This is something Trump actually posted today.

Needless to say, this isn’t funny.

I want to write about changing the name of the Department of Defense to Department of War. To change the name officially requires the consent of Congress, but I’m sure Trump’s people at the DoD/W will go ahead and put the change through. (Don’t throw the old stationary out, military folks. A future administration will change the name back.)

It takes a chickenhawk like Trump — and a man-child with obvious unresolved Mommy issues like Pete Hegseth — to think this rebrand is a good idea. Tom Nichols at The Atlantic has a good backgrounder on the Department of War becoming the Department of Defense in 1949. A succession of presidents with real-world battle experience, beginning with World War I vet Harry Truman and one-time Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, were fine with this. A generation of Americans who had lived through World War II were fine with this. Naturally, Captain Bone Spurs has a different idea.

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that ceremonially recognized the Defense Department as the “Department of War,” a name that was dropped after World War II and that the president claimed had caused the country to enter wars it “never fought to win.”

“We won World War II. We won everything before, and as I said, we won everything in between,” Mr. Trump said at an event in the Oval Office, where he signed the order. “And we were very strong, but we never fought to win. We just didn’t fight to win.”

Mr. Trump argued that the name, which was changed by President Harry S. Truman to combine all of branches of the military, had been changed because the country “decided to go woke.”

“I think the Department of War sends a signal,” Mr. Trump said. The change, he argued, was a “much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.”

And it was in a less perilous place in 1949? I don’t think so. That was the year Mao Zedong took control of China, among other things. But let’s go on …

About winning wars — I remember this is something I used to rant about during the Iraq War. The nature of war itself has changed. For centuries it was conventional for nations to declare war on each other, and then the war continued until one side was forced to surrender. And then there was an official ceremony and a treaty, and it was over. But nations don’t declare war any more, and wars don’t seem to begin or end on fixed calendar dates. And there’s a difference of opinion about why that’s true.  But instead of declared wars what happens these days are intermittent episodes of military action. Two adversaries may stop fighting for awhile, but that doesn’t mean the “war” is “over” or that anybody “won.” And it’s often the case that one of the adversaries isn’t even a nation, but rather some kind of organization that crosses borders, like al Qaeda. The last time the U.S. officially declared war was in June 1942, when Congress declared war on the Axis-aligned nations of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.

If you long for sweet, total military victory in a war, you need a time machine. Because nobody’s doing that any more, anywhere on the planet that I can see. Once again, Trump isn’t keeping up with the times.

Trump clearly has war on his mind, which worries me. Is he thinking of starting a war with somebody? Venezuela is probably on his short list. Maybe he thinks if the nation is at war he can cancel the midterms? If we didn’t cancel elections in the Civil War I don’t think so,  but he might try it.

And regarding Chicago, Trump might want to think twice before messing with Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

In other news: ICE’s latest escapade is turning into an international incident. ICE raided a Hyundai Motor-LG car battery factory in Georgia, and among those detained were 300 South Koreans. And now South Korea is pissed. But what a great way to discourage foreign countries from building factories in the U.S., right?

Also, I am once again rattling the tin cup to raise some money to pay for a dental procedure scheduled for Thursday. All help is appreciated. Here’s the gofundme link, or you can use the donate button at the top of the right-hand column to pay through PayPal,

Regarding the weak jobs numbers, I was reminded of this graphic Trump put out a week ago —

As Krugman wrote last week, “Raising $8 trillion in tariff revenue would be quite a trick, given that total U.S. imports last year were only $3.3 trillion.” And the “hundreds of thousands of new jobs” also are a fantasy. Today’s job report from the BLS says the nation added only 22,000 jobs in August. That looks even worse when you learn that the health care sector added 31,000 jobs. So how bad are the other sectors? This is from the report:

In August, employment in mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction declined by 6,000, after changing little over the prior 12 months.

Wholesale trade employment continued to trend down in August (-12,000) and has fallen by 32,000 since May.

