Archives for category: Trump

Rick Wilson explains why the Senate should refuse to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States. It’s not just that he has covered up the Epstein files and refused to obey the law ordering their release. It’s not just that he personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, after which she was moved to a comfy low-security prison. It’s not just that he negotiated the sweetheart deal to create a slush fund for J6 prisoners and Trump’s disgraced friends. It’s not just that he pledged that Trump and his family would not be audited by the IRS.

The problem is that he is Trump’s personal lawyer, not the champion of justice on behalf of the American people. He will never say no to Trump.

He should not be confirmed.

Wilson writes:

There is a particular species of Washington careerist who convinces himself that the oath he swore was a formality, a bit of throat-clearing before the real work of pleasing the boss begins.

Todd Blanche is an apex predator of that species. He is the man who looked at the Department of Justice, an institution built to stand between raw political power and the citizen, and saw not a sacred trust but a tool to please Donald Trump.

A very large, very expensive tool, with 115,000 employees with guns and badges and legal power that he could hand to Donald Trump like a caddy handing over a nine iron.

Trump has now nominated this man to be Attorney General of the United States, permanently, with the title and the office and the flag behind the desk. So let us be clear about what confirmation would ratify.

Let us catalog the sins.

Start with the original sin, because everything else flows from it. Todd Blanche does not know the difference between his client and his country. When he walks into Main Justice every morning, the man he serves is not the American people. It is the man who signs his continued employment.

Adam Schiff put it with the precision of a former prosecutor: at every turn, Blanche has been unable to put aside his role as Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer and represent the American people instead.

This is not a metaphor. Blanche literally was Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, in three of the criminal cases brought against him in 2023 and 2024. He sat at the defense table. He argued for absolute presidential immunity before the Supreme Court, co-authoring the brief that helped birth the monstrous doctrine that a president is a king within the four corners of his office. And then, having done that work, he was installed atop the very department that had prosecuted his client, where he could finish the job from the inside.

The Attorney General’s client is supposed to be an abstraction so large it can be hard to hold in your head: two-thirds of a billion people, but the Constitution and the idea that the law applies without fear or favor.

Blanche traded that abstraction for a man. He knows exactly who he works for. He has never pretended otherwise. That is the whole problem, and it is disqualifying before we get to anything else.

People confirm men like Blanche imagining the damage as prospective, a risk to be managed. It is not prospective. He has been running the building since April 2, when Trump defenestrated Pam Bondi for the crime of trying, and failing, to gin up prosecutions unsupported by facts and law. Blanche’s qualification for the promotion was that he would not make the same mistake.

Under his leadership, more than 16,000 people have walked out of the Department of Justice, including roughly a quarter of its attorneys. Think about that number. Not a purge of the top layer, a hemorrhage of the institution itself, the career prosecutors and agents and staff who are the actual muscle and memory of federal law enforcement.

He fired the people who worked January 6 cases. He fired people who worked the Jack Smith investigations. He moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leadership, the men who organized the assault on the Capitol, as though the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.

And then he pointed the emptied-out machine at new targets. The Southern Poverty Law Center got indicted on a theory so thin that federal law enforcement had reportedly known about and been aided by the very informant program Blanche stood at a podium to condemn. A whistleblower alleges one of his enforcers ordered Alabama prosecutors to rush the SPLC indictment through despite doubts about whether the case was any good. This is what a weaponized DOJ looks like from the inside: the case comes first, and the facts get conscripted to serve it.

Nothing captures the man better than the persecution of James Comey. The former FBI director posted a photograph of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” and deleted it. For this, Blanche’s Justice Department indicted him. Twice, actually, because the first grand jury effort was such a legal embarrassment they had to go back for another bite.

Understand what the government is alleging: that a retired official committed a felony threat against the president by arranging shells on a beach. Adam Schiff, who spent six years as a federal prosecutor, said he had never seen a case this weak, and offered that in the future, when some DOJ lawyer proposes bringing something this flimsy, there should be a new name for it. He also named the actual motive without flinching.
The case exists, Schiff said, because Comey is a political opponent, because the president called for his prosecution, and because Todd Blanche wants to keep this job.

There it is. The Attorney General of the United States, or the man who wants to be, running a federal prosecution not because a crime occurred but because bringing it is his audition tape. Bondi got fired for not being able to deliver the president’s enemies. Blanche learned the lesson. Comey is the receipt.

The same apparatus has been grinding away at Letitia James, at Schiff himself, at Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, whom Trump has publicly demanded be prosecuted. The through line is not evidence. The through line is a list of people who made Donald Trump angry.

Reread the Comey section. Retired federal official. Instagram post. Photograph of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47.” Felony indictment. Not one grand jury but two, because the first attempt was such a legal embarrassment they had to go back for a second scoop.

Now the money, because there is always money in this corrupt griftorama era.

