Biden had declared a cancer moon shot — which Trump has canceled, of course. Trump’s legacy is secure as a destroyer of everything good.
I think we can maybe pack away all the recriminations we’ve been hearing over the last six months, and particularly in the last week since Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book came out. It’s long past time to put it away and confront what Democrats need to do in the future instead of constantly regurgitating the frustration about Biden running for a second term even as he was slipping. That’s not a problem going forward and we can leave that behind.
At least I hope everyone can have the grace to leave him alone now that he’s facing a bad cancer diagnosis. I don’t expect that Trump will care. He’ll probably pile on even more and the Republicans in Congress will go forward with their plans to “investigate” whether he was using an autopen to sign legislation because he was mentally incapacitated. That’s just how they roll.
But maybe the mainstream media could give it rest now?
THE REPUBLICAN EFFORT TO slash Medicaid stalled on Friday, when legislation cutting more than $625 billion from the program failed to get through a key House committee.
GOP leaders said they hope to try again on Sunday night. That presumably means they are spending the weekend frantically negotiating in private, trying to secure votes from a handful of holdout Republicans—all in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” of spending reductions and tax cuts moving through the House.
He notes that the delays have been a big subject of discussion in that they show the GOP is in disarray, yadda, yadda, yadda. But that’s missing the point:
When they released an actual bill last Sunday evening, they announced at the same time that the Energy and Commerce Committee would take it up on Tuesday—not even two days later, and so quickly that the Congressional Budget Office wouldn’t have time to produce a full, detailed cost estimate. Then came the hearings themselves: an uninterrupted, 26-hour run through deliberations (the “markup” of the legislation) that ended with a party-line vote to approve the bill and send it to the Budget Committee, where it now sits.
In all, lawmakers had less than 72 hours to digest, debate, and vote on deep Medicaid cuts that—according to CBO’s preliminary, partial estimate—will cause more than 7 million Americans to lose health insurance and millions more to face higher medical costs.1
He reminds us of the many different committees, numerous hearings, mark-up,s deliberations, public comments over months when passing the Affordable Care Act 2009. But:
This time around, Energy and Commerce is the only house committee working on health legislation. Want to guess how many hearings it had in preparation for Donald Trump’s big bill?
There actually are savings available, such as the Medicare Advantage program, but they aren’t interested in those since it impacts their corporate owners. They’re rushing this through so they can get it done before anyone figures out what’s in it because it’s very unpopular with the public. I guess they figure the voters will never know what they did.
Once I would have thought that was unlikely. Now, with the news so fragmented and so much propaganda and disinformation I wonder. At this point I’d guess that at least 40% will blame Joe Biden for any Ill effects. Surely that’s what Dear Leader will tell them.
Voters who have not heard much about some of the many major news events from the first 100 days of Mr. Trump’s second term have a higher opinion of the job he is doing, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A little under half of the 42 percent of voters who approved of the job Mr. Trump is doing as president said they had not heard much about at least some of the ups and downs of his administration’s decisions.
Mr. Trump has traditionally done well with lower-information voters, so it is perhaps not surprising that they are more inclined to support his presidency. These voters are also notoriously difficult for pollsters to reach, making it challenging to track their exact impact.
And the blitz of news can be hard to follow even for the most engaged voters. In his first 100 days, Mr. Trump signed more executive orders than any other modern president, part of a strategy to make changes at such velocity that people could not possibly pay attention to all of them.
In total, about one-third of voters said they had not heard much about one or more of the major events of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, such as the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, fluctuations in the stock market or cuts made by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE. Still, most Americans say they are closely watching news coming out of the Trump administration — more than the share who were closely watching the early days of the Biden presidency.
Maybe if more people had paid attention to Biden’s presidency they wouldn’t have hated him so much. But that’s another story.
So much of our future rests on this miscreant’s shoulders. I really wish these people would open their eyes. It could make a difference.