Manufacturing employment changed little in August (-12,000) but is down by 78,000 over the year.

Employment in transportation equipment manufacturing declined by 15,000 over the month, in part due to strike activity.

Employment showed little change over the month in other major industries, including construction, retail trade, transportation and warehousing, information, financial activities, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and other services.

All the bobbleheads on the teevee want you to know that these numbers will be revised as new data comes in. So it might not be quite as bad as it looks now. But no way is it good.

Oh, and the report also included this gem:

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised down by 27,000, from +14,000 to -13,000, and the change for July was revised up by 6,000, from +73,000 to +79,000. With these revisions, employment in June and July combined is 21,000 lower than previously reported.

The best jobs president ever, or at least since World War II, was Bill Clinton. During his two terms the nation added 18.6 million jobs. Of course, presidents don’t actually create jobs, but their policies can go a long way toward creating an economic environment that is conducive to job creation. Or not.

Rolling Stone:

One Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone that their office had pre-written different drafts of talking points for their principal: One version would blame BLS prominently for supposedly pumping out bad data; if the jobs report ended up being more positive for Trump, another version would downplay the BLS criticism or nix it entirely.

Friday’s monthly jobs report was not positive for the president. …

… Instead of immediately lashing out at the government’s statisticians on Friday, Trump took time to once again call his Jeffrey Epstein scandal “another Democrat HOAX.” He then quickly pivoted to criticizing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates. 

Also, too:

Last year, a survey found that 36 percent of job listings were fake. Companies post fake listings to look like they are growing and farm data. 

That makes me sad. It must really suck to be a job seeker right now.

This is not going to turn around as long as Trump is POTUS. Trump’s approval rating is still hovering at around 41 percent in most polls. That’s low by historic standards, but I can’t understand why it isn’t lower. But hey — here’s an actual scholarly study on what motivates Trump support, and the scholars propose that Trump’s policies are irrelevant to these people. It’s all about reclaiming status. That status may not look so hot after a few more months of this. At least, the “approval” is growing softer.

In other news — the New York Times has a story about a secret SEAL mission into North Korea that happened in Trump’s first term. It didn’t go well. We’re lucky it didn’t start a war.

Yesterday’s news was largely taken up with replays of JFK the Lesser’s ghastly Senate testimony. What a terribly damaged human being he is. I wouldn’t put him in charge of a kids’ summer camp, never mind the nation’s health. If you missed it, see let’s watch as Democratic senators rip Bobby Brainworms several new ones by Jeff Tiedrich.

And as I wrote yesterday I am once again rattling the tin cup to raise some money to pay for a dental procedure scheduled for Thursday. All help is appreciated. Here’s the gofundme link, or you can use the donate button at the top of the right-hand column to pay through PayPal,

I’m sorry to say I’m starting a new fundraiser. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but this is for dental expenses that I’m told aren’t covered by Medicaid. Here’s the Gofundme link. You can read about it there. You can also donate by clicking on the donate button at the top of the right-hand column. Thanks you so much for all help.

Now, on to today’s atrocities. I want to talk about Trump’s boat-bombing. Here is Chris Hayes from last night:

And see Trump Is Crossing a Line That Dates Back to the Revolution by Youssef et al. in The Atlantic.

And see David Kurtz at TPM, Abu Ghraib Meets Tonkin Gulf.

The startling U.S. attack on an alleged drug-running boat in international waters off Venezuela is precisely the kind of no-holds-barred combat that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was clearing the way for when he began firing military lawyers as soon as he settled into his E-ring office.

As bad as some of the U.S. infractions were during the Global War on Terror — and I can scarcely believe I’m writing this — there still remained an understanding among the Dick Cheneys of the world that they needed to come up with at least a thread of an argument for what legal authority they were relying on, however pretextual, unpersuasive, and unavailing it might have been.

This astonishing sentence from the NYT suggests that President Trump — fully immunized for his official acts by the Roberts Court — has dispensed with even putting on a show of legally justifying this week’s attack: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Shoot first, figure out the legal cover later.