Trump had a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Blanche settled it, and the settlement’s centerpiece was a fund, an “anti-weaponization fund,” to compensate people who claimed the federal government had done them wrong. The total was set at $1.776 billion. They chose that number as a nod to the Declaration of Independence, which tells you everything about the self-mythologizing grandiosity of these goons. They wanted to loot the Treasury and dress it up as a Fourth of July parade.

Who would the fund pay? Blanche was asked, directly, whether Proud Boys and Oath Keepers convicted of beating Capitol Police officers could collect. He would not rule it out. Anybody in this country can apply, he said, and the commission will set the rules, as though he were describing a raffle and not a mechanism to funnel taxpayer money to men who assaulted cops on live television.

Pardoned January 6 defendants lined up to file claims. So did Michael Cohen. Even Trump’s own allies gagged; a Republican congresswoman called it a billion-dollar-plus slush fund to his face.

The backlash got loud enough that Blanche went before a House committee and said the fund was not going forward, period. But watch the hands. Judge Leonie Brinkema asked him to put that in writing, under penalty of perjury, a sworn declaration that the thing was dead in any manner, under any name. He refused. The Justice Department called her request unnecessary and declined to file it. A man who genuinely meant it would sign the paper.

Blanche of course wants the option to bring it back, and the tax provision buried in the settlement, the one that quietly cleared away audits of Trump and his family and his businesses, that part he defended and that part stayed. The slush fund was the misdirection. The immunity was the trick. Fortunately, a Florida judge nuked the immunity case this week, but I suspect Blanche will fight like hell to bring it back.

Gotta protect the client, right, Todd?

And then there is Ghislaine Maxwell, which is where the contempt for the public curdles into something genuinely dark. When the Epstein files became a political inferno that scorched Trump’s own base, Blanche personally proposed, at a White House crisis meeting, that he interview Maxwell himself. The convicted child sex trafficker. Nine hours across two days.

He was not there as a prosecutor. He offered her immunity for the conversation and made no promises about her sentence, which is a strange way to interrogate a witness and a very natural way to conduct a job interview for a pardon. Weeks later, Maxwell was transferred to a lower-security facility, reportedly in violation of standing Bureau of Prisons policy. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States flew to Florida, sat across from a woman convicted of trafficking children, and gave her a 300-page platform to rewrite history and distance Trump from his old friend, never once challenging her court-proven lies.

Epstein’s victims and their families are outraged over this nomination, and rightly so. Even Pam Bondi, in her own testimony, put the Maxwell decision on Blanche.

Blanche is running the largest cover-up in American history, protecting sexual predators and harming their victims…and that alone utterly disqualifies him from becoming A.G.
This is the tell. When the choice was between the survivors of the worst crimes imaginable and the political protection of Donald Trump, Blanche chose Trump, and he chose him by cutting a deal with the woman who helped commit those crimes. There is no version of the Attorney General’s oath that permits that. There is only the client.

I’ll repeat it again for the MAGAs in the back: the Attorney General does not work for the president in the way a White House lawyer works for the president. That distance is the entire point. It was built in blood and scandal, hardened after Watergate, when the country learned what happens when the Justice Department becomes the president’s personal enforcer.

The AG is supposed to be able to look at the man who appointed him and say no. To decline the weak case. To refuse the vendetta. To refuse to sign on to lies and oversights, no matter how much complying would help the President. That’s not Blanche, Blanche has inverted every one of those principles. He brings the weak case. He runs the vendetta. He signs on to every lie. He empties the building of everyone with the integrity to object and fills the silence with loyalists. He has taken the one office in American government whose independence is vital for the rule of law, and he has offered it, on his knees, to a man who wants to use it as a weapon.

The Senate is being asked to make this permanent. To take the temporary occupant who has done all of this in a matter of months and hand him the title, the tenure, and the flag. Every senator who votes yes is not voting for a man.
They are voting to erase the line between the president’s lawyer and the people’s lawyer, forever, and to reward the man who took the eraser to it with the greatest prize in American law.

Todd Blanche knows exactly who he serves.
It’s not the American people.

Categories Ethics, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Dan Froomkin: Trump Makes Crackpot Announcement, Then Backs Down

By dianeravitch

July 14, 2026 //

Dan Froomkin writes a blog called “Press Watch,” where he keeps tabs on journalism.

In today’s post, he chastises the media for reporting uncritically Trump’s claim that he would impose a 20% toll on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Both JD Vance and Marco Rubio had previously said that any attempt to put tolls on an international waterway was a violation of international law.

The headline, Froomkin wrote, should have been: “Trump Makes Crackpot Iran Announcement.”

Trump’s claim was ridiculous from the start, but everyone reported it as fact. True, he made the claim, but what he claimed would never happen.

So once again, TACO: Trump Chickened Out!

He wrote:

Well, it’s moot now, with Donald Trump this morning suddenly reversing his big announcement yesterday morning that the U.S. military would be taking over the Strait of Hormuz and demanding a 20 percent toll from ships that pass through it.

