There was plenty of money allocated to red states for alternative energy but that money isn’t being rescinded. They are punishing MAGA’s enemies. And it has little to do with the shutdown. Vought believes he can do this any time he wants and there’s little reason to think anyone can stop him.
This is a political assault. I’m sure the Blue states will sue. And if the Supremes endorse the executive’s right to spend money any way it chooses, as I think they are very likely to do, I don’t think they can win.
This op-ed by historian Nicole Hemmer in the NY Times (gift link) is important for the crowd that’s tut-tutting the left for going too far and making the right so mad that they’re creating an authoritarian backlash. She reminds everyone that the left did not invent cancel culture and that the right isn’t reacting to anything — they’ve always been this way. An excerpt:
“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.
The conservative movement that arose at the start of the Cold War readily married government power and private efforts to crack down on its political opponents. Take the case of Counterattack, the newsletter of an anti-communist organization with the anodyne name of American Business Consultants. Funded by the textile millionaire Alfred Kohlberg, Counterattack began publishing in 1947 with hiring managers in mind, regularly publishing the names of people it believed had communist sympathies.
In 1950, Counterattackpublished a lengthy pamphlet called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.”The cover featured an outstretched red hand cradling a microphone; the interiorcontained 151 names of people and a list of their suspected connections to communism. Though pitched as a list of “Red Fascists and their sympathizers,” “Red Channels”targeted people for their involvement with unions, civil liberties groups and Black civil rights activism. Philip Loeb, who lost his role as one of the stars of the TV series “The Goldbergs” because his name appeared in the pamphlet, was included for supporting groups like the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball and the Stop Censorship Committee.
It goes on to detail the McCarthy era and the various right wing repressions that came after. They’ve been doing this a long time. It really is their raisin d’etre.
On Wednesday, over 550 celebrities relaunched a group first organized during the post-World War II Red Scare: the Committee for the First Amendment. Their intent is to stand up in what they call a “defense of our constitutional rights,” adding: “The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry.”
The current group is headlined by actor and activist Jane Fonda — whose father, actor Henry Fonda, was one of the early members of the first Committee for the First Amendment, which was founded in the 1940s to oppose the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, through which the federal government accused many top entertainers of being communists or communist sympathizers and derailed their careers.
Other members of the newly re-formed committee include filmmakers Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, J.J. Abrams, Patty Jenkins, Aaron Sorkin and Judd Apatow; TV show creator Quinta Brunson; musicians Barbra Streisand, John Legend, Janelle Monáe, Gracie Abrams and Billie Eilish; comedians Tiffany Haddish and Nikki Glaser; as well as actors Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Kerry Washington, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman, Viola Davis and Ben Stiller. Another signatory is actor Fran Drescher, who last month ended a term as the president of the SAG-AFTRA union, whose membership includes NPR’s journalists.
It’s past time (looong past time)for the creative community to step up. They’re in the cross hairs. Free speech is everything. But they have platforms and they have money to leave the country if they have to and they owe it to the country to use that privilege and speak up.
Hemmer’s piece importantly notes the fact that in the 1990s when Newt Gingrich and his wrecking crew took power the right cleverly created the concept of “political correctness” (precursor to “woke”) and began to pretend they were free speech warriors merely defending the first amendment. Those of us who’ve been around a while knew better, But it may come as a surprise to read all this by some who either are too young to know about this or willfully ignored it (Chait, cough, Chait) in order to help the right deploy their hypocritical tactics.
This stuff isn’t new and we needed the likes of Henry Fonda back in the 40s and 50s and Norman Lear in the 70s to fight them. It’s never easy to do it because they’ve always been determined to use the power of the state to shut us up. But it can be done if people are willing to step up.
Photographer catches damning text on top Trump official's phone An intrepid AP photographer snapped a pic of Trump Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent reading a damning text message from Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins where the latter more or less admitted that China… 1/3 pic.twitter.com/CXeqrCxqxp
According to a photo of a private text on the phone of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Argentina responded to the treasury secretary’s $20 billion bailout by turning around and removing its export taxes on soybeans and striking a huge new deal with China. That diminished the price of U.S. soybeans and weakened U.S. trade leverage with China, who immediately pulled out of their existing arrangements with soybean farmers in America’s heartland.
The photo taken by Angelina Katsanis for the Associated Press last week shows Bessent reading a text that appears to be from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
“Finally—just a heads up, I’m getting more intel, but this is highly unfortunate,” the text said. “We bailed out Argentina yesterday and in return, the Argentine’s [sic] are removing their export tariffs on grains, reducing their price, and sold a bunch of soybeans to China, at a time when we would normally be selling to China. Soy prices are dropping further because of it. This gives China more leverage on us.”
