner have a 13-year-old child together.

The woman underscored that she’s “lucky enough” to live along the Virginia state border, allowing her to receive out-of-state care. Still, she said she was “scared out of her mind” regarding the complications of the long drive.

Tennessee’s Medical Ethics Defense Act went into effect in late April, allowing medical providers to opt out of participating in specific procedures that conflict with their “conscience”—a legally defined term in the Volunteer State that refers to sincerely held ethical, moral, or religious beliefs.

The aggrieved woman had her first prenatal visit less than three months after the measure was implemented.

Speaking with the Nashville Banner on the condition of anonymity, she recalled that “instantly, I felt my stomach drop and I knew this wasn’t right, this wasn’t okay.”

“I didn’t want to react in a place of anger, because I felt like that was just going to support any judgment that the provider already had against me,” she told the paper. “I said ‘thank you for your time’ and left, because if you’re not willing to provide the best care to me, regardless of the reason, I don’t want any part of this.”

“They were not comfortable treating me because I am an unwed mother and that goes against their Christian values.”

At a recent town hall in Jonesborough, Tennessee, a woman said her OB-GYN refused to provide prenatal care because she isn’t married. pic.twitter.com/E1eFTavtKY

— The Recount (@therecount) July 21, 2025

She has since filed complaints with the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance and the American Medical Association, according to the Banner. At the town hall, the woman said she had called Senator Marsha Blackburn’s office twice a day since the incident happened, but believed that she was either blocked or that Blackburn “had all calls going directly to voicemail.”

“I’ve never even reached a staffer,” she said.

Senator Bill Hagerty, however, did answer—though his staffers had bad news: “I was told he’s not obligated to listen to his constituents,” the woman said.

Just living in Tennessee as a pregnant woman, in the wake of the state’s total abortion ban, terrifies her. Speaking with the Banner, the mother recalled what happened to Adriana Smith in Georgia and feared that the same could happen to her in her home state.

Smith, a 30-year-old woman, was declared brain dead in February after developing multiple blood clots in her brain. But because she was about nine weeks pregnant at the time—past Georgia’s six-week limit on abortions—the state opted to use her body as an incubator until the fetus was viable.

“The fear for me is if something [high risk] happens, I can’t guarantee that the provider I see is going to value my life over the life of this fetus,” the Tennessee woman said. “And while we do very, very much want this baby, I have one here already who very, very much relies on me.”

Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country, with more than 41 deaths per 100,000 births, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also has a staggeringly high infant mortality rate—two factors that, combined, contributed to its ranking as the worst state to live in in the U.S., according to a CNBC ranking.

State Republicans pushed for the passage of the Medical Ethics Defense Act, bargaining that the legislation would help the state retain its medical professionals, but that hasn’t been the case.

Tennessee has been bleeding its medical expertise since the state’s abortion ban went into effect in 2022, and the state’s future isn’t much brighter. A 2024 study from the Association of American Medical Colleges found that overall medical residency applications in the state had plummeted by more than 12 percent between 2023 and 2024, with obstetrics facing the worst decline, falling by 20.9 percent.

Trump’s Dumbest Lawyer Is Officially Out of a Job—Goodbye, Alina Habba - 2025-07-22T19:03:19Z

Federal judges in New Jersey have ousted Alina Habba as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, refusing to extend the 120-day appointment President Trump gifted her in March.

Trump appointed her as interim attorney, but to stay full-time, Habba would need to be approved by district judges or have the Senate confirm her position. On Tuesday, New Jersey’s federal judges instead chose to replace Habba with longtime prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, who served as Habba’s assistant.  

Habba was Trump’s personal lawyer, unsuccessfully defending him in his hush-money and E. Jean Carroll defamation cases. She made headlines for multiple alarming gaffes unbecoming of a U.S. attorney, and went to great lengths to defend the president, even making excuses for his falling asleep during his own trial. In March, she claimed that the thousands of military veterans indiscriminately fired by DOGE were simply unfit. She is also currently being sued by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for malicious persecution after she briefly charged him with trespassing following his arrest by ICE for attempting to enter a local detention center.  

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche railed against Habba’s firing, calling it politically motivated and arguing that the deadline was supposed to be longer. 

“The district court judges in NJ are trying to force out @USAttyHabba before her term expires at 11:59 p.m. Friday,” he wrote Tuesday on X. “Their rush reveals what this was always about: a left-wing agenda, not the rule of law. When judges act like activists, they undermine confidence in our justice system. Alina is President Trump’s choice to lead—and no partisan bench can override that.”

Habba made a similar statement on Sean Hannity’s show Monday night, insinuating that New Jersey Senators Corey Booker and Andy Kim deliberately froze her out of her job, putting her at the mercy of judges who, to her, were biased and corrupt. 

Habba has too many moments of incompetence for this firing to be entirely politically motivated, especially since she’s being replaced with the assistant she chose. And even if that is the case, her firing is only as political as her hiring was to begin with.  

FEMA Chief Quits in Disgust at Kristi Noem’s Texas Flood Response - 2025-07-22T18:55:08Z

The head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Branch has resigned, telling colleagues that the Trump administration’s disastrous response to the deadly flooding in Texas had driven him over the edge, CNN reported.

Ken Pagurek, who had worked in that branch for more than a decade, reportedly told colleagues that his departure Monday from FEMA had come after mounting frustrations with the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the disaster aid agency. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s pitifully delayed response to the flooding over the Fourth of July weekend was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Noem had severely botched FEMA’s Texas response by failing to renew contracts with companies staffing FEMA call centers, resulting in a majority of calls going unanswered for days as the floodwaters raged. The secretary dismissed the reporting as “fake news.”

She also reportedly delayed FEMA’s initial response by instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. FEMA officials, who were unaware of the new rule, didn’t receive Noem’s go-ahead for 72 hours.

In his resignation letter, Pagurek didn’t mention the floods at all. “This decision was not made lightly, and after much reflection and prayer, it is the right path for me at this time,” he wrote. “I have been continually inspired by the unwavering dedication, unmatched courage, and deep-seated commitment we share for saving lives and bringing hope in the face of devastation.”

One DHS spokesperson defended the response to the floods, while another criticized Pagurek’s decision, saying that it was “laughable that a career public employee, who claims to serve the American people, would choose to resign over our refusal to hastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight.”

“We’re being responsible with taxpayer dollars, that’s our job,” the second spokesperson said.

Last month, Donald Trump said he plans to “phase out” FEMA after this year’s hurricane season, and future disbursements would come straight from him. “We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here, could be Homeland Security,” Trump said at the time.

Clearly, putting Noem in charge of personally approving decisions in a disaster comes at a cost, and the Trump administration’s mismanagement of relief is more far-reaching than just the flooding in Texas.

Trump Admits the Truth About His Fascistic Call to Arrest Obama - 2025-07-22T17:27:54Z

Asked about the latest developments in the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein fiasco, President Donald Trump quickly shifted attention to the accusations that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is making against former President Barack Obama.

Trump’s deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer Todd Blanche on Tuesday announced that he will meet with convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to find out “about anyone who has committed crimes against victims” of the late convicted sex criminal.

The move seems to be an effort to stamp out the ongoing fire surrounding the administration’s perceived lack of transparency in the Epstein case, not to mention Trump’s own reported ties to the disgraced financier (though a closed-door sit-down with Maxwell might not exactly allay suspicions that the administration is in on a cover-up).

When asked about Blanche’s anticipated meeting with Maxwell on Tuesday, Trump replied curtly.

“I don’t really follow that too much. It’s sort of a witch hunt, just a continuation of the witch hunt,” said the president, who has in recent days sought to dismiss the Epstein affair as a hoax spun up by Obama and Hillary Clinton.