As it happens, I was just finishing up a post about how credulous the first-day coverage of his crackpot plan was. And now that I’ve been proven right, I still feel there’s some value in sharing what I found.

In a nutshell, my argument was that everyone – including American political journalists — knew that Trump’s “plan” was never going to happen.

It was a bluff from a mentally unstable man desperate to put the war he started behind him. It was completely unworkable and illegal. It would have put American servicemembers in harm’s way. No one would ever pay it.

It’s wasn’t going anywhere.

But you wouldn’t have known that from the coverage it got from our major news organizations. They treated it like a serious proposal. They gave it big headlines. They engaged in a lot of stenography.

“Trump Says Fighting With Iran Has Resumed as He Orders Blockade and Tolls,” the New York Times headlined. “Trump turns to blockade — and tolls — as U.S. and Iran battle over the Strait of Hormuz,” NBC News headlined. “US to take over Strait of Hormuz, charge 20 percent fee for cargo shipped through, Trump says,” headlined Politico.

Many news organizations paired the toll threat with Trump’s announcement ordering the resumption of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports – an actual command that Centcom quickly acknowledged. (Centcom, notably, hasn’t said a peep about any further orders – because there aren’t any.)

One was real, the other was fantasy.

Now that said, if you pored through a number of different news sources yesterday, you could see hints of the real story. That’s because the reporters aren’t stupid. They knew the toll plan was bullshit, they were just too cowardly or lazy to tell you straight up.

If you add them all up, as I will below, you will see how clear it was that the plan was doomed – even though none of the stories, individually, reached that conclusion.

The New York Times, for instance, ran a sidebar by Yan Zhuang headlined: “What to Know About Trump’s Plan to Charge a Toll in the Strait of Hormuz.”

“How would a U.S. toll work?” she asked. “This isn’t exactly clear,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump did not elaborate on how the 20 percent fee would be calculated or how it would be collected.”

In fact, there was no evidence that anyone else in his administration knew anything about it.

“How would a toll affect shipping and markets?” she asked.

A 20 percent fee on the value of a vessel’s cargo could more than double the cost of shipping oil through the strait, experts said.

For a large tanker carrying two million barrels of oil, for example, the fee could add over $30 million in costs. Consumers would likely face higher prices as a result.

Because of the high cost, some analysts said they doubted whether the fee would come into force.

In a CNN explainer, Elisabeth Buchwald also asked and answered question about the plan, including “Who would foot the bill?”

She spoke to John McCown, a senior fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy, who told her that the fee will likely be high enough that no party is willing to pay it:

As a general rule of thumb, shippers pay carriers 2%-3% of the value of their goods in fees, according to McCown, former CEO of shipping logistics company Trailer Bridge. A fee around 10 times the size would likely be entirely unaffordable to shippers, he said.

The Associated Press article by Ben Finley, Farnoush Amier, and Konstantin Toropin headlined “Why it’s so difficult for the US to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz” described a number of serious problems with the plan. Notably, the authors wrote that “restoring oil tanker traffic in the vital Middle East shipping corridor to prewar flows likely will require a much bigger armada of U.S. warships if not tens of thousands of American troops on Iranian soil, experts say.”

Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former Pentagon official, told the reporters: “It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces.” Campbell said that would require tens of thousands of troops who would likely face insurgent attacks.

Relying on warships instead would require “a very large chunk of the U.S. fleet being dedicated to this on an open-ended basis,” Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. military analyst, told them.

In fact, Trump abandoned an earlier promise to protect the strait, Clayton Seigle, a nonresident scholar in energy security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told them. “Those naval escorts, U.S. warships, larger commitments like boots on the ground never came because I think that the rhetoric got a little ahead of our risk tolerance,” he said. “And when push came to shove, the United States was not ready to deploy its Navy, to deploy its other military forces in the capacity that would be needed to even have a shot at neutralizing those threats.”

Buried in a Wall Street Journal story that was mostly about the blockade being reinstated, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Feng, and Jared Malsinnoted the Iranian resistance to U.S. control of the strait. They quoted a spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, who said, “We will under no circumstances allow the United States to interfere in the management of the Strait of Hormuz.” The journalists conveyed “the likelihood of a continued standoff over control of the strait.”

Like I said, it’s all moot now. It took Trump all of 25 hours to chicken out — to go from posting this….

The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately

… to posting this:

Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States.

American journalists would have done everyone a favor – including their own news organizations – if they had said what they knew to be true instead of quoting Trump saying things they knew to be bullshit.

But because of their cowardice and laziness, we had another insane 24-hour news cycle of everyone chasing after whatever Trump said last, no matter how absurd it was. As I wrote in June they should “Stop putting whatever Trump says about Iran in the headlines.”

Will they ever learn?