“The U.S. presidency makes the occupant of that office the most powerful person on the planet,” Andrea Pitzer declares at the opening of her latest “What Comes Next” podcast. “If you’re someone whose deficiencies cry out for more submission to you and more adulation of you, how hard it’s gotta be to have so much power and yet be denied those few extra steps that would deliver you right to dictatorship?”
Step by step, a cabal of MAGA autocrats backing Donald Trump has taken us there. Now their task is to sink the roots deeper and make it harder for lovers of freedom and defenders of our constitutional order to dislodge Trump’s nascent dictatorship.
Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week.
Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that outlines how investigations of elected officials should be conducted.
If adopted, the changes would remove a layer of review intended to ensure that cases against public officials are legally sound and not politically motivated. Career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section guided and signed off on the criminal investigations into alleged corruption by New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and former Democratic senator Bob Menendez.
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed the proposal’s existence but added that no final decision has been made. “The three people familiar with the proposal spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear reprisals.”
No kidding? Click on over to see the AP photo of Her Imperious Blondeness, AG Pam Bondi, and ask yourself if she won’t do it. She’s ready to break into “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” What color is her armband?
Jason Statler considers how the Supreme Court’s 6-3 presidential immunity decision last year gave Trump a blank check negotiable for not just indicting opponents, but crimes up to and including assassination of political enemies.
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
D. John Sauer, now Trump’s Solicitor General (remember him from Thursday?), replied, “We could see that could well be an official act.”
Statler believes Sotomayor should have asked if that included murdering members of the Supreme Court.
Sauer last week had to be pressed on whether the Trump administration would respect lower court rulings. Generally, was the best he could do. But pressed again, Sauer said the administration would respect Supreme Court precedents.
Trump’s people are dangerous. And not maybe, possibly. Statler places (and I agree) Trump v. United States among the worst SCOTUS decisions in history, down there with Dred Scott, Korematsu, Bush v. Gore, Shelby v. Holder, and Dobbs.
The need to confirm that the Trump regime would follow court orders revealed an anxiety that should be pulsing through every one of us.
Two Fridays ago, Stephen Miller—the “untouchable” architect of Trump’s authoritarian fantasies, as Superlawyer Marc Elias of Democracy Docket, called him—took a planted question from a Gateway Pundit “reporter” about when (not if) Trump will throw out habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, as we’ve all been forced to remind ourselves, is the right that makes all the other rights possible by allowing citizens to challenge an unlawful detention.
You obviously don’t want to give Donald Trump the power to wipe away your most central right whenever he feels like it. In the episode of NEXT COMES WHAT above, Andrea Pitzer draws on her global history of concentration camps to explain why:
I’d like to suggest another reason the executive branch wants to suspend habeas corpus: to be able to detain its opponents indefinitely without having to justify its actions. But I don’t even have to be right about the president’s current intentions with regard to habeas corpus for it to be a threat. All you have to do is ask yourself whether, if Trump were given this power with regard to immigrants but would suddenly also find himself permitted to arrest anyone he wanted—including the journalists he has repeatedly called “enemies of the people”—would he stop at the detention and arrest of only immigrants?
Trump et al. mean to “purify” this country in an unsettling fashion that Americans should recognize but won’t if they’re too young or haven’t visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. To further purify us, Trump wants to make English the country’s official language.
Read between the lines of Trump’s Executive Order 14224. It specifies that “Agency heads are not required to amend, remove, or otherwise stop production of documents, products, or other services prepared or offered in languages other than English.” But since those agency heads will be MAGA believers, you know what they’ll do. What Dear Leader wants done: make it harder for non-English speakers to participate in civic life, particularly in elections.
To hear what this land really sounds like, go to Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai‘i and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in northwest Wisconsin. Go to Mashpee on Cape Cod, Diné College in Arizona and Alaska’s Kuskokwim River. Then go to cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Houston.
President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14224, making English “the official language of the United States,” is the polar opposite of what our society, one of the most linguistically diverse in history, is and has always been about.
In the country’s nearly 250-year history, no one had ever successfully imposed an official language; the Constitution pointedly refuses to do so. Freedom of speech means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to speak any of the world’s 7,000-plus languages. While the order does not ban languages other than English, it sends an unprecedented official signal that they are not welcome. A prime target is Spanish, which is fully and fortunately the nation’s second most-spoken language.