“On a plane but Scott I can call you when I land,” a second message said.
Last week, Bessent outlined on X a plan to financially support Argentina following extensive talks between longtime allies President Donald Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian economist with a populist, Trump-like appeal, known for wielding a chain saw and cloning his enormous mastiff dogs.
The Treasury has arranged a $20 billion swap line with Argentina’s central bank, part of an effort to infuse the South American country with capital. Stabilizing Argentina ahead of an October midterm would help Milei’s chances of staying in power. Milei has had more success taming Argentina’s hyperinflation than first expected, but has been dealing with a brewing currency crisis and several corruption scandals.
Amid Argentina’s talks with the U.S., China ordered at least 10 cargoes of soybeans from the South American country, Reuters reported, which cited multiple traders.
Oh those wily Chinese. How dare they outsmart the great Scott Bessent? Apparently some American farmers aren’t amused:
This turnabout—with the U.S. rushing to Argentina’s defense, which rushed into China’s arms, jilting American farmers—has infuriated the slice of rural America that backed Trump to avoid precisely this sort of international trade disaster. Soybeans are vital to the U.S. agricultural industry, accounting for 20% of the U.S.’s cash crop receipts in 2024, worth $46.8 billion.
“The frustration is overwhelming,” the American Soybean Association (ASA) president Caleb Ragland said in a statement last week. “U.S. soybean prices are falling, harvest is underway, and farmers read headlines not about securing a trade agreement with China, but that the U.S. government is extending [$20 billion] in economic support to Argentina while that country drops its soybean export taxes to sell 20 shiploads of Argentine soybeans to China in just two days.”
“The takeaway that we have from the data of the last time we did this is that the U.S. lost about 20% of our market share, and it never came back,” Todd Main, the director of market development at the Illinois Soybean Association, told Fortune.
Trump wants to write them a check but they’re getting a little bit nervous that he’s destroying their businesses forever:
Trump proposed a plan last week to use tariff revenues to help fund farmer subsidies, but farmers have expressed the need for repaired trade with China.
“We can grow anything. What we really want is good relations with our trading partners,” Main said. “We want markets. We don’t want bailouts.”
These are Trump voters so he’ll take care of them and they’ll probably love him anyway. I’m sure they blame Biden or the “woke” left anyway. But it is telling that they’re getting upset. If they knew the whole story they might even be a tiny bit annoyed with Dear Leader.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s $20 billion Argentinian bailout is not only poised to prop up President Javier Milei’s anarcho-capitalist regime with U.S. taxpayer dollars; it’s also set to deliver a significant windfall to one of Bessent’s old friends, per a Monday report by Judd Legum at Popular Information.
Robert Citrone, a billionaire who founded the hedge fund Discovery Capital Management, has a decadeslong relationship with Bessent that’s gone unreported in the U.S. press.
Legum cites descriptions in Latin American business publications of Bessent and Citrone’s friendship, including one paper that notes their “personal relationship as well as a past working relationship.” He also reports that when they were co-workers at Soros Fund Management, Citrone, by his own account, gave Bessent highly profitable investment advice.
Since Milei’s ascendance, Citrone has bet big on the Argentine economy. But amid the recent economic downturn under Milei, his Argentine investments were in trouble.
Enter Bessent. Last week, the treasury secretary announced a $20 billion currency swap line that, Citrone told Bloomberg, “has helped tremendously” and “will pay dividends for the U.S. strategically.” It’s certainly boosted Citrone’s holdings. (Notably too, Legum writes, “In early September, days before Bessent’s announcement, Citrone purchased more Argentine bonds.”)
BASH: Are you okay w/ the military using American cities as 'training grounds'?JOHNSON: I don't know what's being implied by thatB: It suggests troops are going to be in cities & use them military trainingJ: That's been very beneficial for the GuardB: So it's ok?J: It's a win-win scenario
He’s trying to be slick but he’s such a smarmy little worm that it doesn’t really work.
But let’s unpack this. Trump said he was going to deploy the military to U.S. cities to fight “the enemy within” and said he believed they could use the deployments for training exercises. Ok, so Johnson wants to claim that he was referring to standard national guard training and that it’s just fine.
But this comment has to been in the context of Hegseth’s call for a “warfighter ethos” which is anything but the hauling sandbags and search and rescue operations usually performed by the National Guard.
We know what was meant by all this. They want to use the military to violently suppress all dissent in America’s big cities where they believe their political opposition is. It’s not hard to figure out what they’re up to.