He then hastened to change the subject to Gabbard’s recent allegations against those very MAGA bêtes noires.

“The witch hunt that you should be talking about,” he continued, “is they caught Obama absolutely cold, Tulsi Gabbard.” Accusing Obama and Clinton of rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump added, “After what they did to me, and, whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people.… So that’s really the things you should be talking about. I know nothing about the other.”

🚨 PRESIDENT TRUMP says he's ready for the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Barack Obama:

"When we caught Hillary Clinton, I said, 'You know what? Let's not go too far here.' I let her off the hook."

"But after what they did to me, it's time to go after… pic.twitter.com/rMaVNFkRf0

— The Washington Observer (@WashObserver) July 22, 2025

Gabbard last week released documents that she purported “detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the president from fulfilling his mandate.” Trump has pounced on the dubious findings, sharing memes about imprisoning Obama this weekend in a Truth Social posting spree that touched on just about everything but the Epstein-shaped thorn currently lodged squarely in his side.

If Gabbard’s wild accusations were not concocted expressly to distract from the persistent controversy surrounding the late sex criminal, the president’s remarks Tuesday show that he’s happy to use them for just that purpose.

Trump Didn’t Know His Own DOJ’s New Plans for Epstein Investigation - 2025-07-22T17:16:32Z

The president is still gung-ho that the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein is a “witch hunt”—to the point that he didn’t even know his own government was continuing its investigation.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday, Donald Trump was apparently completely out of the loop regarding the Justice Department’s investigation into the pedophilic sex trafficker, unaware of the DOJ’s requested interview with Epstein’s imprisoned associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Do you support the DOJ seeking an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell?” asked a journalist in the pool.

“I don’t know anything about it. They’re gonna what? Meet her?” said Trump.

“The deputy attorney general has reached out to Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorney, asking for an interview,” the reporter clarified.

“Yeah, I don’t know about it, but I think it would be something—sounds appropriate to do, yeah,” Trump responded.

The reporter then asked if Trump believed it was appropriate for deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—who had previously worked as Trump’s personal attorney—to conduct the interview.

“He’s a very talented person, he’s very smart. I didn’t know he was going to do it, I don’t follow it too much, it’s sort of a witch hunt,” Trump said.

Q: Do you support the DOJ seeking an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell?

TRUMP: I don't know anything about it. They're gonna what?

Q: The deputy AG has reached out to Ghislaine Maxwell

TRUMP: It sounds appropriate to do, yeah. I don't really follow that too much. The witch hunt… pic.twitter.com/sONkREyyVt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 22, 2025

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in 2022, when she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in the pedophile network, helping Epstein abduct and abuse underage girls over the span of a decade.

Trump has a well-documented history with Epstein. Prior to his death, the New York financier described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times; the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express”; and Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last week.

Facing enormous pressure from his base last week, Trump ordered the Justice Department to release additional documents pertaining to its investigation into Epstein. The White House did not specify at the time if the documents would be made public, and did not explain the sudden contradiction after Trump had spent the better part of the last week insisting that the Epstein fiasco was a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

But rather than demonstrate a vested interest in making the case files transparent, Trump decided to double down on his “witch hunt” language, deflecting by telling the roomful of reporters that they should instead be focused on former President Barack Obama, reiterating a debunked conspiracy while claiming that his administration “caught” Obama “absolutely cold” trying to “rig” the 2020 presidential election.

Trump Targets Two More TV Hosts After CBS Axes Stephen Colbert - 2025-07-22T17:07:22Z

President Trump says two more late-night TV hosts are “next,” just days after CBS ended The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 

“The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. “These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!”

This is exactly what it looks like. Colbert was canceled mere days after he called out CBS parent company Paramount for capitulating to the Trump administration by agreeing to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit over how they edited a 60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, something news organizations regularly do for the sake of time. 

Colbert argued that Paramount was well aware that Trump’s lawsuit was “completely without merit” but agreed to pay a “big fat bribe” to ease its sale to Skydance Media—a deal that required Trump’s approval. The president has mocked Colbert since his cancellation, calling for Jimmy Kimmel’s job next, and stating that Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them. This Tuesday is just more of the same. Kimmel’s show is hosted by ABC, which also settled with Trump for millions of dollars after George Stephanopoulos said that the president was liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll, instead of just sexual abuse.  

The president is more focused on getting late-night talk show hosts fired than on governing. CBS sacrificed Colbert for political goodwill, dumping a popular host to kiss the king’s ring. And now Trump is calling for more heads. Only time will tell how the networks respond. 

ICE Is Trying to Tempt People Out of Retirement to Keep Up With Trump - 2025-07-22T15:48:35Z

Donald Trump’s administration is desperately trying to lure retired ICE agents back into the fold to help enact the president’s massive deportation campaign, according to The New York Times.

Trump administration officials have been reaching out directly to former officers in good standing and posting tailored offers on job portals attempting to recruit them with promises of hefty cash bonuses.

One email reviewed by the Times issued an “urgent call” to former law enforcement officers to “join OPERATION RETURN TO MISSION,” and included an offer for qualified candidates to collect up to $50,000 in bonuses.

“Ready to rejoin the mission and get up to a $50k signing bonus ON TOP OF rehired annuitant pay (pension + paycheck)?” read one LinkedIn post from Robert Hammer, acting executive associate director at Homeland Security Investigations. “Submit your application by Aug 1 to be eligible for the full recruitment incentives package.”

The Trump administration’s latest efforts come alongside comments from a former agency prosecutor that many ICE agents are seeking exit strategies, having become “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale as they face moral dilemmas about executing their jobs. Apparently, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s directive to execute a lofty 3,000 immigration arrests per day has rendered many in the service completely miserable.

As it turns out, ripping families apart and then subjecting them to inhumane prison conditions isn’t everyone’s dream job. Maybe the only people who can stomach it are the ones who have already been doing it. Still, the Trump administration has said it hopes to hire 10,000 ICE agents and 3,000 border patrol agents to conduct the president’s grotesque immigration policies.

Trump Border Czar Whines That People Keep Saying Mean Things About ICE - 2025-07-22T15:40:59Z

Tom Homan’s responsibilities as border czar seemingly now include policing the bounds of acceptable dissent. On Tuesday, Homan fancifully blamed politicians’ criticisms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for an uptick in violence toward the agency’s personnel.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the border czar supported the practice of ICE agents concealing their identities with masks. “The masks, I think, are important. How do we get rid of the masks? Stop the hateful rhetoric,” he said, before alleging an eightfold increase in assaults on ICE personnel over last year.

Who, by Homan’s lights, is responsible for the rhetoric (and, in turn, the violence)? “I specifically mean members of Congress,” he said. “If members of Congress can compare ICE to the Nazis, that gives some of those people on the far left, the out of control people—it emboldens them to take action.”

Homan’s tone policing is consistent with other spurious attempts by the Trump administration to blame Democratic lawmakers for the reported (and exaggerated) increases in assaults against ICE agents.

Earlier this month, for instance, the White House issued a statement attributing a “surge” in assaults against ICE agents to “dangerous, inflammatory rhetoric from Democrat politicians.” The examples it provided, however, were all legitimate criticisms of ICE’s enforcement under Trump (likening the agents to “secret police” or “Gestapo,” for example, due to instances of masked, plainclothes officers plucking people off the street, at times for their political opinions) or of ICE in general (such as calls to abolish the agency).

In pointing the finger at Democratic rhetoric, the Trump administration conveniently ignores that the alleged increase in assaults comes as the agency, under Trump’s directives, has greatly increased the frequency of its operations—and become markedly more adversarial, embracing policing tactics that, according to law enforcement experts, put its agents in harm’s way.