The Trump administration couldn’t even get its facts straight on the story it was telling publicly, with Trump claiming the boat was headed to the United States and Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially claiming it was headed to Trinidad. Rubio later brought his public statements in line with Trump’s.

I say it’s highly unlikely the craft was heading directly for the U.S. It doesn’t look like a huge boat — I can’t find estimates of its dimensions, but it looked like a speedboat — and it was off the coast of Venezuela. It’s about 1,400 miles between the coast of Venezuela and Florida. There’s only about 7 miles between the coast of Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. Rubio was probably right the first time.

And Trump is claiming there was a “tremendous” amount of drugs on the boat. Maybe there were, maybe there weren’t. Unless someone can find an official manifest we’ll never know, since the evidence went down with the boat.

Trump is justifying all this by saying that drug-runners are terrorists. But they really aren’t, you know. Drug runners are criminals; terrorists are another kind of beast. It’s true that terrorist groups have been known to get some of their funding from the sale of illegal drugs. It’s also true that these days some of them are getting funds through trading bitcoin. Does that mean everyone who trades in bitcoin is a terrorist? Hmmmmmmm?

This is from the BBC:

Under Article 2(4) of the UN charter, countries can resort to force when under attack and deploying their military in self-defence. Trump has previously accused the Tren de Aragua cartel of conducting irregular warfare against the US, and the state department has designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation.

But Prof Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told BBC Verify that the US actions “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point”.

“The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets,” he said. “The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.”

“Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law.”

Prof Moffett said that the use of force in this case could amount to an “extrajudicial arbitrary killing” and “a fundamental violation of human rights”.

“Labelling everyone a terrorist does not make them a lawful target and enables states to side-step international law,” he said.

Back to David Kurtz:

Of particular note is Trump’s unsupported claim those targeted in the killing were Tren de Aragua gang members. Trump has designated TdA as a terrorist organization and used that justification to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for the notorious removals of Venezuelan nationals, many of whom it’s now clear were not TdA members. In an ironic twist, the attack on the boat came the same week that the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that TdA was not invading the United States for Alien Enemies Act purposes, making Trump’s invocation of the wartime statute unlawful.

Assuming it was a drug boat, former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane surveys the legal landscape for a lethal attack on alleged drug traffickers on the high seas. “The use of lethal force in this attack appears gratuitous and the administration has not explained why law enforcement tools were inadequate to address the situation,” he writes.

Trump always believes there’s a quick fix that no one but him ever thought of before. His plan to put an end to California wildfires by emptying a reservoir is an example. Tariffs are Trump’s quick fix to lower the deficit and bring back manufacturing. His love of quick fixes is probably why he prefers executive orders to passing laws. Why bother slogging through all those legislative processes when you can just sign a piece of paper? It’s possible someone has tried to explain to him that executive orders are not legally binding, but Trump doesn’t want to hear it.  His approach to foreign policy is similar; he likes quick-fix deals.

Hers is Trump’s explanation:

pic.twitter.com/K15IcBG3b3

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) September 2, 2025

This, and other statements by Rubio and Pete Hegseth, tells us the rationale is to just bomb suspected drug traffickers to teach them a lesson. And Trump also seems to have a Thing about Venezuela. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro says Trump is really after Venequela’s oil. And he could be right for all I know.

And, may I add, people have gotten on the wrong side of the International Criminal Court for stuff like that.

In more other news, see Alex Shephard at The New Republic, Donald Trump Has Destroyed American Foreign Policy. Forget the “leader of the free world” thing. That’s over. Really, Trump killed that one in his first term. Now he’s busily wrecking years of diplomatic work and foreign policy — the famous “Pax Americana” — and making the U.S. everybody’s enemy.

When it became clear Trump had won the 2024 election I wrote here that “The nation just committed suicide..” I stand by that. The U.S. will probably be around for awhile, but it will never be the same. And it sure as bleep won’t be “great again” until all traces of Trump and MAGA are pushed back to the powerless fringe.