Here’s how the the president’s top adviser and second in command puts it:
The White House published an executive order on Wednesday vowing to defend Qatar in the event of an attack from another country, a remarkable security guarantee for a single country akin to NATO’s Article V.
The order, which President Donald Trump signed Monday, states that the White House will now consider “any armed attack” on Qatar “as a threat to the peace and security of the United States.”
And, in the event of any attack, the U.S. would take “all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and the State of Qatar.”
Trump signed the executive order on the same day that he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and orchestrated a phone call with the Qatari prime minister during which Israel’s leader apologized for missile strikes last month targeting Hamas officials while they were in Doha for ceasefire talks. The attack killed a Qatari security officer. The president, shortly after the attack, promised the Qataris it would not happen again.
The unilateral creation of any Article V-like security guarantees by a president — under the Constitution, treaties must be ratified by the Senate— is highly unusual, especially for a president who espouses an “America First” foreign policy and has questioned longstanding U.S. commitments to NATO and the central pillar of its charter that similarly deems an attack on any member country as an attack on the entire alliance.
Well, at least Qatar isn’t in a volatile region where someone could make a mistake or decide to up the ante. I’m sure it won’t be a problem.
Meanwhile, NATO is left hanging in the wind wondering if Trump will whine about “dues” and refuse to honor Article 5. You just never know with him.
I wonder if anyone will challenge the idea that the president is now unilaterally declaring such security guarantees without even getting input from Congress much less getting ratification. Eh… why bother? This will only become an issue if a Democratic president decides to try it.
It’s happened. We’re shut down. Old addled Trump thinks he’s cancelling transgender surgeries for everyone and Russ Vought is in so much ecstasy he’s speaking in tongues. Here we go.
Dan Pfeiffer says Democrats have a good chance of “winning” this stand-off, at least in the minds of the voters. His reasons:
Shutdowns matter. Thousands of federal employees lose their paychecks with no guarantee of back pay. Government services are curtailed. People’s lives are disrupted. But shutdowns are also political exercises, one of the few points of leverage available to the minority party. For Democrats, this is about drawing a line. Trump has been running roughshod over the government for nine straight months — firing people, closing agencies, and shutting down programs authorized and funded by Congress. At some point, Democrats have to say “enough is enough” and use the tools they have to fight back.
[…]
It’s possible Schumer and Senate Democrats won’t have the spine for this fight. There are already reports they’re looking for an exit. It’s also possible congressional Democrats lack the messaging discipline to win the political argument. But I think Democrats enter this fight on firmer ground than most assume.
1. Polls Show Voters Blame Trump and the GOP
More importantly, 49% of voters in battleground districts blame Trump and Republicans, while just 44% blame Democrats.
The new Morning Consult poll, shared exclusively with Playbook, reports that 45 percent of voters are more likely to blame Republicans if there’s a shutdown, compared to 32 percent blaming Democrats — a 13-point margin. That split gets wider among independent voters, who are more likely to blame Republicans by a 17-point margin. The poll surveyed 2,202 voters last week.
2. Trump Is Much Weaker Than People Think
There’s a paradox at the heart of Trump: substantively, he’s powerful. Politically, he’s very weak. Trump has weaponized the government in countless ways. With the unanimous support of his party and the avarice and cowardice of business and media elites, he does what he wants, when he wants.
But Trump himself is historically unpopular, pushing an unpopular agenda, and widely seen as failing on the top issue for voters — the cost of living.
He is less popular now than Biden was at the same point in his presidency. His disapproval on inflation and affordability is as bad as Biden’s was in 2024. The only modern president more unpopular at this stage was Donald Trump in 2017.
And Trump’s weakness matters. He is not a persuasive messenger to anyone outside his base. That makes him and his party more vulnerable to being blamed for the shutdown than they may realize.
3. Voters Want the Obamacare Subsidies Continued
Pfeiffer thinks that the focus on the Obamacare subsidies was a weaker hand than if they’d have pushed more on affordability but recognizes that they had a whole bunch of people they needed to bring onboard to have unity on this. I think it also has to do with the fact that there are vulnerable Republicans who are terrified of what their constituents are going to think when they get their health insurance bills and see massive hikes. It’s also going to show up when they do their taxes next spring, just as the election is kicking in. It’s one of the most immediately damaging things they did in the Big Beautiful Bill. So it makes sense to squeeze them on this.
Also:
Still, the Obamacare tax credits are wildly popular. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in June found that 77% of Americans think Congress should extend the tax credits, while just 22% say they should expire.