But Homan would have you believe that the Trump administration couldn’t possibly be to blame. It must, instead, be the fault of Democratic lawmakers who have critical things to say about the increasingly unpopular force unleashed on American communities.

Trump Team Crashes Out Over His Remark on Minimum Sexual “Age Limit” - 2025-07-22T15:08:45Z

The president’s team is trying to stomp out coverage of his prior comments about young girls amid fallout regarding his alleged ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, torched The Daily Beast for dredging up remarks that Donald Trump made during an interview with Howard Stern in 2006, when he told the radio show host that the best part about being Donald Trump was that he could get “all the girls” he wanted—if he wasn’t married to his wife.

“Do you think you could now be banging 24-year-olds?” Stern asked.

“Oh, absolutely. I have no trouble,” a 60-year-old Trump replied.

“Would you do it?” pressed Stern, to which Trump said he had “no problem.”

But then Trump got into a questionable back-and-forth with the show’s co-host, Robin Quivers, who asked the real estate mogul: “Do you have an age limit?”

“No, no, I have no age—,” Trump started, before backtracking. “I mean, I have an age—I don’t want to be like Congressman Foley, with, you know, 12-year-olds.”

Trump was referring to former Representative Mark Foley, who had resigned that year for sending sexually explicit messages to underage boys. One of Foley’s victims was 16 years old at the time. Trump’s aversion to the ousted lawmaker was apparently temporary, however: The Florida Republican was spotted sitting in a reserved section, directly behind Trump, at a 2016 campaign rally.

When asked about Trump’s old remarks, Cheung lashed out. “The disgusting insinuation by The Daily Beast is beyond the pale and does a great disservice to survivors. The Daily Beast is devoid of morals or compassion, all because they want to play political games,” Cheung said.

Trump has a well-documented history with Epstein. Prior to his death, the New York financier described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times; the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express”; and Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last week. Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch–owned paper over the alleged letter Friday.

Congress Makes First Move to Get Epstein Answers—via Ghislaine Maxwell - 2025-07-22T15:07:29Z

The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday approved a motion to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell, which would force her to testify before Congress.

Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend and main accomplice and is currently incarcerated for helping him traffic and rape hundreds of women and girls. Maxwell’s subpoena would be a dramatic move, as she is widely believed to have particularly sensitive information on other prominent figures who were engaging in these horrendous acts alongside Epstein.

The motion was introduced by Tim Burchett, a Republican, further confirming the legitimacy of the internal rift that the Trump administration caused when it closed the Epstein case earlier this month. Trump has been on an intense defend and distract campaign since he first received backlash from his base, continuously acting as if his base is irrational for demanding the answers he’d been promising them for years.

On Monday, Trump attacked another Republican, Thomas Massie, after he filed a discharge petition for the files in full. Now Epstein’s closest confidant may be testifying in front of the entire country. The president’s questionable relationship to Maxwell and Epstein has been well reported. Time will only tell what the tone of his reaction will be.

MLK Jr.’s Daughter Brutally Taunts Trump Over Epstein Files - 2025-07-22T14:19:10Z

Donald Trump’s administration is now hoping to distract Americans from Jeffrey Epstein by declassifying documents related to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and no one is impressed—including King’s own children.

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard announced Monday that the government would release 230,000 files on the federal investigation into King’s assasination.

But Bernice King, who was only 5 when her father was killed, wasn’t falling for the government’s blatant misdirect. “Now, do the Epstein files,” she wrote on X Monday night.

In a statement following the files’ release, Bernice and her brother Martin Luther King III urged that the “files must be viewed within their full historical context” and echoed the family’s long-held contention that the man who’d been convicted of King’s assassination, James Earl Ray, was not solely responsible for the death of the civil rights leader.

“As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief—a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met—an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they wrote. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

This is the third week of fallout from the Trump administration’s disastrous rollout of the Epstein files—or lack thereof. The Justice Department announced earlier this month that the sex offender kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following.

The Trump administration has already tried several other subjects for its disastrous bait and switch, including threatening to prosecute and imprison several of the president’s political enemies, such as former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Senator Adam Schiff.

DOJ Tries to Use Ghislaine Maxwell to Put Out MAGA Fire on Epstein - 2025-07-22T14:06:46Z

As Donald Trump seeks to allay public outcry over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, a top Justice Department official vowed Tuesday to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted Epstein accomplice currently serving out a 20-year sentence for her role in the late financier’s sex-trafficking operation.

In a statement on X, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced: “I have communicated with counsel for Ms. Maxwell to determine whether she would be willing to speak with prosecutors from the Department. I anticipate meeting with Ms. Maxwell in the coming days.”

The deputy attorney general promised to hear out information she may have “about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.” In a follow-up post, Blanche added, “For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?”

In response, FBI Director Kash Patel approvingly wrote, “Get it.”

David Oscar Markus, a lawyer for Maxwell, confirmed on X “that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully. We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.”

Blanche’s announcement stood by the Justice Department’s findings in its July 6 memo, which stirred an uproar on both sides of the political aisle—but most notably among Trump’s base—by deflating Epstein-related conspiracy theories previously elevated by the president (despite his own storied history with Epstein).

Trump has not taken kindly to the clamor, lashing out against, and even disowning, supporters of his who remain interested in the case, which he now considers a hoax spun by his Democratic adversaries.

But, in recent days, the gravity of the scandal has seemingly become clear to the president. Over the weekend, he requested the release of grand jury testimony related to the case of United States v. Epstein. Critics, however, interpreted this request as a mere sop to his angry supporters; after all, if it’s granted—after a lengthy legal process—it would still fall far short of many’s hopes for the publication of all Epstein-related DOJ files.

It remains to be seen whether Blanche’s planned meeting with Maxwell will be viewed similarly—as a half-measure to quell MAGA infighting while snubbing calls to release the “Epstein files” in full—or if it will help restore Trump supporters’ trust in an administration that has, for over two weeks now, left them feeling jilted.

Trump Flips Out at Republican Lawmaker Exposing the Party on Epstein - 2025-07-22T13:42:39Z

President Trump is excoriating another one of his own party members for asking him for basic transparency on the Jeffrey Epstein case.  

Representative Thomas Massie, who filed a bipartisan discharge petition with Ro Khanna calling for the Justice Department to release the files in full, had blunt words for Speaker Mike Johnson’s lack of initiative on the issue.

“I think this is the referendum on [Johnson’s] leadership,” Massie said on Monday, according to Punchbowl News. “Who’s he gonna pick? Is he going to stand with the pedophiles and underage sex traffickers? Or is he gonna pick the American people and justice for the victims? This is the ultimate decision the speaker needs to make. And it’s irrespective of what the president wants.”

Trump, who had a personal relationship with Epstein, lashed out at Massie. 

“Thomas Massie, the worst Republican Congressman, and an almost guaranteed NO VOTE each and every time, is an Embarrassment to Kentucky. He’s lazy, slow moving, and totally disingenuous—A real loser! Never has anything positive to add,” Trump wrote Monday evening on Truth Social, attaching a link to an attack ad about Massie. “Looking for someone good to run against this guy, someone I can Endorse and vigorously campaign for!”

It’s painfully obvious at this point that the president is on the extreme defensive on Epstein, urging his own base to simply forget about a Holy Grail–level issue he dangled in front of them for years. Trump has been speaking condescendingly about this to his own supporters for some time now, saying that anyone who is still interested in the case of a wealthy pedophile socialite who killed himself in prison is a bad person. And now he’s talking about funding campaigns against a member of his own party for disagreeing with him. 