So this just happened:

This is another of those “where do I even start” days. So let’s start with a story that’s not getting much front-page attention: Lutnick Family Angling To Make Astronomical Sums Off Court Nixing Tariffs by Josh Marshall at TPM.

Here’s the synopsis: A couple of days ago an appeals court backed up the U.S. Court of International Trade and found that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. But the tariffs are staying in place for a while, pending more appeals. If someday the SCOTUS determines once and for all that the tariffs are illegal, the Trump Administration is going to have to refund importing companies a whole lot of money.

Josh Marshall heard that some Wall Street firms are actually buying up the rights to these maybe some day refunds. For example, a Wall Street firm might offer an importer $2 million now for the right to claim $10 million down the road. One of the firms that is going whole hog on these deals is Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald, until very recently, was headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Now it’s being run by  Lutnick’s sons. Brandon Lutnick, age 27, is the current chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. Does anyone really believe his old man is not still involved in running the company? And does Trump know his commerce secretary is set up to make a nice profit if Trump’s tariff policy is tossed out by the courts?

Paul Krugman mentioned this little conflict of interest in a column today, and also noted that the White House made a Labor Day proclamation that the United States has taken in $8 trillion in tariff revenue! “Raising $8 trillion in tariff revenue would be quite a trick, given that total U.S. imports last year were only $3.3 trillion,” Krugman said.

In another small step, a U.S. district judge in California ruled that Trump’s deployment of National Guard and Marines to California was a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The judge blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to California again, but put the ruling on hold for ten days to give Trump time to appeal. The White House has already announced it will ignore the ruling. And this afternoon Trump announced he would order “federal intervention” in Chicago and Baltimore, but he didn’t say when.

In other legal news, there is a U.S. District Judge In Washington DC named Sparkle Sooknanan. That’s not really the news, but it did make me want to meet her. Judge Sooknanan is the one who stopped the Trump Administration from deporting a number of unaccompanied children to Guatemala. Exactly how many children were being prepared for deportation isn’t clear. I believe I saw 800 in one story, and 600 in anther, and it may not have been that many. But it was some. To condense this story quite a bit, the judge was alerted to the deportations at 1 a.m. Sunday morning and worked 20 hours straight, without sleep, to be sure all children were returned to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.  It appears one plane full of children was already in the air when the Judge began issues orders, but this time the plane came back.

In the This Is Rich department, Trump is upset that the CDC is being ripped apart by disputes over whether covid products, vaccines and treatments, actually work. You might notice that there were no such disputes until Trump put a brain-damaged wackadoo who doesn’t know science from his ass in charge of the nation’s health. I liked this bit from STAT.

Drug companies have long shared findings with government regulators and the public showing that their Covid-19 products are overwhelmingly safe and effective. In his post, Trump said he has been shown data demonstrating the vaccines and drugs are effective and have saved millions of lives, but he accused the companies behind the products of not sharing that information publicly — or with officials at the CDC.

Trump used the post, which comes five days after the ouster of Susan Monarez as director of the CDC and resignation of several other top officials, to urge companies to “clear up this MESS, one way or the other.”

So he’s being shown data that was shared to the government — how else would he have seen it? — and the public, and he’s demanding this data be shared with the government and the public. Genius. And the onus is entirely on the medical/pharmaceutical companies to prove to the wackadoos that science is right and their conspiracy theories are crap. Yeah, that will so not happen. You can’t tell those people anything. They are impervious to reason and logic and facts that don’t fit their cherished biases.

Trump has been teasing a big announcement today, which got a lot of people really excited. A cryptocurrency prediction market was taking bets he was going to announce his resignation. That was a stupid bet; that man is not going to resign. We’ll be lucky if he agrees to move out of the White House when his term is over. When he had a colonoscopy during his first term he refused anesthesia so he wouldn’t have to temporarily turn the presidency over to Mike Pence. This is not a man who is preparing a graceful exit. No matter what.