The Republicans are leaning heavily on the lie that the Democrats want to extend health care to “illegal aliens.” I’m sure that will work with a good portion of their base. But everyone else isn’t as easily duped.
I think the Republicans would actually be relieved to get rid of this hot potato. But addled old Trump doesn’t really know what’s happening and Vought and some of the zealots want a shutdown for their own reasons. But if there was ever a chance that the Democrats might achieve something for the people and look fairly strong in the process this might be it.
Or not. Pfeiffer says he’s heard rumblings that they’re already looking for a way out so … I’m not putting any money on their willingness to hang tough. But they should.
Marcy Wheeler argues that the more Donald Trump authoritarians, the worse it goes for him. Meaning the more the American public will see through him, supporters included. The shutdown may have the same effect.
Trump ran last year on an immigration crackdown. It’s just that the more of Stephen Miller’s heavy hand we see in ICE video after CBP video, the less Americans like it. In event after staged event, like the violent abductions by masked agents and the horse march through MacArthur Park, Americans have grown more squeamish about getting what Trump promised. Seeing people thrown to the pavement and gang-beaten is not what they bargained for. For Trump it’s a bad look, and we know how attentive he is to appearances:
As noted, several of these efforts have largely failed. The ICE spectacle, often featuring Kristi Noem as the figurehead, often look ridiculous and have repeatedly led to blowback (such as her staged visit to CECOT or a recent Chicago raid that resulted in the detention of two American citizens, along with some others). The attempt to eroticize ICE raids often looks pathetic.
Meanwhile, while Miller attempts to create spectacle to eroticize ICE goons, bystanders continue to capture his goons rolling around on the ground violently abusing people, and in this particular case, desperately losing his gun. They capture people shaming ICE agents. A latest video shows a food delivery guy riding away after 8 heavily armed men chased him for saying something. And those — not Miller’s fancy new trucks — are what go viral on social media.
As Rachel Maddow noted about the comical bicycle chase, insert “Benny Hill” music here. The videos make Miller’s “goons look fat, incompetent, and pathetic” with their “[b]utt cracks and beer bellies.” Whiskey Pete Hegseth certainly would not approve, despite that fact that “[m]odern nations … don’t win wars by having big biceps.”
Wheeler speculates that this is why Trump and Miller have shifted their focus to blue cities allegedly awash in violent crime. Immigration has jumped the shark.
The shutown has the potential to further erode Trump’s support for the same reason. The more people see of Trump 2.0, the less they like it. The shutdown will raise the visibility of matters that Trumps has tried to distract from with tweets and stunts.
For one, Trump’s usurpation of powers assigned to Congress. Wheeler writes:
Start with Russ Vought. To my mind, too few Democrats have framed their primary message — that this is a fight to actually return to existing funding levels before the Big Ugly Bill stripped healthcare from millions of Americans and from rural hospitals — to include the power of the purse. That is, almost no one is being told that the issue, and one of two main differences in the competing continuing resolutions, pertains to protecting Congress’ power of the purse.
The battle to rein in Trump and White House budget director Russ Vought through a piece of must-pass legislation has been eclipsed by Democrats’ larger push to extend expanded Affordable Care Act tax credits that are due to expire at the end of the year.
But Democrats are seething about the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” opinion, arguing that Trump and the high court are ignoring the intent of the 1974 law designed to prevent presidents from withholding federal cash. And they see themselves as the last line of defense.
“He is unchecked at this point,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), another senior appropriator, said of Trump in an interview. “We have to check him. No one should have that kind of power.”
Trump, of course, threatens to retaliate against Democrats for not kissing his ring. His retaliation will also harm his base. The problem, Wheeler suggests, is that to use his leverage, “Trump has to claim credit,” thus making “visible all the damage he’s doing to the services government offers.”
Whatever limited wisdom there was in Democrats trying to make the shutdown about saving health care, now that people will lose it, flog the hell out of it.
Wheeler:
The longer this shutdown goes, the more obvious the initial effects of the Big Ugly bill in terms of rural hospital shutdowns and expiring subsidies for ACA premiums will become.
It makes it easy to demonstrate — as Tammy Duckworth did here — how badly Republican members of Congress are screwing over their own constituents.
Trump is already vulnerable on the economy and on the Epstein files. He’s souring farmers on his tariff policies. So work the eye. There’s more at the link.
But I want to add to the “butt cracks and beer bellies” angle. It’s clear from the behaviors of Miller’s ICE recruits that they must either have received their shoddy law enforcement training over Zoom or over the weekend. Their brutishness reveals many not only as incompetent but as sadistic testosterone junkies. So angry confrontation by protesters may simply give the ICEmen exactly what they want: a chance to bust heads under color of law.