This is not a drill, The Lincoln Project makes plain in its latest video. “Make no mistake– they’re coming for your free speech.” The Trump adminstration is telegraphing what’s in store. Coming for you is in the planning stages. Noncitizens already know what that looks like.
Political strategist Trygve Olson, a founding Lincoln Project advisor, launched a Substack days ago that I ran across just this morning. He offers some musings on the work of soft power that white nationalists like those propelling West Wing policies may never understand. His jumping off point is the “chaotic, over-the-top, and joyfully weird” Eurovision Song Contest.
The annual event watched by roughly 180 million viewers (over half the population of our disUnited States) knits together a continent of diverse languages and cultures. Not simply through music, although there’s that, but through participation:
Every year, nations from Iceland to Ukraine, from Portugal to Israel, show up. Not just to compete — but to belong. To stand on a shared stage and say, we are part of this. Even in moments of crisis — maybe especially then — the show goes on.
Americans like to think we invented community. That we’re the world’s example of pluralism and shared purpose. But the truth is, we’re often too proud, too isolated, or too caught up in our own culture wars to see what’s happening beyond our borders. Eurovision is a reminder that unity doesn’t have to look like conformity. That shared identity can emerge from wildly different voices singing side by side.
The event provides cross-cultural connection, as Olson sees it and “a subtle kind of politics.” It is also “a powerful form of soft power.”
One would think that Donald Trump, the former owner of the Miss Universe Organization, might grasp that. But no, he’s all about showmanship, money, and picking winners and losers. Sacrificing for the greater good and building community is for suckers.
“For decades, soft power was the beating heart of America’s global influence,” Olson writes. “Our culture, ideals, and optimism were tools of connection, not coercion. But in recent years, we’ve turned inward, obsessed with division and retreat.” This, while other nations wield soft power “not just with strategy, but with joy. With music. With unity.”
Okay, Olson oversells his thesis there, given that the decay of democracy on this side of the Atlantic has its European analog. But let’s continue.
Eurovision reminds us that cultural connection is still a weapon for good.
What’s striking — and tragic — is how figures like Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have failed to grasp what every American president since World War II understood: that this kind of cultural connection is not weakness, but strength. In his second term, Trump gutted USAID, undermined public diplomacy, and treated our alliances like transactions. He mocked the very Europeans who, through forums like Eurovision, are building the kind of cohesion and soft power America once led with. He sees them as weak — but they are, in fact, showing a kind of strength he and his MAGA enablers can’t comprehend. Because real strength isn’t about bluster. It’s about belonging. And right now, much of the world is pulling together while we posture and pull apart. It doesn’t conquer — it invites. It doesn’t impose — it inspires. And that might be the most important power of all in the world we’re living in now. The kind we could use more of — the kind that reminds people they’re seen, heard, and part of something bigger than themselves.
With our daily, lonely struggles to raise the kids and pay the monthly bills, that sense of belonging must be nurtured to be sustained. It doesn’t come naturally these days, save in the wake of natural disaster when all else is suspended.
An acquaintance noted recently how in the wake of Helene’s WNC devastation neighborhoods and complex dwellers came together to help one another. With food, with drinking water, with cleanup. And then, once the crisis subsided (we’re still in recovery; don’t think otherwise), people became strangers once again. With power and water restored, they went back inside their homes to their streaming services and narrowcast news. Into the siloed realities that sustain disunity and bitterness.
Disunity and bitterness is the soil autocrats till to grow dictatorship.
So, a small community event in the wake of disaster for you:
The Seattle International Film Festival is running now through May 25th. This year’s SIFF features a total of 245 shorts, documentaries, and narrative films in 63 languages. The brick-and-mortar event will be immediately followed by a week of select virtual screenings from this year’s catalog (May 26th to June 1st) on the SIFF Channel. I’ve been bingeing on screeners and thought I would take a breather and share some reviews. Hopefully, some of these festival selections will be coming soon to a theater (or a streaming service) near you!