Mike Johnson Pulls Plug on Congress Early to Avoid Voting on Epstein - 2025-07-22T13:37:44Z

Republicans are taking an early summer break as infighting intensifies over the Epstein scandal.

Caucus leadership is sending everyone home early, Politico reported Tuesday, canceling all votes from Thursday. The schedule change comes after the Rules Committee recessed Monday night when Democrats threatened to force a vote on the Epstein files.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters earlier Tuesday it was “unlikely” that the committee would reconvene, a decision that will stall any progress conservatives were hoping to make this week on several key agenda items, including an immigration bill.

South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman told ABC News Monday that several Republicans on the committee, including himself, did not want to vote on the Democrat-led effort to uncover more details pertaining to the Epstein case, deriding the vote as “grandstanding.”

It’s the second week in a row that the House has become completely paralyzed by debate over the potential release of records regarding the notorious child sex trafficker.

The botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague the Trump administration since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” A YouGov/Economist poll conducted last week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”

But if Republicans want transparency, they have a funny way of showing it. Last week, conservative lawmakers unquestioningly fell in line to support Donald Trump’s narrative that there’s nothing to see here, blocking a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

Republicans are scheduled to meet behind closed doors Tuesday morning for their weekly conference meeting. Evacuating the lower chamber over a tough vote on the Epstein files also likely won’t play well with Trump, who is hosting a megabill celebration for Republican lawmakers at the White House Tuesday evening.

House Speaker Mike Johnson initially refuted the possibility of an early exit, telling Politico that “we’re not sending anybody home.”

But Johnson was proven wrong before Noon. House GOP leadership announced that “votes are no longer expected in the House on Thursday,” with last votes taking place on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ET, ending the schedule a day early.

This story has been updated.

“F***ing Wrong”: Jon Stewart Torches CBS for Bowing to Trump - 2025-07-22T13:20:28Z

Late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart cursed out Donald Trump and CBS News Monday night following last week’s announcement that the Late Show With Stephen Colbert had been canceled. 

During his show, Colbert took a moment to respond to Trump celebrating the news that the Late Show was ending. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social last week. 

“How dare you, sir,” Colbert said. “Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go fuck yourself.”

During Colbert’s show Monday, several other late-night hosts appeared in the audience to lend their support. While Weird Al Yankovic and Lin Manuel Miranda sang Viva la Vida by Coldplay, the camera scanned the audience, landing on Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, then Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, before jumping to Jon Stewart and John Oliver. 

Finally, the camera rested on an animated Trump spooning the Paramount logo, a reference to the viral kiss cam video from a recent Coldplay concert that led to the resignation of a data company CEO. As the spotlight shone on them, the animated Trump ducked down and crawled away. 

There had been some speculation that Colbert’s ousting was the result of  his accusing Paramount of paying a “big fat bribe” to Trump in the form of a $16 million settlement over the editing of Kamala Harris’s interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes last fall. Colbert claimed that CBS had acknowledged the lawsuit was “completely without merit” but agreed to pay a large sum to ease its sale to Skydance Media—a deal that needs approval from the president.

Prior to Colbert’s show, Stewart slammed CBS for its cowardice in the face of the Trump administration during Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Comedy Central is also owned by Paramount. 

“The fact that CBS didn’t try to save their number one rated network late-night franchise that’s been on the air for over three decades is part of what’s making everyone wonder, ‘What’s this? Purely financial? Or maybe the path of least resistance for your $8 billion merger?’” Stewart said. 

Stewart argued that the Late Show wasn’t ending for financial reasons, or even because Trump had directly threatened it. “I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment,” he said. 

Stewart argued that it was the very shows CBS sought to censor that had provided the value of Paramount’s $8 billion deal. “Shows that say something, shows that take a stand, shows that are unafraid—this is not a ‘We speak truth to power.’ We don’t,” Stewart said. “We speak opinions to television cameras. But we try. We fucking try, every night.”

“And if you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourself so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar, (a) why will anyone watch you? And you are fucking wrong,” he said. 

Stewart also pointed out that straying away from criticizing Trump would do little to protect the channel from catching the president’s ire—considering Trump had just recently filed a lawsuit against his old ally Rupert Murdoch, who’d helped to transform Fox News into a Trump propaganda machine. 

Stewart concluded by urging institutions to “sack the fuck up” or “go fuck yourself.”

Transcript: Trump Press Sec Knifes FBI in Back as Epstein Mess Worsens - 2025-07-22T10:35:05Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 22 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Trump’s propagandists are getting more frantic in their efforts to spin away the scandal around the Jeffrey Epstein files. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, unsurprisingly, offered the most creative spin of all, basically throwing the FBI under the bus. But House Speaker Mike Johnson followed a close second, casting Trump’s position on the files as the height of transparency. All this comes as Trump’s approval ratings have just hit a new low, and those things are related. The Epstein scandal, though it might appear disconnected from people’s everyday lives, is perfectly suited to damaging Trump in all kinds of hidden ways. We’re talking about all this today with data analyst G. Elliott Morris, author of the Strength in Numbers Substack, who has a good new piece probing how the Epstein fiasco is weakening Trump. Elliott, good to see you.

G. Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks for having me back.

Sargent: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump drew a lewd doodle in Jeffrey Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album along with some cryptic prose. Trump denies it. As a reminder, MAGA spent years promoting the idea that Epstein’s client list would expose a massive pedophile ring among Democrats. Now Trump’s DOJ suddenly said, Oh, there’s nothing here. Yet, in fact, there are actual questions about whether Trump is in there or not. Elliott, you wrote the other day that the scandal by itself is taking a toll on Trump’s approval. Can you walk us through that argument?

Morris: Sure. So at Strength in Numbers, my Substack, what we like to do is look at an average of all polls over a certain amount of time. While there’s some noise in the data, when there’s a clear shift in how people feel about the president in a short amount of time, we can be reasonably confident that we can attribute that to certain events. So since July 13, there’s been about a two percentage point increase in Trump’s disapproval rating, from 52.5 percent of the public saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing as president to 54.5 percent. And there’s been a corresponding decrease in his approval rating, from about 44 percent to about 42.5 percent. Look, you can come up with other explanations for me, maybe, but it seems like the easiest explanation here is the Occam’s razor one: The thing that’s sucking up all of the news attention that’s particularly damaging to Trump because of the last two years of Republican positioning on this is the one that’s affecting his approval rating. That’s my analysis.

Sargent: Well, I want to talk about that at some length a bit later, but first let’s talk about what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said when she was asked Monday why Trump won’t just order a full release of the Epstein files. Here’s her answer.

Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any further credible evidence, they should do so. As to why they have or have not or will, you should ask the FBI about that.

Sargent: So Elliott, unless I’m missing something, Trump actually called for the release of the grand jury testimony, which is really unlikely to be revelatory. But it is noteworthy that the White House badly wants Trump to appear pro-transparency. She’s now fobbing it off on the FBI as if Trump couldn’t order the FBI to release the files. Your thoughts on that?

Morris: Yeah, it seems unlikely to me, given everything else Trump is able to do with a snap of his finger, that if he wanted full transparency, he wouldn’t get it from his own FBI, especially with the people who are running the FBI today, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. So it just seems obvious that there’s some roadblock that we’re not seeing. And in terms of public opinion, the public agrees with that. Reuters/Ipsos polled people between July 15 and 16 and asked them if they agreed with the statement, “The government is hiding Epstein’s alleged client list,” and 70 percent of people said that they agreed with that. They also agreed with the statement, “The government is hiding information on Epstein’s death,” which I know we don’t necessarily want to touch and I’m not sure how much we believe that. But just that is a point in the case that the public sees that something is going on behind the scenes here. And I think that’s the explanation for Karoline Leavitt’s comments, as well.