Oh, and the big announcement was that the military’s US Space Command will be moved from Colorado Spring, Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. There’s already a bunch of space/military stuff in Huntsville. But Trump seems to be mostly doing this because there are too many Democrats in Colorado.

So yesterday an appeals court backed up the U.S. Court of International Trade and found that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. But the tariffs can remain in effect until mid-October or until another court says otherwise. A Supreme Court appeal is assumed.

One of the interesting developments in Trump’s second term is that the free-market libertarian side of conservatism, which for years has supported Republicans, appears to be breaking with Trump. Websites like Cafe Hayek and Reason are siding with the court decision against the tariffs. The Cato Institute hasn’t weighed in on this decision yet, but it’s got a good article up on the unconstitutional deployment of national guard. Dan McLaughlin of the National Review applauds the ruling, But Andrew McCarthy, also at National Review, works hard to find a fig leaf of an excuse for Trump’s position. You might remember McCarthy for his mighty efforts to persuade us that Saddam Hussein’s representatives met with 9/11 perp Mohamed Atta in Prague.

You really don’t have to be a Constitutional scholar to understand that the Constitution gives Congress, and only Congress, the power to impose tariffs in Article I, section 8, first paragraph. “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;” Tariffs come under the heading of “duties.” And the third clause gives Congress the power “To regulate commerce with foreign nations.” None of those things are mentioned as a power of the President in Section II.

Trump is arguing that the power to impose tariffs was delegated to him because it’s an emergency. Paul Krugman wrote yesterday,

It’s important to be clear what just happened. The court didn’t say that tariffs per se are illegal. It said that the procedure Trump used to impose tariffs — declaring an economic emergency, then setting tariff rates without so much as consulting Congress, let alone passing legislation — is illegal. If Trump wants to pass a tariff bill, the same way he passed his One Big Beautiful Bill, OK. (I mean, terrible policy, but legal.)

But just saying “I am the Tariff Man, and here are my tariffs” isn’t OK.

True, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act gives the president substantial room to set tariffs during an, um, economic emergency. But Trump himself keeps saying that the economy is in wonderful shape, booming without inflation, and any claims to the contrary are fake news. So how can things both be terrific and an emergency calling for drastic action?

Let us not hold our breath waiting for a sensible answer to that question. But yes, he certainly could have gotten any tariff he wanted passed in Congress. But he’s allergic to working with Congress. Yesterday he informed Congress he won’t be spending $4.9 billion in foreign aid Congress had already appropriated. He’s doing this through a rarely used maneuver called a “pocket recission.” The Hill explains,

The Impoundment Control Act (ICA) lays out rules governing the rescissions process. It allows the administration to temporarily withhold funding for 45 days while Congress considers the rescissions request. If lawmakers opt not to approve the request, the funds must be released. 

But a pocket rescission is when the president sends the same type of request to Congress within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The request is made so late that the funding is essentially paused until it runs out at the end of the year regardless of congressional action.

The $4.9 billion was appropriated to the State Department for various peacekeeping-type activities. A portion of it was intended for USAID, which Trump already destroyed. Again, Trump probably could have gotten Congress to review and eliminate this spending had he asked. He would rather just issue possibly unconstitutional orders that courts might overturn than work with a Congress inclined to give him whatever he wants. And this is probably from a combination of laziness and temperament — he gets off on being The Boss.

And I wish people would remember that Trump has never in his life worked within a large multi-level organization that requires coordination and agreement among many departments and managers. The Trump organization is a collection of LLCs. Trump’s management experience is very limited.

Another federal judge yesterday blocked the administration from deporting people without a court hearing. We’ll see if the administration complies.