Free Leonard Peltier (USA) ***½ – “Free Leonard Peltier!” has been a rallying cry by Native American rights activists for decades; in fact so many years have passed since his trial, conviction and sentence for the murder of two FBI agents that the circumstances surrounding his case have become obfuscated to the general public. Even those who have lobbied 50 years for his release (predicated on the government’s arguably flimsy evidence and dubious witness testimonies) didn’t see Joe Biden’s January 2025 commutation of Peltier’s life sentence coming. It wasn’t the full pardon his advocates had wished for, but they certainly welcomed it with joy and relief.
It’s been a long road for Peltier (now 80), with many twists and turns, but co-directors Jesse Short Bull (Oglala Sioux) and David France do a yeoman’s job of telling not only his story, but putting it in context with the activities of the American Indian Movement that flourished in the 1970s.
The filmmakers recount the Mt. Rushmore, Alcatraz, and Wounded Knee occupations, takeover of the BIA headquarters in Washington D.C., the Trail of Broken Treaties march, et.al., culminating with the 1975 incident at Pine Ridge Reservation involving the execution-style murders of the two FBI agents.
This is the most comprehensive study I’ve seen on Peltier’s case and the history of the A.I.M. movement. What you learn from this film is by turns enlightening and maddening, but ultimately inspiring and moving.
Four Mothers (Ireland) ***½ – SIFF’s Opening Night Galaselection is the latest from writer-director Darren Thornton (A Date For Mad Mary). James McArdle stars as a gay novelist about to embark on an important American book tour. While he is excited about the prospect, he is torn about what to do about his mother while he is away (he’s her caregiver).
Adding to his stress level, he is unexpectedly saddled with taking care of three additional elderly women when several of his friends drop their mams off with him before heading off to a Pride festival for a weekend (he’s too nice a fellow to say no).
A delightful dramedy inspired by the Italian film Mid-August Lunch (my 2009 SIFF review). Bolstered by crackling dialog (co-written by the director and Colin Thornton) and endearing performances all round (particularly by Fionnula Flanagan as the writer’s mother, who steals all her scenes without uttering a word).
Chain Reactions (USA) *** – Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama walk into a rundown farmhouse…and their lives change forever. At least according to the idiosyncratic appraisals by those luminaries regarding Tobe Hooper’s no-budget 1974 cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary transcends its subject to not only become a treatise on what defines “horror”, but illuminates the sometimes elusive elements that constitute a great work of cinema-regardless of genre (or budget).
Monarch City (USA) ** – Set in an economically depressed small town in Washington State, writer-director Titus Richard’s network narrative drama serves up a dollop of family angst and sprinkles it with lives of quiet desperation. Hovering somewhere between Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show in its aspirations and Larry Clark’s Kids in its vibe, Monarch City suggests both; but due to an uneven script and scattershot approach, it unfortunately achieves neither. Richard does capture and sustain a “nowheresville” mood, and there are some earnest performances, but at 70 minutes and with this many players, there’s barely enough time for any kind of meaningful character development.
Transfers (Argentina) *** – There were many horrors endured by the citizens of Argentina in the course of that country’s “Dirty War” period (1974-1983). Nicolás Gil Lavedra’s documentary primarily focuses on just one them: the methodical, State-sponsored extermination of dissidents (or those accused of being such) wherein people were kidnapped, tortured, drugged, and thrown to their deaths from airplanes.
These “death flights” included the kidnapping and murder of the “twelve of Santa Cruz,” a group of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, human rights activists and two French nuns captured in December 1977, which Lavedra covers in detail, mixing archival and present-day testimonials from former detainees, eyewitnesses, and journalists.
There is some redemption when you learn how a few (if not enough) of the perpetrators were eventually brought to justice. Interestingly, this was precipitated by the fact that, not unlike the Nazis, they kept meticulous records of their crimes (in this case, vis a vis dated flight logs that notated passenger counts).
