Earlier today there were headlines saying Trump war preparing to fire Jerome Powell as head of the Federal Reserve. I take it that Trump has TACO’d on that plan already. But Powell’s term ends in May 2026, and it’s a sure thing that Trump will appoint someone else to the Fed who will let Trump dictate monetary policy. So we’re doomed eventually.

Trump wants the Fed to cut interest rates to goose the economy. But this would also goose inflation, which is already heating up again because of Trump’s stupid tariffs. So whatever is left of the U.S. economy by then Trump will effectively kill off.

At Talking Points Memo, Hunter Walker reports that Millions of Dollars and Diverted Disaster Resources Were Used to Build ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’  Apparently Rhonda Santis  tapped Florida’s disaster response account to build Trump a prison camp.

And the Houston Chronicle blasts Homeland Security Secretary Gnome for her gross mismanagement of FEMA and the botched federal response to the recent floods.

Trump continues to play the cornered rat over Jeffrey Epstein. Now the Epstein files are a Democratic hoax.

Got that? If you’re a MAGA still talking about Epstein Trump doesn’t want your support. You’re dead to him. So straighten up and do as you’re told.

Trump is a case study in Acting Guilty, in other words.

Josh Marshall asks What Is He Doing?  Calling the files a Democratic hoax begs the question of why the Democrats went to all the trouble to create a hoax and then not leak it. Because clearly there was something that people in the Trump Administration were calling “Epstein files” that suddenly had to be erased from collective memory. The best explanation for Trump’s lame handling of this controversy, Josh suggests, is that Trump is a one-trick pony. Blaming the nefarious Dems and calling the controversy a hoax is what he always does.

Like you, I’ve been at this Trump thing for way too long to let myself think this is the pivot where his magic wears off. But I’m kind of struggling to come up with another theory of what’s happening. I don’t think he’s going to be able to sell the idea that there’s some damning information out there but that it was created by Obama to frame him. I guess you could say, “Why, Josh? It’s worked again and again.” And that’s true. But he’s in charge. He’s got an Attorney General who will do whatever he asks. Why not release the proof about what Obama and Hillary did? But he’s going both with the “I was framed” story while the people who run his DOJ and FBI are saying they’ve looked at the materials and there’s nothing there.

So they aren’t keeping their stories straight. It’s just a mess.

I had not realized that Jeffrey Epstein had become so central to the MAGA fantasy universe. Apparently this really is blowing up MAGA. Trump is even being slammed by his followers on Truth Social. This is turning into a big deal.

The best thing I’ve read so far is by David French, MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein. This looks beyond just the current roiling of MAGA to the probable eventual breakup of MAGA and what this will do to the Republican party. Just read it. And let me know what you think.

[Update: Steve M is skeptical that MAGA is going to break up. It may not just yet. But there’s been one nativist right-wing movement after another in the U.S. for about as long as there has been a U.S. In the antebellum period there were Know-Nothings, and after the Civil War came the Ku Klux Klan. And then in the early 20th century the Klan flared up again. After World War II came McCarthyism and the pseudo-conservatives that Richard Hofstadter wrote about in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently there was the Tea Party. These movements are not identical and didn’t focus on exactly the same issues, but in many ways it’s all one pathology, complete with nutty conspiracy theories. MAGA is just the newest version. If the past is our guide, MAGA will collapse eventually, and then after some period of time it will reform as something else around some other personality or issue.]

And see also Dave Weigel, Why MAGA can’t move on from the ‘Epstein files’. (Note that Weigel has left WaPo and is now writing for Semafor. WaPo has lost nearly all of its best editorial writers, IMO.  Way to go, Jeff Bezos.)

As far as I can tell, the MAGA faithful are still refusing to consider that the coverup is about protecting Trump. Mehdi Hasan put together a video documenting how close Trump and Epstein were for many years. They had a falling out a few years ago, but not over Epstein’s well-documented vices.

And see also MAGA cares more about Jeffrey Epstein than dying without Medicaid, which explains everything by Will Bunch.

I wasn’t initially planning to write about Epstein because in a moment of unAmerican raids on immigrants by masked secret police and GOP boasting about its new concentration camps, a sex scandal — even one that touches Trump — didn’t feel so important. But watching the MAGA implosion in recent days has made me realize I was wrong — as are the parade of Democratic elected officials who go on MSNBC to declare that any story not about Medicaid cuts is “just a distraction.”