In the meantime, I urge the journalists who wrote about this yesterday to write something for tomorrow about how Trump cooked up this ridiculous idea and blurted it out, and why, and why he changed his mind so quickly.

They should use this sequence of events to tell the American public the other thing they all know to be true, but are too cowardly and lazy to write about: That Trump is deranged; that he is mentally unfit for duty.

As for why he changed his mind, presumably, someone he trusts told him his plan was crazy and unworkable. Too bad journalists hadn’t done the same.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Insane, Lies, Media, Trump

The Hartmann Report: Are We Living in a Police State Yet?

By dianeravitch

July 14, 2026 //

Thom Hartmann reflects on the question: are we living in a police state yet?

Read his article and judge for yourself.

He wrote:

Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.

He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.

By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.

The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”

The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”

The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.

Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”

I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread.

I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)

My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work.

And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist.

Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in — to the shows and to the police — and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.

The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization.

Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.

There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.

So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:

— A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.

In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract.

Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.”

Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.

— A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.

On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years.

Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.”

And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment.

For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6th, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.

— A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.

Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover.

In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the Bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants.

The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging.

When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.

— A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.

In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis.

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice.

Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway.

He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next.

That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.

— A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.

Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all fifty states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms.

Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval.

Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.

— A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.

Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, the Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too.

— A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: the National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.

In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there.

Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.”

That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn.

Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.

— And finally, a police state controls the vote.

In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents.

On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all fifty states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost eleven straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls.

Yesterday, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress that has the power to call out and punish election fraud, illegal campaign tactics and spending, and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. It’s now effectively shut down.

And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.

So, are we in a police state yet?

Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question — or at least at the wrong moment — because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”

Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.”

Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security….”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: every component is now built, tested, and humming.

But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.

That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.

So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections, demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls.

Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in Red states.

Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer.

Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it.

Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general.

And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize.

At least not yet.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

Federal Judge Rules Against Trump’s Deal with Justice Department as “Self-Dealing”

By dianeravitch

July 13, 2026 //

Judge Kathleen M. Williams blasted Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the settlement, which created a $1.776 billion “slush fund” for Trump’s aggrieved allies and granted Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from IRS audits.

Judge Williams also referred Todd Blanche to the Florida Bar Association and the New York Bar Association for possible disciplinary actions. Blanche, the acting Attorney General, was nominated by Trump to be Attorney General; Senate confirmation hearings begin this week.

The New York Times reported:

A federal judge on Monday ruled that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement.

In the order, the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought Mr. Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. Judge Williams added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

The decision by Judge Williams did not explicitly kill the deal that Mr. Trump had worked out with his own government to receive what amounted to amnesty from investigations into tax returns that he, his family and their businesses have already filed. But Judge Williams’s scathing ruling exposed the negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior officials at the Justice Department he controls for what she says they were: backroom dealings that did not arise from a legitimate legal process.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” the judge wrote.

The 56-page decision, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, came two months after the Justice Department released a pair of documents purporting to be formal agreements that settled Mr. Trump’s remarkable suit against the I.R.S. The documents laid out a pair of separate but shocking moves — one granting the president, his family and his businesses wide-ranging immunity from tax inquiries and the other creating a $1.8 billion fund aimed at compensating allies of Mr. Trump who say they were the victims of so-called government weaponization.

After outcry from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund. But he said that Mr. Trump’s extraordinary protections from I.R.S. scrutiny would remain in place.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Discipline, Ethics, Justice, Trump

Miles Taylor Said: Don’t Celebrate Anyone’s Death

By dianeravitch

July 13, 2026 //

Miles Taylor worked in the first term of Trump. He worked in the Department of Homeland Security and rose to become its Chief of Staff.

In 2018, he wrote an essay in The New York Times titled “I am Part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration” and signed it “Aninymous.”

He now has a Substack blog called Defiance.

This was his response to Lindsey Graham’s death.

“When his enemies die, Trump stomps on their graves — and we rightly call him a ghoul for it.

“Don’t be like Trump.”

I admire his forbearance.

But I am nonetheless posting commentaries by two people who cannot forgive Senator Graham’s sycophantic embrace of Trump.

Categories Trump

Marc Elias: GOP Wants to Destroy Citizens’ Belief in Fair Elections

By dianeravitch

July 13, 2026 //

The GOP knows that it’s in trouble with the voters. Trump’s decision to join Israel in a war against Iran is a disaster. It has caused inflation at a time when voters were already worried about affordability. Trump’s poll numbers are somewhere in the 30s.

His biggest issue, meant to distract voters, is to charge that our elections are fraudulent. He told world leaders that our elections are “rigged,” which is surprising considering that he and his party won the last (rigged?) election.

Marc Elias has led the legal battle to stop Trump’s multiple efforts to take control of voter data and to control state elections. The Constitution clearly says that states control their elections. He and his team of lawyers have fought the federal government in case after case and won.