Chilling and moving, this relatively understated film brings the human cost to the fore; making it a good companion piece to Luis Puenzo’s 1985 political drama The Official Story.
This is also a cautionary tale. When you consider that the term “Dirty War” was coined by the military junta, which one would assume was its way of self-justifying its atrocities, recent statements by government officials in our own country suggesting that habeas corpus “may” be suspended under the umbrella of “war powers” (what ‘war’?) should raise a red flag.
By the Stream (South Korea) *** – I was surprised to learn that South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo has made 33 feature films over the last 20 years (which by my estimation makes him one of the most prolific filmmakers this side of Fassbinder). I also felt a bit ashamed that I didn’t discover him until I saw In Our Day at the 2024 SIFF.
With By the Stream, I may now have only two Sang-soo joints under my belt, but I think I “get” his rhythms. Like In Our Day, this is a languidly paced and understated character study about people involved in the arts; there’s lots of eating and drinking and walking and talking (with exchanges that frequently feel improvised).
Melancholic Jeonim (Kim Minhee) is a textile artist and university lecturer who coaxes her famous Uncle Chu Sieon (Kwon Haehyo) out of retirement to rewrite and and take over direction of a play that some of her students have been working on after the production hits a snag.
While Uncle Chu seems genuinely flattered and more than happy to get back on the boards, you sense that he mostly sees this as an opportunity to reconnect with his niece, with whom he’s been out of contact with for a number of years. This could be Jeonim’s motivation as well, although she is a more of a cypher in the emotional department.
It turns out that Jeonim’s supervisor is a Chu super-fan; when she begins a relationship with him, it triggers a dynamic shift in Jeonim’s interactions with her uncle that suggest some unresolved family business may be at play.
The film’s deliberate pacing may not be for all tastes, but the naturalistic performances and gentle rhythms makes this rumination on life, love, art and family ties relatable on all fronts and easy to digest.
Jean Cocteau (USA) *** – Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland utilizes a non-linear collage of film clips, archival interviews, and a present-day actor reading from letters and diary entries to create a vivid portrait of the avant-garde poet/visual artist/playwright/film director. It’s an enlightening study; I picked up a number of new tidbits on his life and work (I was familiar with him mostly from his films – e.g. Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and Beauty and the Beast). The address he made in 1960 “to the youth of the future” is a mind-blower. I found it particularly interesting how his “apolitical” stance made him a pariah to both the Left and the Right at various junctures. Absorbing and rewarding.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (UK) *** – How do I describe the weird micro-universe Stephen and Timothy Quay have created through their stop-motion/live action films? They’re pieces of dreams; a screen capture of that nanosecond of Jungian twilight between nodding off and jerking awake. Their latest film explores grief and memory through the eyes of a man who travels to a sanatorium where his father has died. Or that’s what he believes…until he arrives. The “reality” is left up to the viewer.
Unclickable (Greece) ** – Just in: From the nanosecond you log in to a social media platform, you are being tracked. Not only are you being tracked, but you are being filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered (YOU are Number 6). In short: you are being bought and sold. That smart phone, laptop, or tablet in your hands is not the “product”. YOU are.
I know. In this day and age, any internet-savvy 8 year-old could tell you that.
Consequently, it was hard for me to be shocked, shocked by the revelations in Babis Makridis’ “torn from the headlines” investigative documentary. Although to be fair, his film does take a slightly different tack from similar exposés I’ve seen about how we’ve all become slaves to the algorithim; this one focuses on the proliferation of digital ad fraud.
To demonstrate how easily cyber scammers can cash in, Makridis enlisted a former tech executive to form a team of software developers to create a digital ad fraud operation, and basically documents thier step-by-step procedure (don’t try this at home, kids).
Unfortunately the film stalls out once the team starts getting hits and picking pockets (we are assured they did not bank the revenue). I suppose it’s interesting to learn how everyone from advertisers to phone users are getting screwed (except for Google and Meta, who still reap massive revenue-whether ad click data is legit or artificially inflated) but it leaves you wondering what you’re supposed to do with this information (go touch some grass?).