Jimmy Kimmel won his bout with Donald Trump not only with public support for the First Amendment but with satire. A friend reminded me of how protesters in Charlotte once faced down the KKK and Nazis by coming to protest as clowns and mocking them mercilessly.
I’m not suggesting clowns, exactly. But geared-up, amped-up men who put such stock by their macho strike me as more vulneable to relentless mockery of their manhood than to their acting like Nazis. More cell phone videos set to the “Benny Hill” theme, please. Just a thought.
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Our friend Susie Madrak is experiencing a cash crunch. She’s looking for whatever help you might lend this week. Making things worse is an insurance settlement delayed on account of paperwork. Plus:
In the meantime, my neurologist suspects I have an obscure lupus-like autoimmune disorder that’s causing all kinds of weird symptoms (for one thing, she says the signals my brain are sending to my feet aren’t making it through and I’m off balance) but first she has to rule out blood cancers, etc. There’s also a lesion on my lung and they want an MRI.
Reagan-appointed U.S. District Court Judge William Young on Tuesday issued “a scathing rebuke of President Trump” in a First Amendment case in Boston. At issue was the Trump administration’s targeting for deportation foreign students who expressed support for Palestinians in Gaza and/or criticized Israeli government actions there.
Young found that the Trump administration’s goal was to stifle the students’ free speech rights, writing:
Having carefully considered the entirety of the record, this Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations.
While Trump’s Executive Order 14149, entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” purports to bar federal officials from “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen,” his view of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections is that it applies “to American citizens alone, and to an unconstitutionally narrow view of citizenship at that.” Ergo, foreign students had best watch what they say while guests on U.S. soil. Young spends 161 pages schooling the Trump administration that that is not how our First Amendment works.
Young couched his opinion in part as a reply to an anonymous critic’s postcard (at top). It read: “Trump has pardons and tanks. … What do you have?”
Young’s sense of duty and “our magnificent Constitution.”
The New York Times reports that Young “assailed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for wearing masks, which he argued was a tactic ‘to terrorize Americans into quiescence’ and evoked ‘cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.’”
It is amusing that in commenting on what the Trump administration’s actions mean for free speech that Young launched his commentary based on a comment about Trump from his wife: “He seems to be winning. He ignores everything and keeps bullying ahead.”
Judges rarely write angry, but Judge Young seems to have here. The decision ends with a remarkable section entitled “JUSTICE IN THE TRUMP ERA.” Having established that there were First Amendment violations, the Judge notes that he is uncertain about the remedy for the violations. That, he writes, is because of “the rapidly changing nature of the Executive Branch under Article II of our Constitution and, while he is properly not now a defendant in these proceedings, the nature of our President himself.”
He concludes that Trump’s speech is frequently “triumphal, transactional, imperative, bellicose, and coarse. It seeks to persuade –- not through marshaling data driven evidence, science, or moral suasion, but through power.” But presidents have First Amendment rights and “there can be no constraint of any sort on the speech of the President of the United States, be that speech statesmanlike, magnanimous, and unifying or ‘foolish’ and ‘knavish.’ As President, he has the absolute and undoubted right to speak.”
But, Judge Young explains, “Where things run off the rails for him is his fixation with ‘retribution.’ ‘I am your retribution,’ he thundered famously while on the campaign trail. Yet government retribution for speech (precisely what has happened here) is directly forbidden by the First Amendment.” He refers to a line of cases that have taken place during the second Trump administration that reject “The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.” Those cases include ones disallowing Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms, colleges and universities, and the media.
That case law, the Judge writes, is “the major bulwark of our right to free speech” in this era. We will learn what steps he intends to take next in this case when he holds his hearing on the remedy.
Young has for now not enjoined the government from further deportations.
After signing his opinion, Young once again addresses his post card critic:
“While the president naturally seeks warm cheering and gladsome, welcoming acceptance of his views, in the real world he’ll settle for sullen silence and obedience,” Young wrote. “What he will not countenance is dissent or disagreement.”
Therefore, let the countdown begin for Trump’s call for Judge Young’s impeachment in 3-2-1.
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Our friend Susie Madrak is experiencing a cash crunch. She’s looking for whatever help you might lend this week. Making things worse is an insurance settlement delayed on account of paperwork. Plus:
In the meantime, my neurologist suspects I have an obscure lupus-like autoimmune disorder that’s causing all kinds of weird symptoms (for one thing, she says the signals my brain are sending to my feet aren’t making it through and I’m off balance) but first she has to rule out blood cancers, etc. There’s also a lesion on my lung and they want an MRI.