In other news: The Miami Herald is reporting that  Hundreds at Alligator Alcatraz have no criminal charges, Miami Herald learns.  No surprise, but habeas corpus has not lawfully been suspended. This means those hundreds of incarcerations are unlawful.

In more other news: See Trump Is Gutting Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response in the New York Times. As I wrote in the last post, Trump seems to think natural disasters just don’t ever happen, and if they do happen it’s something no one could have seen coming. This act is going to get real old if people stop getting timely warnings about hurricanes and the other major storms that do happen every year. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp he’s setting up his own administration to fail at something that can kill him politically.

This is a must-watch bit from Chris Hayes’s show last night. Trump has a long history of being absolutely astonished that there are such things as natural disasters. Who could have known?

See also Trump and Noem’s attacks on FEMA blew up in the most predictable way. The plan had been to abolish FEMA and expect states to take care of their own disaster relief. Apparently this is being re-thought. I’m not sure Trump is capable of remembering what he is supposed to be re-thinking from one hour to the next, though.

Let us not forget how he cut the pandemic early warning program before the Covid pandemic. Trump’s standard plan is to wait until there’s a fire, and then if no one else puts it out he’ll maybe start organizing a fire department. While being astonished (note accordion movements with his hands) that there are such things as fires. Nobody ever saw a house burn down before!

I’ve read that the flood in Kerr County, Texas, was in a 100-year flood zone. This  means the chance of a flood in any given year is very small, but not nonexistent.

And file this one under What the Bleep Is Wrong With These People?

A Texas county devastated by deadly flooding earlier this month rejected federal funds in 2021 that could have helped install a flood warning system, with local officials and residents arguing they didn’t want to be “bought” by the Biden administration.

As far back as 2016, officials considered a $1 million siren and gauge system to warn both locals and the flood-prone region’s many visitors, the Texas Tribune reported. But despite multiple meetings and FEMA grant applications, funding efforts repeatedly stalled, first due to missing mitigation plans, then due to shifting priorities after Hurricane Harvey.

In 2021, the Biden administration awarded Kerr County $10.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, which could have been used for flood prevention infrastructure. But commissioners, facing political pressure from conservative residents, opted not to pursue a warning system.

At an April 2022 meeting, one citizen called the White House a “criminal treasonous communist government,” urging the county to reject the money altogether. Others echoed that sentiment, saying they didn’t want the federal government’s help.

“We don’t want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” a resident said. “We’d like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”

While the county ultimately kept the funds, they allocated the majority, about $8 million, to sheriff’s department upgrades and public employee stipends.

Sometimes the government isn’t the problem, folks. And sometimes it is. Secretary Gnome is doing a terrible job. FEMA is much less useful because of her.

(I saw her name spelled Gnome in a chryon a few days ago. So that’s her name now.)

We know that there will be tornadoes and hurricanes this summer. There will be wildfires. There could be more floods. There could be earthquakes. I understand the New Madrid Seismic Zone has been acting up lately. We don’t know exactly what will happen,, but these things do happen. Hurricanes and tornadoes in particular always hipper, somewhere in the U.S., every year. Yet they catch Trump completely by surprise, as if he never heard of such things before. .

Update: Steve Bannon is telling his followers that the GOP could lose 40 House seats over the Epstein files sideshow. Not over stripping health care from millions of people or slowing up the deficit on tax cuts for the rich or anything else they’ve been up to. Bleeping Jeffrey Epstein. They’re like children.

Gallup has some interesting data on immigration. It’s getting more popular. No, really.

 Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.

These shifts reverse a four-year trend of rising concern about immigration that began in 2021 and reflect changes among all major party groups.

Also,

In addition to supporting increased or stable immigration levels, more Americans now favor offering undocumented immigrants pathways to citizenship, while fewer support stringent measures to deter or reverse illegal immigration.

Gallup attributes this change to a drop in illegal border crossings. Maybe. But I’ve always seen “illegal immigration” as two separate issues. Border security is one issue, and treatment of undocumented immigrants who have made the U.S. their home is a another issue. Why are people getting more sympathetic toward immigrants, undocumented and otherwise? Could it be that the ICE vibe is turning people off?