Trump’s goal is to destroy Americans’ belief in the fairness of elections. The goal is to transfer the public’s trust to authoritarianism.

Marc’s “Democracy Docket” is a must-read.

He writes:

I doubt Donald Trump thinks Chuck Gray is allowing noncitizens to vote. Indeed, when the Wyoming Secretary of State first ran for the office in 2022, Trump endorsed him. In 2024, Wyoming overwhelmingly voted for Trump for president.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Trump’s Department of Justice sent Gray and the chief election officials in the other 49 states a letter warning that they could face criminal prosecution over possible noncitizen voting.

Utah’s top election official, Deidre Henderson, posted on social media that the letter was “truly bizarre behavior.” The Republican Lt. Governor noted that the DOJ “is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

I can say confidently that neither Gray nor Henderson has anything to worry about. Like their colleagues in the other 48 states, they have done nothing to warrant the insulting correspondence they received.

Though I have profound differences with many Republican chief election officials, I have no doubt they, like their Democratic counterparts, aim to keep noncitizens off their voter rolls and have done nothing remotely criminal.

But keeping noncitizens from voting wasn’t the point of the DOJ’s letter. Nor is it the point of DOJ’s announcement that it is sending “observers” to watch primary elections in fifteen jurisdictions across six states — Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia.

No, the point of both efforts, like so much in the Trump era, is performative. In lieu of evidence of actual fraud, the administration wants to use these clumsy steps to create the illusion that fraud exists.

This is a tactic Republicans regularly employ when it comes to their attacks on voting. For example, the DOJ has filed thirty lawsuits to gain access to state voter rolls. It has lost all 11 that have been decided. Yet its public posturing around the cases is intended to convey the message that something untoward resides in the data it seeks.

The RNC has followed a similar path, touting new anti-voting lawsuits that are either later dismissed or amount to nothing. Yet the propaganda value of the filing is achieved nonetheless.

There is a second, more dangerous reason why Trump and his allies act this way. They want to desensitize the public to their creeping authoritarianism.

When the DOJ deployed a handful of observers in advance of the 2025 elections, it caused waves. Now it is expanding that program with less fanfare. If, as I expect, it massively increases this behavior in the fall, officials want it to seem like old news.

Sadly, we have seen this work for Trump.

The right wing has made promoting lies about elections its top priority. It shows up in every presidential speech, is embraced by every GOP campaign, and is promoted — at least in part — by every right-wing advocacy effort.

Anyone nominated to the federal bench by this administration is required to adhere to certain norms supporting election denialism. They cannot say Biden won the 2020 election; they must parrot at least some form of voter fraud allegations.

Democrats dismiss these statements but mostly want to discuss other topics — the economy, jobs and healthcare. This makes good campaign sense but leaves a mismatch in the volume of messages Americans hear on the vital topic of democracy.

The legacy media has proven itself unable or unwilling to stay focused on threats to democracy. It feels institutionally compelled to treat the entire issue as a two-sided political contest rather than as an existential threat to the rule of law and the country.

That leaves those of us in the pro-democracy movement. Independent media has made great strides but continues to suffer from a lack of reach and resources necessary to inform the broader public of the nature and extent of the risks.

Voting rights organizations and lawyers do the hard work in the trenches but face Republican officials, a hostile administration and well-funded opponents.

With four months until the election, the challenges I lay out above will only grow. I haven’t even mentioned the role of disinformation, foreign interference, or how the Supreme Court might undercut efforts to protect voting.

But the truth is that we have faced these threats before — in 2020, when Trump tried to overturn the election and then inspired a violent insurrection at the Capitol, and in 2022, when his followers tried to prevent certification of elections.

We can defeat Trump’s authoritarianism. We can protect our elections and our democracy. But it will require all of us working together with a common mission.

That starts with refusing to allow ourselves to become numb to what Trump is doing, and insisting that we remain vigilant for signs that it is getting worse. In short, it requires us not to turn away, but to focus on the threats.

In the weeks and months ahead, there will be opportunities to discuss specific tactics and steps to take. But for now, all I ask is that you stay engaged. It’s okay to be tired and worried. It is not okay, however, to give up hope. That is what Trump wants — and is counting on.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Trump Fires Every Member of the Federal Election Commission

By dianeravitch

July 13, 2026 //

Rebecca Slaughter was a member of the Federal Trade Commission, appointed by Trump to a Democratic seat in 2018, then reappointed for a second term by Biden in 2023. In 2025, Trump fired her and another member of the commission. She challenged her dismissal in court, because she had been removed without cause. On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the President could fire members of independent commissions without cause.

Although the conservative majority claims to be “originalists,” they overruled a long-standing precedent (“Humphrey’s Executor”) which protected the independence of independent commissions, requiring the president to have cause for firing or removing a member of an independent commission.