The Safe House (Switzerland) **½ – Lionel Baier’s dramedy (adapted from Christophe Boltanski’s novel La Cache) is a child’s-eye view of the political tumult that permeated Paris in May of 1968.
A nine-year-old boy lives in a comically cramped apartment with his parents, his grandparents, a pair of uncles, and his great-grandmother. Everyone in the family is quirky, colorful, and whimsical (despite the near-revolution raging in the streets outside).
If you can get past the initial Wes Anderson vibe (with a zest of Jacques Tati), Baier does occasionally turn down the twee enough to fold in the sociopolitical realities of the era; leading to some profound moments (e.g. the film’s best scene is completely absurd, yet unexpectedly moving).
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story (Ireland) ***½ –
Never heard about Oscar Wilde Don’t know about Brendan Behan Know anything about Sean O’Casey Or care about George Bernard Shaw Or Samuel Beckett Won’t talk about Eugene O’Neill He won’t talk about Edna O’Brien Or know anything about Lawrence Stern
Being the proud middlebrow that I am, I will freely admit that the only two things I previously knew about Irish writer Edna O’Brien was 1) she was name-checked in my favorite Dexy Midnight Runners song (“Dance Stance”), and 2) that the 1964 UK kitchen sink drama Girl With Green Eyes was adapted from her novel “The Lonely Girl” (which I haven’t read).
However, I’m happy to report that Sinéad O’Shea’s engaging documentary portrait of the outspoken novelist, playwright, poet and short-story writer (who died in 2024 at the ripe age of 93) has set me straight. Now I want to read everything she wrote.
What a life. She was raised by an abusive father; left home and married writer Ernest Gébler when she was 24 (he was 40), and was garnering universal critical acclaim for her debut novel (“The Country Girls”) by age 30.
That book (and several of her subsequent works) were banned in Ireland, due to their sexual frankness (and anti-patriarchal stance, no doubt). Undaunted, she pushed onward with her career, becoming the toast of the town in London, and eventually selling her work to Hollywood (in the film, the nonagenarian O’Brien bemusedly recounts escapades with Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando). A film as provocative and uncompromising as its subject.
Here’s a gift link to a searing essay by Judge Michael J. Luttig. I never appreciated his judicial philosophy but I do appreciate the fact that he is clear-eyed about what we are facing and willing to be a patriot instead of a toady. It’s just shocking that it’s so rare these days. I thought there’d be more of these guys. My bad for still having naivete toward conservatives.
A short excerpt:
From the moment he entered the White House on January 20, 2025, Trump has waged war against the rule of law. He not only instigated a worldwide economic crisis with his hotheaded, unlawful tariffs leveled against our global trading partners and our enemies alike; he deliberately provoked a constitutional crisis with his frontal assault on the federal judiciary, the third and co-equal branch of government and guardian of the rule of law—grabbing more and more power for nothing but power’s sake.
On his first day back, foreshadowing his all-out assault on the rule of law, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,200 January 6 rioters. Soon, he began to persecute his political enemies—of whom there are now countless numbers—and to fire the prosecutors for the United States who attempted to hold him accountable for the grave crimes against the Constitution that he committed after losing the 2020 election.
Also within those first 100 days, the FBI arrested the Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan in her Milwaukee courthouse on federal criminal charges that she was “obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest,” because she invited an undocumented immigrant appearing before her on misdemeanor charges to exit her courtroom by way of the jury door rather than the front door of the courtroom. The evidence, at least as revealed so far, does not come close to supporting these charges.
The arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins. The independent judiciary is the only constraint of law on a president. It is the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule.
Appearing on Fox News, the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, defended the evidently unlawful arrest: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” she said. The judges “are deranged, is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today if you are harboring a fugitive … we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”
No, Ms. Bondi, our judges do not think they are above the law, and no, judges are not deranged. They are simply upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States—the same oath you took.
That’s just a small bit of the bill of indictment. He goes into great detail about the assault on law firms and universities, the Chris Krebs-Miles Taylor vendetta, tariffs, DOGE, the Alien Enemies Act and more. It’s a sobering compendium of Trump’s assaults on our system.