Josh Marshall has more to say:

A new Gallup poll taken over the month of June shows Trump support on “handling the immigration issue” now stands at 35% with 62% opposing. Needless to say that’s a very, very low level of support, especially on what is viewed as Trump’s sheet anchor issue. Unsurprisingly these numbers break down along sharply partisan lines, with essentially no support from Democrats, 28% support from independents and 81% of Republicans. (I’m focusing on this new Gallup poll. But the trend is evident and often in even starker terms from other pollsters. Gallup has if anything tilted, in methodological terms, slightly GOP-friendly in recent years.) Along with these numbers we also see a strong shift, much as we did in Trump’s first term, with more atmospheric support for immigration. Gallup shows a sharp uptick in the number of Americans who believe immigration is a net positive for the United States and who support various policies to open pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

My impression is that Stephen Miller is the one who’s really driving immigration policy, while an increasingly feeble-minded Trump just signs off on things. But it appears they both sincerely believe that most Americans actually enjoy seeing videos of the ICE arrests and hearing about the nasty places people are being sent. Yes, with MAGA the cruelty is the point. But most Americans aren’t MAGA. Are there plans to evacuate detainees from Alligator Alcatraz in the event of a hurricane? I’m guessing not.

There are also plans to start denaturalizing citizens like never before. Denaturalization has happened before, but it’s a rare thing. Now I take it the DOJ is actively looking through the records of naturalized citizens even for innocent discrepancies that would allow that individual to be denaturalized and deported. It doesn’t matter if they have no criminal records and are hard-working members of their communities. There are no good naturalized citizens in MAGA world, except for Melania. I expect them to go after Zohran Mamdani, who needs to keep his ass in New York City for the next few months. He may be safer there.

And I’m just seeing new headlines that a California farm worker died as a result of an ICE raid. The individual fell from a 20-foot building. This seems — unnecessary. This must be peak growing season in California. These raids really could impact the food supply.

Meanwhile, it’s been fun to watch MAGA tear itself apart over the Jeffrey Epstein issue. I hadn’t realized Epstein was so central to the MAGA fantasy universe. And now Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino is so upset with the DoJ over their attempt to sweep the Epstein controversy under the rug that he may resign. To which I say, bye.  But I guess the MAGAts really did notice that AG Bondi had gone from saying the Epstein files are on her desk to saying they don’t exist. And the video that is supposed to show the door to Epstein’s jail cell on the night he died has been “modified,” according to Wired.

Now let’s see if these geniuses can figure out who is being protected. And it looks like Laura Loomer would be a no. She has not.

Trump appears to have no idea what’s going on in his own administration.

Today the Supreme Court gave Trump the green light to go ahead and fire federal civil service workers as he pleased. The only dissent was from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. I don’t have to tell you what a disaster this is.

The on-again, off-again deportation of migrant farmworkers is on again, apparently. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has a grand plan to replace migrants with Medicaid recipients.

“There will be no amnesty,” Rollins said Tuesday during an event at USDA headquarters highlighting the administration’s efforts to strengthen farm and national security policy. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation.”

“With 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly,” she added, referencing Medicaid participants currently in the program who don’t yet meet the reconciliation package’s new work requirements.

I believe the work requirements don’t go into effect until after the Midterms, although I could be confused. The other problem with this plan is that most able-bodied Medicaid recipients age19-65 already have jobs.

Chuck is peeved.

The Senate is set to vote on a rescissions package that narrowly passed the House in June and would cancel already appropriated federal funds for public broadcasting and some foreign aid programs.

Republicans only need a majority vote for the legislation to pass the upper chamber. But Schumer warned GOP lawmakers in a Tuesday letter that passing the rescissions package will have “grave implications,” such as Democrats blocking any government funding deal and risking a government shutdown.

“[I]t is absurd for [Republicans] to expect Democrats to act as business as usual and engage in a bipartisan appropriations process to fund the government, while they concurrently plot to pass a purely partisan rescissions bill to defund those same programs negotiated on a bipartisan basis behind the scenes,” Schumer wrote.

Let’s see if he sticks to this.