The country is still reeling from what amounts to a purge of science from the CDC. Since states all have their own laws about vaccines, we’re now in a place where life or death may depend on what state you live in. I’m reading that CVS and Walgreen’s will (or may; it’s confusing) require a prescription from a physician to administer a covid vaccine even if you are over 65. And in some states they may not give you a covid vaccine at all. I haven’t heard anything from Walmart or other chains yet. The updated vaccines are supposed to be available very soon, but good look getting one.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s health department is looking into purchasing Covid-19 vaccines in bulk from manufacturers, Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic. Sargent continues,

Meanwhile, a coalition of mostly-blue states led by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is planning to coordinate on the purchase and distribution of pediatric vaccines, should the federal government restrict access to them, according to a source familiar with ongoing discussions. This will likely include big states like New York and Pennsylvania.

Of course I am worried for my grandsons and my children, especially living in New York City. There is no avoiding crowds there.

David Kurtz at TPM explains what’s going on at the CDC.

For a guy whose political career is largely based on the reality TV one-liner “You’re fired,” President Trump sure had a hard time firing CDC Director Susan Monarez.

What may have confounded the White House, beyond its own ineptitude, is that Monarez is the first Senate-confirmed CDC director ever, as a result of a new post-pandemic law. She serves at the pleasure of the president, not of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is her boss, but has less power over her than if she were a run-of-the-mill political appointee.

Kennedy asked for Monarez’s resignation, and she refused, according to reports. He tried to fire her, and her attorneys said nope, sorry, the president has to fire her. The White House then announced it had fired her, and her attorneys again said nope, sorry, you’re not the president.

As of about 3 pm Thursday afternoon, Trump has not weighed in publicly.  In the meantime, four other CDC officials resigned in protest. They are:

Dr. Debra Houry, the chief medical officer

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases;

Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and

Dr. Jen Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology

I assume Dr. Monarez will be fired eventually. So, in case of another nasty pandemic, we’ve got only RFK the Lesser and his conspiracy theories to protect us. Stock up on masks.

See also Tom Bartlett, “It Looks Like the CDC Is Over,” at The Atlantic. More resignations are expected. But Kennedy doesn’t even talk to the scientists he is supposed to be managing. He doesn’t take their briefings. They have no idea where he gets his “information,” except probably the Web.

The flash point was Lesser’s new restrictions on covid vaccines. It will now be much more difficult for most people under age 65 to get covid vaccines.

The new shots from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax are approved for all seniors. But the Food and Drug Administration narrowed their use for younger adults and children to those with at least one high-risk health condition, such as asthma or obesity. That presents new barriers to access for millions of Americans who would have to prove their risk — and millions more who may want to get vaccinated and suddenly no longer qualify.

Additionally, Pfizer’s vaccine will no longer be available for any child under 5, because the FDA said it was revoking the shot’s emergency authorization for that age group.

Parents will still be able to seek out shots from rival drugmaker Moderna, the other maker of mRNA vaccines, which has full FDA approval for children as young as 6 months. But the company’s Spikevax vaccine is only approved for children with at least one serious health problem.

It’s not clear to me if these restrictions are in effect now, or if they are expected to go into effect when Junior’s hand-picked advisory panel of wackadoos issues the official recommendations, some time in September. If you keep reading the linked PBS piece above, you will find that implementation will probably vary a lot by state. It’s also possible that in some places vaccines will be available to anybody, but if you don’t “quality” you may have to pay for them out of pocket. And it’s not clear how pharmacies are going to screen people; it’s not what they usually do. That has yet to be worked out.

The new updated covid vaccines are expected to be shipped to pharmacies and whoever else dispenses them very soon. If you are under 65 I urge you to go ahead and try to get one as soon as they are available, because nobody seems to know how this is supposed to work. The CVS or Walgreen’s staff may just keep giving shots until they are explicitly told to stop, or until they’ve got a screening system in place.

But in the meantime, we’ve still got a pack of amateurs in charge of national security and defense. Just today there is new reporting that Tulsi Gabbard accidentally revealed the name of an undercover CIA agent in a post on X.

Update: Here’s another new blow to national security. Trump, Gabbard fired top CIA Russia expert days after Alaska summit at WaPo.