Sargent: Well, you mentioned Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, so I want to point out for people that Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Dan Bongino, the FBI deputy director, were among the leading promoters of the idea that the Epstein files contained this explosive set of revelations, back when they were big MAGA influencers. They were put into the deep state partly to blow the lid off the deep state and show everybody that that scandal that had been festering for many years was actually there. So it’s this weird poetic justice for them to be getting thrown under the bus here. But again, the desperation to appear pro-transparency is palpable. That’s the thing.

Morris: Yeah. And people do want the transparency. If you ask them, “Should the government release all the documents it has about Jeffrey Epstein?” that’s an 80–20 issue. They’re clearly reading public opinion here in that the people want the information. And then the next question is like, “Why are they not getting it?” and that’s, I guess, where we have to be a bit more speculative.

Sargent: Well, Leavitt said something else of real note that I want people to listen to. She was asked about the news that FBI agents going through the Epstein files were told to flag any mentions of Trump. Listen to her answer.

Leavitt (audio voiceover): I don’t believe that’s something the White House was aware of. You’d have to ask the FBI.

Sargent: Now that’s just preposterous. The second that that came out—it came out last Friday—Karoline Leavitt and the White House would have been on the phone with Pam Bondi, the attorney general, in about three seconds, finding out exactly what the deal was with whether there was a directive to FBI agents to flag mentions of Trump. And they would have gotten an answer. So I think it’s pretty damn telling that they’re not saying, No, it’s not true. They’re saying, Go to the FBI, again.

Morris: Yeah, that’s just classic obfuscation by the press secretary, right? If they could say no, then they would say no. They say no all the time when they don’t have information on their side. This press secretary … how does The New York Times call it? Stretches the truth, perhaps? So they could be stretching the truth further here if they want, but instead you get the redirection to the FBI. So I agree. I think that’s pretty telling of what’s going on behind the scenes here.

Sargent: Yeah, there’s just no chance that they wouldn’t have gotten to the bottom of this. I want to be clear [on] how this emerged so people know, because it’s a really important turn in this whole story and maybe people missed it. Senator Dick Durbin sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday saying that his office had received information that FBI agents going through the Epstein files were tasked with flagging mentions of Trump. And in that letter, Senator Durbin also demanded that Pam Bondi produce essentially a list of flags of Trump’s name. Now, I think there’s very little chance that there will be an answer from Attorney General Bondi on that point, but what Dick Durbin there did was something really quite extraordinary. I don’t know what the basis for his information was, but this was a very serious congressional letter. It was not just some tossed-off thing on a podcast, or something, like this one. It was an official letter to the attorney general from the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying, We have gotten confidential information to this effect. It’s pretty explosive stuff.

The reason I bring this up, Elliott, is that this is the sort of event—this letter—that can continue the media maelstrom, which in turn gets the public more and more focused on this. What are you seeing in the polling there? Are you seeing like a marked uptick in actual interest by the public? Because I’m expecting if Democrats can stoke this more this way and more questions get aired out in the media, the public gets more and more focused on it.

Morris: Yes. So we asked about this in our July Strength in Numbers and Verasight poll, which has just come out this morning. We asked people to recall what they’ve seen in the news over the last month. And although our poll missed, I think, the height of the Epstein controversy, it still shows up in the answers. About 10 percent of people say they’ve heard something about government scandals, let’s call it. Most of that is about Epstein, but also people will mention the FBI without saying Epstein’s name. That’s the only story about the FBI in the news really, so I think we can reasonably assume that that’s in there. For comparison, about 15 percent of people say immigration and deportations, and far fewer people, like 5 percent, say the big, beautiful bill. So Epstein is ranking somewhere closest to the most covered story in the administration right now and twice as much as the biggest legislative story. So I think it’s pretty impactful, and people are definitely picking up on this. It makes sense that the White House would be trying to get ahead of the backlash that we’ve been seeing in the polls as well.

Sargent: Well, as a scholar of public opinion, can you talk a little bit about why we should anticipate that things like this Durbin letter and other interventions by Democrats that focus the media on this issue are likely to gin up more public interest about it? This is something you public opinion types obsess over pretty regularly.

Morris: Yeah. So this is the worst issue for Trump, and that’s something to underscore. In an average of polls that I calculated last Friday—so a couple of days old now—17 percent of people said they approve of the way Trump’s handling “the Jeffrey Epstein files,” and 59 percent of people disapprove. That’s a minus-42 net rating. Again, for comparison, [with] inflation, which is bad for any president, particularly bad over the last two years, that’s minus 20. So people feel about twice as bad as they feel about inflation—something that sank the last presidency—toward Trump’s handling of the Epstein files. To answer your point, it’s still early in the news cycle for this, and the White House shows no sign of slowing it down. So if they don’t make concrete steps toward giving the public what they want—which is, as they say, full transparency, but [which they] aren’t giving—then we can imagine that that minus-42 rating is just going to keep wearing on the White House as the new cycle wears on.

Sargent: And I think a coordinated message has gone out among top Republicans. We had House Speaker Mike Johnson also comment on whether there will be a House vote compelling release of the Epstein files. Listen to this.

Mike Johnson (audio voiceover): So here’s what I would say about the Epstein files: There is no daylight between the House Republicans, the House, and the president on maximum transparency. He has said that he wants all the credible files related to Epstein to be released. He’s asked the attorney general to request the grand jury files of the court. All of that is in process right now. My belief is we need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing. And if further congressional action is necessary or appropriate, then we’ll look at that. But I don’t think we’re at that point right now because we agree with the president.

Reporter (audio voiceover): So no vote after the resolution?

Johnson (audio voiceover): No. No.

Sargent: So here Johnson again conflates releasing the grand jury testimony with releasing the files. Note, again, the effort to portray Trump as supremely transparent. Like I said, the message does appear coordinated. They’ve got to be looking at similar data to what you’re talking about here. And let me ask this, Elliott, if I could: There’s going to come a point when House Republicans get even more nervous about this, aren’t they?

Morris: Yeah, and I think that point’s got to come pretty soon. So we know that Trump’s really unpopular with all voters, but he’s also unpopular with Republicans, the types of people that vote in the primary elections. Those are still about nine months away, but hey, you’re always campaigning when you’re in Congress, right? So in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week, 35 percent of Republicans say they approve of the way Trump’s handling this. Trump’s approval rating with Republicans is usually 90 percent, so the fact that he’s at 35 is pretty telling. If these people are looking to signals from their constituency about what to do next, they’re going to be getting a lot of really negative feedback about the president’s strategy here. And I imagine either they change course and they respond to the public or they respond to their party leader. And what determines how they respond to this is: Who’s the loudest in the meantime? Are they paying more attention to Twitter and people yelling at them, or are they getting a bunch of phone calls from Trump and the White House?

Sargent: Well, you wrote this piece trying to dig into why this is so problematic for Trump. I want to read a bit from it, “By siding with Epstein and against transparency, Trump significantly injures his reputation as an outsider fighting the ‘deep state’ for God and country. Much of the conspiratorial wing of the Republican Party has been arguing that Epstein was in bed with major Democratic donors and other political elites—by refusing to side against them, Trump implicitly sides with them.” He’s the traitor to his class, in a way, to appropriate the FDR idea. He’s the guy who’s going to go in and avenge the people by showing them how elites rigged the system in their favor, how corrupt their globalist schemes are and so forth. So I think you’re really getting at something essential there. This cuts against his political mystique at a very deep level.