Trump hailed the decision as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”

Trump just removed three of the four remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission. He didn’t have to give a reason. Everyone (except members of the Federal Reserve) serves at his pleasure. By law, the four-member commission is supposed to be bipartisan, with two members from each party.

What makes this removal ominous is that Trump has made no secret of his desire to manipulate the election machinery to benefit his party. He wants to change the rules of eligibility, change the documentation, change mail-in voting, anything that might make it more difficult to vote.

L.C. Francis of the L.C. Francis Open Society for History & Civics warns about the dangers of removing an electoral safeguard on the cusp of an important election. Will any new commissioners be Trump partisans? Will they swear their loyalty to him? Will they agree that the 2020 election, which he lost decisively, was rigged?

L.C. Francis writes:

Trump could not force an independent commission to carry out his voting agenda. Less than four months before the midterms, he removed the entire leadership team.

“Power is of an encroaching nature, and ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”
—James Madison, Federalist No. 48

Dear Friends,

Imagine learning, over your first cup of coffee, that less than four months before a national election, every seat on the federal commission created to protect the machinery of that election is vacant. No commissioners remain to lead it, to question political pressure, or to stand between the White House and the rules beneath the ballot.

Donald Trump recently eliminated the last three members of the United States Election Assistance Commission, leaving all four positions vacant. Two commissioners were dismissed via email, while the third resigned after being informed of her imminent removal. Subsequently, the White House issued a statement that clarified the intent behind these actions: stating that election officials need to be “totally aligned” with the president’s agenda.

The issue at hand is that an election commission, originally meant to stay independent from presidential influence, has been undermined by a president who thinks its leadership should be aligned with him.

To fully understand what has been at stake, we need to return to Florida in 2000. Election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light while lawyers argued over hanging chads, incomplete punches, and the intentions of individual voters. The presidency turned on 537 votes, handing George W. Bush the Oval Office, and the country discovered that the right to vote depended on an aging and uneven election system that few Americans had ever considered.

After the chaos of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act and established the Election Assistance Commission on the hard lesson that no president, party, or faction should control the machinery beneath the ballot. Its four members were evenly split between the parties, recommended by congressional leaders, confirmed by the Senate, and required to produce three votes before the commission could act.

The design was intentional because the agency manages voting-system standards, testing labs, election grants, and the national registration form, all of which influence an election well before any ballots are counted.

While researching this article, I was struck by James Madison’s warning that power tends to overreach. Congress learned this lesson and distributed authority over elections among the states, Congress, the courts, and an independent bipartisan commission. It’s important to remember that while the president may nominate members, he cannot legally turn the commission into an arm of his campaign or personal agenda.

Trump has already tried to cross that boundary.

In March 2025, he directed the commission to require documentary proof of citizenship on the federal registration form and sought to implement new rules for mail ballots and election funding. However, a federal court halted key parts of the initiative because the Constitution assigns the regulation of federal elections to Congress and the states, not the president.

He was unable to compel the commission to follow his order and has now dismissed everyone who had been managing it.

Trump is not currently in the Oval Office altering vote counts. Instead, he aims to influence the rules governing elections before votes are even cast, including who can register, what identification is required, which voting systems are permitted, and the extent of federal pressure on the states.

We still have lawful means to prevent the consolidation of power.

The commission needs three confirmed members to function legally. Any replacements must get Senate approval, and bipartisan membership is still required. Moreover, state attorneys general and secretaries of state can challenge illegal federal requests before Election Day.

In fact, election officials are authorized to publicly disclose all White House instructions, preserve all communications, and reject policies exceeding presidential authority. Courts can also issue injunctions against disputed rules before those rules reach voting ballots, registration offices, or voting machines.

The public must therefore monitor the replacement process with the same attention normally reserved for election night. The nominees’ names, records, testimony, and views on presidential power will determine whether the commission remains independent or becomes obedient in all but name.

Congress created this commission because the country learned in 2000 that an election can be lost in the machinery before a single result is announced. Trump has now cleared out his leadership as the nation prepares to decide whether to restrain his power. No serious citizen should mistake the timing as coincidence.

The chairs at the Election Assistance Commission may be empty, but the law has not surrendered them. Courts can still block unlawful executive action, as the Kennedy Center injunction proved. States can resist presidential interference, public records can expose what is being attempted, and every nominee can be scrutinized before obedience is allowed to pass for qualification.

The danger is not that our constitutional defenses have vanished…It’s that Americans may wait to use them until the damage is already done.

I’ve always believed that no president controls the machinery of an American election. It is ultimately owned by the states, the law, our Constitution, and, most importantly, We the People.

Vivat Constitution!

Categories Trump

Federal Judge Drops Case Against Leaders of the Proud Boys

By dianeravitch

July 12, 2026 //

Trump pardoned the convicted criminals who were sentenced because of their actions on January 6, 2021. Those who committed the most serious crimes were accused of seditious conspiracy and did not receive a pardon. They are leaders of the Proud Boys, a group of right wing extremists. They were later pardoned by Todd Blanche.