Trump must be bored. He’s run out of countries to bomb, or else the Fox News bobbleheads aren’t talking about him enough. So he’s gone back to his other feel-good fix, raising tariffs. Paul Krugman has a substack column up called The Tariff Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves that is a must-read. And I mean all the way through. Somebody really needs to take the car keys away from Grandpa.

Yesterday I linked to a Josh Marshall post called Critical Read About the BBB, Federalism and the Future of American Democracy. Do read it if you didn’t, and then read a sequel, ICE’s Penumbra of Abuse. The U.S. is about to throw more money at expanding ICE than most countries spend on their militaries. It’s fairly obvious Trump is thinking about using ICE against anybody he chooses to oppress. We’re all in danger.

This is one of those “I don’t even know where to start” days. So I’m randomly starting with Elon Musk’s announcement that he is forming a new political party. I’m not expecting this to go very far, mind you. Elon has a track record of not following through on a lot of what he promises. And third parties just don’t get very far in the U.S., for reasons previously discussed. And I don’t know if Elon has all that much of a following any more.

Still, he does have a lot of money, and the party has a website. It’s the America Party. There already is an American Party, I take it, although it seems a bit inactive at the moment. There was an American Party in the 19th century that was better known as the Know Nothings. That party was xenophobic, nativist, and steeped in conspiracy theories. For example, Irish immigrants were part of a “Romanist” plot to take over the U.S. and put it under the control of the Catholic Church. Here’s an article from 2021 that draws some parallels between the Know-Nothings and QAnon. Interesting stuff.

But this takes me to the present day and the way the Republican Party has been entirely consumed by MAGA. Former Republican senator Jeff Flake has an op ed in the New York Times that mourns the passing of the Republican Party of his day. Flake’s political career — first in the House, then the Senate — spanned the years from 2001 to 2019, but he announced in October 2017 that he would not seek a second term in the Senate. “I noted that in today’s Republican Party, anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to President Trump — then in his first term — was deemed unacceptable and suspect,” he wrote in the op ed.

I wrote about Flake’s announced departure from the Senate when it happened, in a post called Flake Out, It’s interesting to go back and read it now (and the comments by our departed CUNDgulag and Swami) for the perspective. Flake appeared to be positioning himself as a leader of a Republican resistance to Trump. He even wrote a book and may have been considering a run for the presidency in 2020. But the resistance never materialized.

The gist of Flake’s new op-ed is that the Republican party has become entirely driven by loyalty to Trump, which of course it has. And this is very bad, which of course it is. The question he doesn’t directly ask is, what will become of the Republican Party when Trump is no longer in power? What happens will depend a lot on the manner of Trump’s leaving the political scene, whether in handcuffs or an ambulance or a prolonged retirement in Mar-a-Lago where he continues to jerk his cult around on Truth Social. But I don’t see anyone who could step into his place and hold the cult together. It’s all too much about him to survive without him. There is almost certainly going to be some kind of realignment on the Right, and where that will leave the GOP remains to be seen.

So this sorta kinda takes us back to Elon Musk and his America party. Again, I don’t expect big things from Elon’s party, but this may be just a first step in a movement away from Trump that will point us in the direction of what might come next.

Speaking of political realignments, Peter Beinart reminds us that there was another realignment of sorts in the GOP not that long ago. The Tea Party, which you’ll remember picked up steam in 2009, swept away a lot of the movement conservatism that evolved out of Reaganism, foiled the Clinton Administration, and reached its peak in the George W. Bush years. After the Tea Party got going many former GOP powerhouses like Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner were swept away. Jeff Flake and Kevin McCarthy were later casualties. The Tea Party paved the way for MAGA and was absorbed into MAGA.

Beinart’s column is really about how Israel is no longer popular with rank-and-file Democrats and party leaders need to wake up to this. His supporting arguments are more interesting to me than the main one, frankly. He argues that the primary victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City is analogous to the primary defeat of Eric Cantor to Tea Partier Dave Brat in 2014. Maybe. But I generally agree with Beinart that “Mr. Brat and Mr. Mamdani have little in common. But they won their primaries for similar reasons: Each exploited the chasm between his party’s grass roots and its elites.” That chasm among the Dems has been there for a long time, and it keeps getting bigger. So we may be seeing the beginning of a long-delayed realignment among the Dems as well.