Morris: And it’s not just his mystique, as you call it. It’s his entire “value-add” in the Republican Party. In the 2016 primary, this is why Trump beats Cruz and Rubio. In 2024, this is why Trump outperforms with young men who would otherwise be liberals. It’s because they feel like the system is corrupt; especially at a time of inflation, they feel like it’s not giving them what they need. When there’s lots of these narratives about the elites being in bed with some pedophilic ring and covering it up and Trump says, I can fix it. I alone can uncover the story for you—when he doesn’t do that, when he looks to be actually continuing to cover stuff up, then he loses a lot of credibility. And this isn’t … there’s lots of stories like that over Trump’s term, but it does seem like this one is unique; there’s a lot of staying power. In most of Trump’s term, there’s lots of news events and you move on every two or three days. This has been the lead story for two weeks, at this point. And because he really got behind it in the 2024 campaign and so much of the party was behind the transparency, for him to turn around in completely the opposite direction, I think, is hurting him in a unique way that we haven’t seen before.

Sargent: Right. He’s basically in on the elite cover-up. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s essentially what’s exactly happening.

Morris: Yeah, he has chosen his side very publicly in a way that he will most likely be attacked for by his party in the future, I imagine.

Sargent: And it’s interesting how hard Johnson and Leavitt are working to obscure that that’s his actual position. That’s really what’s at issue here with the throwing of the FBI under the bus. That’s basically, Hey, we’d love to have the files out there. Go talk to Kash.

Morris: Yeah, this does raise the question of, Who’s going to out-Trump Trump on the Epstein files? And we worry about what that figure looks like over the next four years. But yeah, he has chosen the side that he was previously not associated with very publicly. Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying he needs to be more transparent. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is not on Trump’s side here, so we can imagine that that’s going to have some costs. As we get more data, we’ll probably see those costs kick in.

Sargent: I just want to pick up on what you said about young men. Of course, young men are the success story for Trump of the 2024 cycle—the incels and those types, all the Joe Rogan–vote types, and so forth. They’re the more conspiratorial, “anti-system” voters that Trump was able to win over. You do think this costs him with that demographic? And does that matter in the midterms though? How do you see all that playing out? These are probably the types of voters that would sit out a midterm, but I would imagine that Trump would like them to turn out on his side—on the side of the Republican Party—precisely because the midterm electorate is going to be made up of highly educated, highly motivated voters who lean Democratic.

Morris: Yeah. In 2024, analysts made a lot about the podcast voters. These are the people who were activated by Joe Rogan and Theo Von and such. Both of those podcasters have come out against Trump in the past two weeks, asking, Where are the hundreds of thousands of hours of tape? They claim, I think, it is a quite credible question from Rogan, for example. So if we’re asking where the people that they brought to the Trump camp are going to go, they’re probably going to follow the person who brought them there. They’re not Trump podcast watchers. They’re Joe Rogan watchers. That’s the person they trust. That’s the person they have a parasocial relationship with, to use the podcast marketing [term]. And as you say, they’re quite conspiratorial, and yes, they are disengaged. But every vote matters. If turnout in this group is only 30 percent instead of 40 percent, that’s still a lot of people that the Republicans were counting on and had counted on in 2024 to win that they’re losing now because of this very high-profile flip-flop.

Sargent: I’ve got to say, it’s awfully inconvenient for Trump and House Republicans that the people now sounding the loudest calls for transparency on this matter are House Democrats, right?

Morris: Yeah. And the most popular part of the identification among this group are independents, so I think they’re very likely to acknowledge that messaging in a way that your Republican young men aren’t likely to. There’s a lot of people … there’s a lot of votes here that could be moved.

Sargent: Fascinating stuff. Elliott Morris, thanks so much for talking to us, man. It’s going to get really, really crazy.

Morris: Yeah, this is probably one of the more interesting stories I’ve covered in my last 10 years. Thanks for having me on, Greg.

The Late-Capitalist Menace at the Heart of Cloud - 2025-07-22T10:00:00Z

There is nothing new under the sun, but Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud hovers somewhere in the vicinity. The Japanese master’s latest is a malevolent, cumulonimbus shapeshifter of a movie, a click-through consumer satire that’s darkly droll and also laugh-out-loud funny, charged with extremely online vibes and featuring an antihero bearing the (Posh)mark of Cain.

Cash-strapped and fed up, several years after acquiring his (useless) university degree, twentysomething Yoshii (Masaka Suda) laments his lack of “easy money”; he sulks through his shifts on a clothing factory floor, squirms uncomfortably at the prospect of a promotion, and tries his best to mollify his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), a striver by proxy whose idea of making conversation is to whisper sweet nothings in his ear about their need for a bigger apartment. There’s no idealism in Yoshii’s psychological makeup, and no shame, either—just a set of what he refers to as “conventional desires” dangling carrot-like beyond his reach. His solution: a lucrative, legally flexible sideline as a digital middleman, purchasing trinkets in bulk from similarly flailing suppliers and reselling them online at jacked-up prices.

“You operate on impulse and instinct,” says one woman as Yoshii cruises coolly through her Tokyo warehouse, inspecting her inventory with calculating disdain. She doesn’t mean it as a compliment.

For his part, Yoshii isn’t offended. In fact, he’s already internalized the sentiment. His chosen online handle, “Ratel,” is another name for the honey badger, an animal that went viral in 2011 for not giving a fuck; whether the reference is intentional or just another way of saying “rat,” it distills a furtive, distinctly millennial grindset. The name also embodies the same tenacious, neo-Darwinian instincts glimpsed in Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite, which Kurosawa’s film slots alongside nicely as a companion piece, or maybe a riffier, more dissonant B-side. Where Bong excels in a brawny, bravura form of crowd-pleasing—an approach that unfortunately failed him earlier this year in Mickey 17—Kurosawa isn’t afraid to be misunderstood. Unlike Parasite’s merry band of home invaders, Yoshii doesn’t see himself as a class warrior, nor is he bound by family ties. Rather, he’s very much his own crazy, nasty-ass animal, and perfectly happy to be perceived as vermin, provided he moves enough units. The key to Ratel’s scavenger persona lies in a combination of agility, anonymity, and furiously suppressed appetites, which sometimes get the better of him. He doesn’t want to let his eyes get bigger than his stomach; he knows that the worst thing he could do is to gnaw the invisible hand that feeds him.

The intricate interplay between impulse and instinct—and the carnage that ensues when those mechanisms go haywire, whether under external pressure or from the inside out—is an essential component of Kurosawa’s cinema. This was especially true of his 1997 breakthrough, Cure, a genuinely frightening study of free will whose psych-major villain weaponized his victims’ submerged grudges and secret desires. (The bad guy is a cheesy archetype—a sinister hypnotist—but the movie elides clichés; in a wicked twist, his subjects greet him almost gratefully, as a subconscious liberator.) Cure’s grim tone and savvy evocation of ’90s serial-killer signifiers—i.e., the gory x-marks-the-spot motif recasting crime scenes as expressionist canvases à la Se7en—made it an international hit; in retrospect, it serves as the dividing line in Kurosawa’s career between his extended apprenticeship as a willing and adaptable director for hire in the Japanese studio system in the 1980s and ’90s and a capital-A auteur traversing the festival circuit. His subsequent reputation as a genre specialist, buttressed by movies like Pulse, Retribution, and the aptly titled Creepy, belies the actual diversity of his twenty-first-century output, but it’s well earned: He’s peerless when it comes to manifesting menace.