CNN reported:

(CNN) — A federal judge on Friday dismissed the seditious conspiracy case against several Proud Boys members — granting a request from Trump’s Justice Department and undoing one of the Biden administration’s most celebrated victories against those who it said inspired the January 6, 2021, attack on American democracy.

US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, begrudgingly agreed to drop the case against the four members, saying he “lacks the authority to compel the Executive to pursue a prosecution, full stop.”

“President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6—whether those views are based on fact or fiction—are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the Executive Order,” Judge Kelly said, referring to Trump on his first day back in office signing an order commuting their sentences.

Trump’s order granted pardons to over 1,000 people convicted in the attack but left in place the convictions of the four Proud Boys members — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.

In April, the Justice Department under Todd Blanche moved to vacate their convictions.

Dismissing the case against the Proud Boys associates erases some of the most serious convictions from the sprawling investigation of the US Capitol riot, one of the largest federal investigations in US history. Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were found guilty in 2023 of seditious conspiracy and a range of other charges. Pezzola was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but convicted on other charges related to January 6.

The US district judge who sits in Washington, DC, said in his order that the Trump administration sought to “treat this case essentially the same way it has all January 6 cases, without regard for the seriousness of the conduct at issue or even whether the case was initiated after President Biden took office or, like this one, while President Trump was still in power.”

“The decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s,” Kelly continued. “No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions.”

Rehl, one of the Proud Boys members, celebrated the dismissal in a post on X, saying, “Finally, it’s all over! January 6th can now be a thing of the past for me!”

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the group who had also been pardoned by Trump, was also quick to boast on X Friday night: “Justice is served! Proud Boys don’t lose. We win. This is our victory.”

Trump has long lambasted the January 6 prosecutions as an injustice against his supporters, even referring to those in jail as “hostages.”

The president has repeatedly called January 6, 2021, “a day of love and peace” and claimed his supporters posed “zero threat.” His comments are contradicted by hundreds of video clips of Trump supporters beating police with flagpoles, batons, wooden clubs and baseball bats; deploying stun guns and chemical sprays; and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers.

The judge, calling the insurrection “a perilous event,” said it was “an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government—Congress—that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called ‘nothing less than a miracle.’”

Closing his order with a somber warning, Kelly said, “Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people—no matter their partisan preferences—will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework.”

Categories Accountability, Character, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Trump Department of Justice Issues Subpoenas to NY Times Reporters

By dianeravitch

July 12, 2026 //

The Trump administration claims to be transparent, but it is quick to harass reporters if they discover and reveal information that the administration wants to hide. The New York Times recently explained that Trump had to use his old Presidential airplane to return from the NATO meeting in Ankara, Turkey, because his huge airplane–the Qatari gift– didn’t have the required security enhancements. The reporters credited with the story received subpoenas, and the government will try to compel them to testify before a grand jury and reveal their sources.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.

The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.

In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.

The Times denounced the administration’s actions.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, in a statement on Friday evening.

“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” Mr. McCraw wrote. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The subpoenas contain few specifics, asking only that the journalists testify “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” They were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Clayton, who leads one of the country’s most prominent law enforcement offices, was recently nominated by Mr. Trump to serve as director of national intelligence.

Representatives for the White House did not respond to inquiries on Friday evening.

In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman said that “reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”

“We value and appreciate the important role that the press plays in this country, but D.O.J. also plays an important role to make sure that the people entrusted with our nation’s secrets do what they’re supposed to do with that information,” said the spokeswoman, Emily Covington. She added, “We recognize there may always be natural tension there, but we are not going to ignore the law.”

The Times journalists who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, who reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had departed Turkey on the old Air Force One as a security precaution at the urging of the Secret Service. On Thursday, The Times reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including antimissile capabilities. Both articles cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.

Before the Wednesday article was published, a senior official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted a reporter and a senior editor at The Times to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The F.B.I. official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked The Times to disclose its sources for the article; the newspaper refused to do so. (A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, confirmed the account.)

Mr. Trump has long been a harsh critic of the news media. But in his second term in office, he has moved aggressively to use the immense powers of the federal government in his efforts to attack the press.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have initiated leak investigations into the disclosure of classified information. But subpoenas aimed at journalists are not common, and First Amendment advocates say they can chill the work of news gathering.

In January, F.B.I. agents took the rare step of searching the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant. Ms. Natanson had spent months speaking with government employees while reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal work force.

The Times is a party to several lawsuits involving Mr. Trump and his administration.

The president sued The Times last year, accusing it of defaming him, disparaging his reputation and seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy.

In December, The Times sued the Defense Department after it imposed restrictions on reporters who cover the military. The company sued again after the agency reduced reporters’ physical access to the Pentagon.