Also: Do read Critical Read About the BBB, Federalism and the Future of American Democracy by Josh Marshall. Serious stuff.

Among those dead or missing in the horrific Texas floods are about twenty young girls, swept away from a children’s summer camp. See “Texas flooding leaves at least 24 dead, 20 Camp Mystic campers unaccounted for” at CNN. Some news stories are reporting twenty-four girls missing.

What seems to be under-reported is that the National Weather Service didn’t predict the flooding in time to do much good.

At a press conference last night, one official said: “The original forecast we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6” of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8” of rain in the hill country. The amount of rain that fell in these locations was never in any of their forecasts. Everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service. They did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”

Reuters published a story just a few days ago, one of many warning about this problem: “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’. Despite bipartisan congressional pushback for a restoration in staffing and funding to the NWS, sharp budget cuts remain on pace in projections for the 2026 budget for the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS.”

The National Weather Service did issue a flood warning on Thursday afternoon, but that was after there had already been flooding. I take it there was another big surge late last night, but the area has no warning system for floods.

Trump is promising to send aid to Texas, but we’ve heard that one before. Texas should be warned not to hold its breath waiting for the feds.

I assume the OBUB will get passed in the House by the end of the day so Trump can sign it on July 4, as he demanded. So on a day for celebrating independence we’ll all lose some of it.

Over the years I’ve written a ton of posts about how the Right loves the word “freedom,” but only after they’ve stripped it of meaning. For example, here’s one from July 2, 2017, in which Texas governor Abbott defines “freedom” as the ability of the state to nullify local laws it doesn’t like.

And because we’re concerned about health care, let us revisit Because Freedom from April 2013. Just go read it; it’s short. You can take out “tea party” and write in MAGA, and it would be about today. “Freedom” to the Right means the freedom to shirk moral and civic responsibility. It means letting people die so as not to tax the wealthy.

Republicans still won’t admit to the truth of health care, which is that it simply isn’t possible to expect a for-profit health care system to equitably deliver medical care to an entire population. The profits come from price gouging and benefits denial. It means letting people die to benefit stockholders. That’s the plain truth. but even many Democrats don’t dare say that out loud, because someone on Fox News might accuse them of being socialists.

So a whole bunch of Red-state Republicans are passing a bill that will take medical benefits from their constituents and close rural hospitals. And most of them know this. They just don’t dare admit it. This crew is not exactly Washington and his troops at Valley Forge. .

Since yesterday I’ve been checking the news periodically to see what was going on with the One Big Ugly Bill in the Senate. I held on to faint hope that the thing would stall forever. But I just saw a news bulletin saying that it passed. Now it’s off for another messy fight in the House.

One of the terrible ironies of this bill is that while it will do a lot of damage to the nation and its citizens, it likely will end up hurting the GOP also. Some Republican senators are smart enough to know that, which probably is why a few dragged their feet. House Republicans are, um, more cognitively challenged, however.

According to this really excellent article about the bill in the Atlantic, “Each year, the legislation would kill 51,000 Americans, researchers at Yale have estimated.” However, “two in three Americans say they have heard little or nothing about it.” This is why so many voters make bad choices; they don’t know what the bleep is going on.

Speaking of killing people, today is the end of the USAID program. It is totally terminated. By closing it, the Trump Administration is responsible for a lot of deaths already. See In Sudan, where children clung to life, doctors say USAID cuts have been fatal.

When U.S.-supported soup kitchens were forced to close, babies starved quietly, their mothers said, while older siblings died begging for food. Funding stoppages meant that critical medical supplies were never delivered, doctors said. The lack of U.S.-funded disease response teams has made it harder to contain cholera outbreaks, which are claiming the lives of those already weakened by hunger.

The food that could have saved those babies has been sitting in storage, slowly spoiling. And CNN reports, Rubio hails end of USAID as study says its elimination could contribute to 14 million deaths in next 5 years

Today former presidents Bush and Obama issued videos critical of the agency’s closing. You could have spoken up sooner, guys, Nobody was stopping you.

Update: I’m slipping. I forgot today was the second-round recount of the New York City mayoral primary vote. Well, Zohran Mamdani won, easily, with 56 percent of the vote. So he is definitely the nominee.