Kurosawa’s style isn’t ostentatious, but his spare, functional setups get under your skin anyway. His camera—sometimes static, sometimes gliding, always intent—has the same nagging, disembodied presence as a phantom limb. Cloud’s early sequences are suffused with free-floating paranoia; riding the bus home from work with Akiko—who’s excited (and openly turned on) by her boyfriend’s plan for “a new life,” located out in the boonies and subsidized by more strategic gouging—Yoshii is so engrossed that he doesn’t clock a scruffy fellow passenger looming over his shoulder like an angel of death. When he turns suddenly to look behind him in a jarring reverse shot, the sound drops out, as if synced to the feeling in the pit of his stomach (and also ours). Nothing comes directly from this brief encounter (the other guy just gets off at his stop), but it nevertheless teaches us how to watch the rest of the movie—on a wavelength of steadily encroaching dread.

That’s Kurosawa’s frequency: No contemporary filmmaker is better at oblique threat, or at fusing physical and psychic architecture. Cloud is a film of cavernous and dilapidated interiors, densely cluttered but spiritually vacant spaces illuminated through frosted windows or fractured glass. The central, recurring image of shelves lined with cardboard boxes offers a sick parody of abundance—rows and rows of knockoffs waiting patiently to be unpacked, framing Yoshii himself as another piece of counterfeit merchandise. Where some genre filmmakers’ hermeticism feels sealed off from reality—variations on the neat-freak megalomania of Stanley Kubrick—Kurosawa works, steadily and patiently, toward the inverse. He takes us through the looking glass, darkly; his images seem to seal reality off from itself.

2024 was a banner year for Kurosawa, who released three excellent movies: an inscrutable, apocalypse-now short (Chime); a bleak, carefully torqued remake-slash-revision of his own ’90s DTV psychodrama (The Serpent’s Path), and Cloud, which is probably the most accessible of the trio—all things being relative—and was hailed last fall at festivals in Toronto, Venice, and New York as a “return to form.” Leaving aside the fact that Kurosawa’s form has never once abandoned him—his languid, measured filmmaking is as natural as breathing, and as mesmerizingly precise as a velvet-tipped metronome—there is a sense in which Cloud’s muscular genre pastiche represents both a directorial flex and a timely desire to revisit old terrain. Back in 2001, Kurosawa unleashed Pulse, a horror movie whose title hinted at a sociological agenda; its story of ghosts trapped in the machine—of lonely phantoms seeking dial-up connection and silhouettes of suicides screen-burned into the walls of apartments and chat rooms alike—monitored a society’s steadily declining vital signs. Cloud (another suggestive title, connoting a world of remote servers and ephemeral data collection) could be Pulse’s secular sequel. There are no literal hauntings here, and no blurry, wobble-walking apparitions, but the internet remains a portal toward something horrific nevertheless: an antisocial network of jilted customers spewing bile on message boards and eventually cosplaying as vigilantes in a campaign against the dirty rat(el) who knowingly sold them crap.

That it takes a while for Cloud to reveal its form as a best-served-cold thriller—with Yoshii getting hassled by cops and vandals alike after he arrives at his palatial, steel-and-glass fortress—is in keeping with Kurosawa’s fondness for methodical, elliptical storytelling. At the same time, approaching Cloud’s narrative from the perspective of cause-and-effect drama is a mug’s game. As he enters his seventies, Kurosawa’s magisterial control of film language obliges him to try to scramble its syntax; he’s more interested than ever these days in dream (or nightmare) logic and in cryptic, tactile abstractions that keep their meanings elusive (all the better for chasing them around).

To say that Cloud is a movie about the compulsive, hollowed-out shell game of late capitalism—with Yoshii/Ratel as its insatiable avatar—isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s reductive: It’s equally acute as a study of the complex and very contemporary relationship that exists between online anonymity, technological surveillance, and rapidly metastasizing, reactionary-populist rage. In interviews, Kurosawa has talked a little bit about how Cloud’s shaggy-mad-dog plotting—which keeps extracting new antagonists out of the woodwork until the sheer proliferation of buyers with an ax to grind against Ratel becomes hilarious—conveys how small frustrations can become contagious. Yoshii’s remorseless grift provides his clients with a common enemy or effigy, suitable for burning (or a threatened “slow roasting” with an acetylene torch), but their anger transcends simple comeuppance. “In a sense,” writes Kurosawa in his director’s statement, “this might also be how modern-day wars come into being.”

The notion of doxing as a hypermodern form of warfare is provocative, and, within its genre-hopping conception, Cloud does transform into a kind of combat picture, albeit one where the rules of engagement keep mutating. As long as he’s hidden behind his modem and his pseudonym, Yoshii wields considerable power and influence (like Cure’s sociopathic manipulator, he knows what people want and preys on their weaknesses). Exposed and flushed out, though, he’s a cornered animal, flailing around helplessly in the woods (certain exterior locations and a sight gag involving a masked assailant in broad daylight suggest that Kurosawa is a fan of the Coen brothers’ masterpiece Fargo).

If Cloud were simply a cautionary tale (like Fargo), such dramatic turnabout might be taken on its face as fair play (a variation on the old parable of fuck around and find out), or as a necessary series of trials en route to some larger redemption. Suffice it to say that Kurosawa, who is not an ironist, is playing a different game entirely—and that game is definitely the operative word here. One late, extended set piece unfolds uncannily like a first-person shooter; from that bullet-riddled and blood-soaked moral void, it’s a short trip, metaphysically speaking, to a seductive rhetoric of pure evil, delivered—again, as in Cure—by a character who styles himself proudly as an enabler.

With his lanky frame and bland, slightly hateful handsomeness, Suda makes for a fine cipher. But the strongest impression in Cloud is made by the angelic Daiken Okudaira as Sano, a local college dropout whose loving devotion to Yoshii extends beyond the gig as his personal assistant-cum-henchman, and serves as an enigmatic running joke whose punch line, when it comes, is devastating. There’s no real reason that Sano gloms onto Yoshii, who mostly treats him with disdain and refuses to take his (good) advice about his business; he shuts down Akiko’s advances, accepts his severance pay gracefully, and tells his (now-ex) boss that he can always call if he needs help. This isn’t lip service; when Yoshii is placed in peril, Sano is—somehow—there, armed to the teeth, a crack-shot deus ex machina and a willing, lubricious cog within an even grander contraption. “Please keep focusing on only making money,” he says brightly to Yoshii when the shooting is over. “I’ll handle the rest.” To paraphrase another movie about a wretched mammal who finds a protector, the two of them need look no more. The end of the world as we know it is also the beginning of a beautiful friendship; every Cloud has its silver lining.

So, Where Is the “Bawdy” Trump-Epstein Letter, Anyway? - 2025-07-22T10:00:00Z

President Donald Trump followed through on his threat last week to sue The Wall Street Journal for reporting that he had sent a “bawdy” letter to Jeffrey Epstein to celebrate the financier’s 50th birthday in 2003. Epstein, who was convicted of state child-prostitution charges in 2008, died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

In their suit, Trump and his lawyers claim that the letter is “fake and nonexistent” and that the president suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” from the Journal’s reporting. His complaint requested no less than $10 billion in punitive damages, a shoot-for-the-moon sum. He may as well have asked for $10 kajillion while he was at it.

The legal merits of Trump’s lawsuit are dubious, at best. The Journal is one of the most reliable news outlets in the nation, and it is extremely unlikely that it went to press without strong evidence that its reporting was accurate. As far as the legal claims go, what stands out most to me is the underlying factual dispute and the question that could resolve it: Where is the letter itself?

Trump’s past relationship with Epstein is receiving new scrutiny this month thanks to his own administration. Earlier this month, the Justice Department and the FBI released a joint statement claiming that their “exhaustive review” of the Epstein files found no evidence of an “incriminating client list” or other potential bombshells. Ordinarily, that would have convinced most observers. However, that statement ran counter to numerous past insinuations by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel that the files could contain damaging information about Trump’s political opponents.