In May, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued The Times, accusing it of employment discrimination. On Friday, The Times filed a counterclaim, saying the lawsuit was an act of retaliation for its coverage of the Trump presidency and a violation of its First Amendment rights.

Categories Censorship, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Has Two Obsessions: Rigging the 2026 Elections and Redecorating

By dianeravitch

July 12, 2026 //

Heather Cox Richardson reviews the new focus in Trump’s actions. He has lost interest in governing. He is fixated on rigging the 2026 elections and redecorating the White House. He wants to leave indelible changes, sort of like the “Kilroy was here” graffiti. But in Trump’s case, he wants to make changes that can’t be wiped away, like tearing down the East Wing before anyone could stop him. His golden ballroom will be his lasting memorial. His successor will quickly strip the Oval Office of the gold kitsch that he plastered all over the walls, making it look like the reception room of Louis XIV.

Richardson writes:

Presumably afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J. Trump appears to have abandoned all pretense of governing for the good of the country and is focusing on rigging the 2026 election to keep Republicans in power.

This morning, as the National Association of Realtors reported that U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high, he announced that he will not sign the housing bill, which was designed to address the unaffordability of housing and which passed Congress with strong bipartisan majorities, “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

As the Lincoln Project summed it up, the Republican Party’s message four months before the midterms appears to be, “You’re not getting affordable housing unless you give up your voting rights.”

His demand for the passage of a bill that most observers agree will suppress voting is only one of the ways that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 election.

After federal judges have repeatedly prohibited the administration from seizing state voter lists, apparently to run them through a program designed to identify noncitizens who are not eligible for certain federal programs (something federal judges have also prohibited), Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice appear to have turned to trying to intimidate election officials.

On Tuesday the Department of Justice confirmed that it has sent letters to election officials in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., warning them that they could be criminally prosecuted if noncitizens vote. The letters came from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, and gave them five days to detail how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

Utah lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media: “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Last night, Trump fired the last two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent federal commission that helps state and local officials make sure elections are smooth and secure. Among other things, it certifies voting machines and maintains the national mail-voter registration forms. The only other current member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned. The fourth member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned earlier this year.

A White House official told Justin Papp of CNBC that the Supreme Court recognized Trump’s authority to fire the agency officials in its June 29 Trump v. Slaughter decision, which overturned more than 90 years of precedent to rubber stamp the president’s right to fire agency officials who are not aligned with his political agenda.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official told Papp. “The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so.”

Legal analyst Harry Litman says this interpretation of the Slaughter decision is a stretch. He noted that “[n]othing in the agency cases held that Trump could simply shut down an agency of Congress’s creation. That’s what he has done with the [E]lection Assistance [C]ommission which now lacks commissioners to act. It’s taking the court’s cases to the ultimate conclusion and just disabling an important agency.”

The nonpartisan, nonprofit League of Women Voters, which works to protect the right to vote, called the removal of the Election Assistance Commission officials “a direct attack on the independence of our nation’s election infrastructure…. The American people deserve elections administered by trusted professionals, not shaped by political interference. This is not a routine personnel decision—it is a dangerous escalation in the effort to weaken the safeguards that protect free and fair elections in the November midterms.”

This is the backdrop for the news from Betsy Klein and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today that the White House is fortifying the White House entrance at the North Portico during Trump’s renovation of the Ionic columns there.

In March, Trump’s appointee to the Commission on Fine Arts, which advises Trump on design matters, urged replacing the historic Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian columns that would match the ones Trump picked out for his ballroom. The White House says the work on the North Portico is “standard restoration work,” but did not answer CNN’s question about whether there would be more substantial changes to the North Portico. Trump recently posted pictures of the Corinthian columns at his proposed ballroom, boasting that “When completed, there will be nothing like it anywhere in the World!”

While the focus has been on the historic columns and their possible replacement, it is not until now we have learned about the strengthening of the White House door. The portico is now covered with scaffolding that is covered with a drape, and a White House official told Klein and Collins that the renovations will include security enhancements at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.

Dan Diamond of the Washington Post also reported today that under the Trump administration, the Secret Service, the White House, and the Interior Department are seeking to place permanent eight- to nine-foot-tall fencing around Lafayette Square, where tourists and protesters congregate, in front of the White House. They are also considering fencing off the parts of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. In the past, when officials believed it was necessary to shut off access to Lafayette Square, they used temporary barriers to avoid the perception that they were restricting public access to what is known as the People’s House.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting congressional representative from the District of Columbia., objected. “More fencing around the President’s Park would send the wrong message to the nation and the world by continuing to transform our democracy from one that is accessible and of the people to one that is exclusive and fearful of its own citizens,” she said.

Tonight, at 11:59 PM, the housing bill became law without the president’s signature.

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Notes:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/u-s-home-prices-hit-an-all-time-high-as-sales-slow-and-mortgage-rates-rise

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/09/trump-fires-election-commissioners