Luttig concludes:
Donald Trump may wish he could dictate his unconscionable global tariffs; dispense with due process and deport whomever he pleases, citizen and not; and vanish away huge swaths of the federal government without check or rebuke. He may wish he did not have to contend with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the free press, or the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He may wish he could ignore the Constitution’s elections clauses and run America’s elections from the White House. And he may wish he could intimidate the nation’s lawyers and law firms from challenging his abuse of power and commandeer them to do his personal bidding.
But it is these constitutional obstacles to a tyrannical president that have made America the greatest nation on Earth for almost 250 years, not the fallen America that Trump delusionally thinks he’s going to make great again tomorrow.
After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years. He will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
From across the ages, Frederick Douglass is crying out that we Americans never forget: “The limits of tyrants are precribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
I suspect Luttig wrote this to his fellow conservative judges serving on the Appeals Courts and the Supreme Court. I’m not sure appeals to their consciences or to the rule of law are effective anymore. (I’ve been reading Leah Litman’s new book Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes and I’m not sanguine.) But it’s worth a try.
There’s so much horror happening in our government that it’s easy to miss things. Joyce Vance highlighted one of them that I missed yesterday in her newsletter:
The New York Times reported yesterday that a weather service office in Kentucky scrambled to cover overnight forecasting as storms bore down on the region. They no longer have 24-hour staffing. Among the concerns they included in their story:
The National Weather Service has lost close to 600 employees since the start of the Trump administration, as a result of layoffs and early retirements because the administration demanded “significant cuts”.
Because of the staffing cuts, some of the 122 weather forecasting offices that operate 24 hours a day, nationwide, each with responsibility for their area, have cut back on the twice-daily launches of weather balloons that collect data and make daily forecasts and forecast models possible.
An agreement last month between the National Weather Service and its employees’ union warned of “degraded” services.
Five former directors recently wrote an open letter saying they “feared the cuts had been so deep that lives would soon be endangered.”
The Washington Post put up a map of parts of the country that no longer have 24-hour weather prediction services. In addition to the Kentucky office, there is one in Kansas. None of this makes any sense. I worked in government long enough to be a big fan of cutting waste. But providing lifesaving weather prediction services is about as far from waste as I can imagine. Why derail them? (Unless, of course, you’re planning on creating a private company to provide those services for a fee, but I try not to deal in speculation here.)
Friday night into Saturday, as severe weather, possibly including tornadoes, crossed through Missouri and Kentucky, 21 people were killed.
As she goes to point out, too many people don’t care about what’s going on until it hits their own lives. I would just add that many people are unable or unwilling to make the connection between what their Dear Leader and his henchmen are doing so they chalk it up to fate or Biden or God.
Vance says that they care once it hits them personally but I honestly question that.
These weather events are definitely increasing. It used to be that we’d have them on occasion or have a particularly bad year. Now they happen all the time. Ignoring climate change is terrible price for the right’s devotion to superstition and oil company greed. But now they are destroying the ability of people to cope with what they’ve done, even to the extent of starving the agencies they depend on to warn them about catastrophic weather events coming their way.
People are dying.
The Republican response is to shrug and say, “people always died from these things.” And it’s not just the weather. As a way of excusing the current measles outbreak Trump’s HHS Sec. Bobby Jr like to point out that we only lost a few hundred kids a year from measles before the vaccine, and it was mostly kids who already had health problems — as if they deserved to die.
And sadly, I think we know that a lot of their followers feel the same way. We learned that during the pandemic. We lost 1.2 million people, many of them relatives of the very people who love Dear Leader and his accomplices. They cared more about their cultist beliefs than they care about life and death of human beings. They too shrug and say, “well, people die all the time.”
They will do anything to justify their membership in the cult. At this point I honestly don’t know what will change it. We just have to hope that enough people who are resistant to the charms of Donald Trump outnumber them and that our very rickety electoral system can hold up long enough to defeat them. But the damage in the meantime is cataclysmic.