Some of Trump’s conservative media allies, who had hyped the files’ potential release, sharply criticized the administration for its mishandling of the situation. Elon Musk, a former Trump ally looking to criticize Trump, claimed on social media that the president would be implicated by the files’ release. (Musk later partially backtracked on those assertions.) Trump lashed out at his own supporters on social media and demanded that they move on from the scandal.

The Journal’s article breathed new life into the saga by reporting new details about the depth of Trump and Epstein’s relationship. Some of the details have been publicly available for decades: Trump infamously told a magazine in 2002 that Epstein was a terrific guy and that he “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”—an eye-popping quote to volunteer about someone like Epstein. The president claims that he ended his friendship with Epstein a few years later and banned him from Mar-a-Lago for unexplained reasons.

“To attempt and [sic] inextricably link President Trump to Epstein, [the Journal reporters] falsely claim that the salacious language of the letter is contained within a hand-drawn naked woman, which was created with a heavy marker,” the lawsuit alleged. “Worse, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely represent as fact that President Trump drew the naked woman’s breasts and signed his name ‘Donald’ below her waist, ‘mimicking pubic hair.’” (Emphasis theirs.) The lawsuit recounted the letter’s written contents, which it described as a third-person narration of the two men’s friendship, as follows:

“Voice Over: ‘There must be more to life than having everything,’ the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

This is a pretty weird thing to send to a friend who would later be convicted of child prostitution by the state of Florida. “Enigmas never age” and “may every day be another wonderful secret” aren’t quite legally incriminating on their own, but they give the impression that the two men knew quite a lot about each other’s personal and romantic lives. Given what we now know about Epstein’s personal life, the letter raises questions about what Trump knew at the time—and why he didn’t tell the authorities.

Trump, both personally and through his lawyers, denied that he had anything to do with the letter. “I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal in a statement in the original article. “I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language. It’s not my words.” In the lawsuit, he claimed that the reporters “concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.”

The Journal, on the other hand, reported that it existed as part of a “leather-bound album” compiled by longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s 50th birthday, and quoted from it verbatim. The newspaper did not describe its source for the letter beyond “people who have reviewed the pages,” and its attribution for the article’s contents was “according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”

Much of last week’s article described the album’s creation and preparation in detail. It identified the New York bookbinder who created the album—he died in 2020, making him an unlikely source—and detailed how the letters were gathered and prepared by Maxwell. It even described another letter submitted by retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s former lawyers. None of this information can be found in publicly available records, so the Journal’s reporters may have relied on Justice Department documents or sources within Epstein’s circle to flesh out the album’s origins.

Why doesn’t the Journal simply publish the letter? That’s a good question. The likeliest answer is that they aren’t in possession of the original or a copy of it. The article said that the letter was “reviewed by the Journal.” It is unclear whether this means the reporters personally saw the letter itself or a photograph of the letter. The Journal described the album as “among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago,” but it is unclear where the album is currently located.

That vagueness is understandable. Reporters are ethically and professionally obligated to protect their sources, and further details about the letter’s veracity could implicate those sources. There are only so many people in the world who would have had access to the album, after all. Their source may have also conditioned access to the letter on the reporters’ agreement to not keep or publish a copy or photograph of it, perhaps fearing that it would be traceable back to them.

“Despite these unsubstantiated claims, however, the article does not attach the purported letter, does not identify the purported drawing, nor does it show any proof that President Trump has anything to do with it,” the lawsuit claimed. “Tellingly, the article does not explain whether [the Journal] obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstance that would otherwise lend credibility to the article. That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump.”

Most of the lawsuit is dedicated to describing how widely the article has been shared and distributed, as if to support its claims of reputational harm. Other portions are bizarrely written. “The article was published in The Wall Street Journal as an exclusive,” it claimed. “However, since publication, Defendants have widely disseminated it to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.” Yes, that’s what publication means.

While it might seem strange that Trump would sue Rupert Murdoch—the Journal’s owner also owns Fox News and other right-wing media outlets—the media mogul has always treated the Journal differently from his other outlets. Its opinion and editorial page is easily the most conservative among major U.S. newspapers. But its newsroom journalism has generally avoided a tangible ideological drift in any direction and maintained a high level of credibility, even through the tumult of the Trump years. Among its scoops was the first revelation that Trump had paid hush money to Stormy Daniels to conceal their affair during the 2016 presidential election.

Murdoch himself has also shown far more reluctance to interfere in the Journal’s newsroom operations than with his other media properties. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the fraudulent blood-testing start-up Theranos, reportedly asked Murdoch in 2017 to squelch the Journal’s investigation into its lab problems. Murdoch declined, even though his own investment stake in the company reportedly totaled up to $125 million. The Journal’s coverage eventually led to Theranos’s collapse and a Pulitzer Prize.

The lawsuit was filed by Brito PLLC, a boutique law firm based outside Miami. Alejandro Brito, the firm’s eponymous founder, has represented Trump in a variety of legal battles against major media companies over the last two years. His most notable victory came last December when ABC settled a lawsuit that Brito brought on Trump’s behalf for inaccurately describing E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault allegations against the president. As part of the settlement, the news organization donated $15 million to Trump’s presidential library and awarded Brito $1 million in attorney’s fees.

Other Brito-led lawsuits have been less successful. In 2023, for example, Trump and Brito sued CNN over its use of the term “the Big Lie” to describe Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, as well as other remarks by the network’s contributors that compared him to Adolf Hitler and other dictators. Those remarks were obviously covered by the First Amendment, which protects Americans’ ability to describe their elected officials in blunt and unflattering terms, and a federal judge dismissed the defamation lawsuit accordingly.

Last month, Brito sent a letter on Trump’s behalf to The New York Times demanding that the newspaper retract and apologize for a June 24 article on U.S. military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump initially claimed during a nationally televised address that the strikes were a “spectacular military success” and that Iran’s most important nuclear sites had been “totally and completely obliterated.” The Times later reported that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that the bombings had set back Iran’s nuclear program by “only a few months.”

Brito’s letter repeated Trump’s own hyperbolic claims about the strikes, saying that they had “unequivocally eliminated Iran’s nuclear capabilities and brought peace to the region.” The lawyer also claimed that the Times, in contradicting Trump’s version of events, had “undermined the credibility and integrity of President Trump in the eyes of the public and the professional community.” (It is unclear to what the “professional community” is meant to refer.)

David McCraw, the Times’ veteran in-house counsel, wrote in a reply letter that the paper would not be retracting the article or apologizing for its contents. He noted that remarks by Trump himself and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had undercut the president’s original claims about the efficacy of the airstrikes and their impact on Iran’s regional footprint. McCraw concluded by observing that it would be “irresponsible for a president to use the threat of libel litigation to try to silence a publication” that had reported on the contradictory U.S. intelligence estimate.

If Trump is correct that the Epstein letter does not exist, that would not automatically spell doom for the Journal, at least legally speaking. The Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedents require an even higher threshold for defamation claims than mere falsity. A plaintiff like Trump must instead prove that the Journal acted with “reckless disregard for the truth”—in other words, that it did not care whether what was published was true or false, and that it intended to do harm to Trump.

That would be out of character for the Journal and its reporters, to say the least. Trump’s unequivocal insistence that the letter does not exist still raises an important question for the Journal, for the Justice Department, and for Trump himself: Where is the Epstein album, and where is Trump’s letter to him? If it is not in the Justice Department’s custody, then Bondi and Patel should explain what they know about it and its current location. And if it is in the Justice Department’s custody, then the government should release it in full as quickly as possible.