The biggest ego in the word threatens the biggest retailer in the world
Unpack this for a moment. Walmart made billions last year when Trump wasn’t president. Now because of his stupid policy, they are paying more for their products and Trump wants them to “eat the tariffs” or he’s threatening to what, tell his cult to boycott them? That’s what it sounds like.
Furthermore, he has said over and over again that China will pay the tariffs. Why would Walmart be on the hook if that’s the case? Does anyone in his cult have even the slightest bit of critical thinking? (Don’t answer that…)
The markets are going to love Trump telling businesses to lower their profits in order to cover for his economic sabotage. Should be an interesting week on Wall St.
Margaret Sullivan writes about the latest pile-on of Joe Biden by the mainstream press (the new book by Jake Tapper and Biden nemesis Alex Thompson) and points out that all the sanctimonious mea culpa’s about how they “failed” to properly destroy him before the election conveniently miss the real story.
At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?
“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years.
It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”.
What would be the elements of this reckoning?
Here’s Ornstein again on what the mainstream press wrought with their hubris and their failures.
“False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”
From 2015 – when Trump first declared his candidacy for president – right through the 2024 election, the press in general didn’t get across the reality.
When the New York Times infamously set the tone in 2016 by vastly overplaying the supposedly shocking scandal of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, that was only the beginning. But it was a consequential beginning since, even in our fragmented and polarized media system, the Times was then, and is now, still extremely influential.
I’ve long believed that Times editors were so dedicated to proving that they could be tough on Candidate Clinton – convinced she would be the president and that Trump was no real threat – that they went way overboard.
Was the fault for electing Trump entirely theirs or even the fault of the mainstream media in general led by them? Of course not. But they played a destructive role, one that has never been adequately acknowledged.
Then, during Trump’s first term – and especially during the 2024 campaign – the mainstream press constantly normalized the would-be autocrat.
The ever-so-apt term “sanewashing” was born to describe what was going on, and the media’s role. Talk about a cover-up. Trump’s rallies were exercises in lunacy, as he spun tales about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, rambling for hours.
But the coverage seldom came close to getting across the reality. Instead, we’d hear descriptions about his “freewheeling” style or “brash” approach.skip past newsletter promotion
As for the autocracy in waiting, there were excellent stories about the blueprint for his second term known as Project 2025, but it was far from obvious whether news leaders stopped to ask if voters really understood the stakes. Now we see the Trump administration quite literally enacting that same Project 2025 that he claimed he barely knew anything about.
Horserace coverage prevailed, day after day. And then, when Biden’s decline became impossible to ignore – after that earth-shattering presidential debate last June – news organizations changed their tune.
For weeks, there was nothing but “hey, Biden is old” coverage, once again failing to put the emphasis where it belonged: on the dangers of a Trump presidency.
Heads of news organizations and reporters themselves are fond of distancing themselves from their real mission at times like these: to communicate the reality of an election’s actual stakes. Instead, they talk in lofty terms of merely covering the news, as if their daily decisions about the volume, choice and tone of coverage didn’t matter.
Thank you! This is the reckoning that needs to take place. The ongoing navel gazing by the Democrats, particularly this attack on Biden for running again, elides what is the biggest question: what makes them think any other Democrat could have beaten Trump under the circumstances? After all, Harris didn’t. What, is it inevitable that a white male candidates would have beaten Trump?
I submit that for all the reasons Sullivan lays out, the media’s thumb on the scale sure made it less likely. As she writes, ” they ought to have done so in defense of democracy, the rule of law and human decency. The failure to do so is playing out in our shattered world, and at a frightening pace.”
There’s more at the link worth reading.
By the way, I trace Biden’s problems not to his alleged decline but to reporters like Jake Tapper’s coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal. It was clear they were itching to prove their “unbiased” bone fides by behaving as if the inevitably ugly spectacle of pulling out could have been done cleanly and easily. He knew better. But the pile-on was too inviting and that was when they changed the trajectory of the coverage. The idea that they went easy on Biden is ridiculous.