See also Did the White House Not Understand What Putin Was Really Offering? at The Atlantic. It strongly gives the impression that neither Trump nor his envoy and chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, have half a clue what they are doing.

Meanwhile, Trump is bragging about the great job he’s doing reducing crime. If you missed Chris Hayes’s riff on this from night before last, do watch.

Greg Sargent has another interview at The New Republic, this time with a journalist and historian named Garrett Graff. Sargent sites something Graff wrote yesterday titled America Tips Into Fascism, which begins.

The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

Sargent’s interview is titled Trump’s Fury Erupts at Many Targets as Expert Fears Worsen. It strikes me that in headlines Trump is perpetually furious and raging and seeking vengeance. That much anger isn’t good for one’s health, you know. I don’t know the man personally, but I wonder if he was always perpetually angry or if this is something that’s taken hold since he’s been in politics. Chronic anger is linked to depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline, some website says. I don’t know that Trump is depressed, but I don’t doubt the anxiety and cognitive decline parts. And the cognitive decline fuels the anxiety. The psychologists will tell you that people turn into control freaks out of fear and insecurity. They need to control their environment and other people to manage their insecurities and fears. The problem for Trump is that his “environment” is now the whole planet.

The whole interview is worth reading, but this part stood out for me.

Graff: Well, it’s not even just political opponents. And this is, I think, an important part of this. It is part and parcel again of this worldview that Trump has brought into office this time where “the state is me”—the old French king line—where it’s not just that Donald Trump doesn’t like being criticized by domestic political opponents. It’s that Donald Trump thinks that he personally and his taste should dictate what is in our museums with his attacks on the Smithsonian. He believes that his taste should dictate what is performed in our theaters with his takeover of the Kennedy Center. He believes that his taste and his personal preferences should dictate what books people should read as we have seen him go after things like the Naval Academy library.

His craziest tweet of the weekend to me was him trying to dictate that Major League Baseball immediately induct Roger Clemens into the Hall of Fame because he played golf with Roger Clemens and, boy, Roger Clemens is just a great guy. This idea that there’s one true vision for America—and it is Donald Trump’s personal vision for what our life and our culture and our society should be—is to me the most clear example of authoritarianism that we could see.

It’s a clear example of authoritarianism and a clear example of narcissism and a clear example of someone with diminished mental capacity trying to pro-actively shape everything within his field of vision into something that feels safe and familiar. It’s why he wants the White House to look more like his Florida country club, for example. Everything must be forced to fit into his shrinking comfort zone.. There must be nothing in museums that upset him, no weird plays or music performed at the Kennedy Center that go over his head. And everybody is supposed to be nice to him. Other people’s anger and disapproval are frightening and threatening to him.

In a sane world, Trump probably would be confined to some kind of extended care community where everything would be familiar and he could be kept under close medical supervision. Instead, a perfect storm of circumstances came together to make him president of the United States.

Probably what terrifies him more than anything else is losing power. If he loses Congress next year, his ability to call the shots will be diminished. And of course he really wants to stay in office for life. Part of him acknowledges that he’s not supposed to be able to serve a third term, but I doubt he genuinely accepts that, deep down. That’s why he’s turned a room in the West Wing into a “merch store” selling “Trump 2028” hats. This is not a joke. Deep down, he wants to believe that he will win another term in 2028. And he’ll stop at nothing to make that happen.

The interview continues:

Graff: Complete surrender on all fronts: in politics, in sports, in culture, in business. Part of my essay today was this insanity of Trump capitalism we have seen in the last couple of weeks where Tim Cook from Apple came to Washington D.C. to hand Donald Trump literal pieces of gold in the Oval Office to curry favor. We’ve seen Donald Trump having the government take 10 percent of Intel over because Donald Trump just believes he should have 10 percent of Intel. Nvidia is paying a literally unconstitutional export tax because Donald Trump decreed that if they wanted to sell chips to China then they had to pay this export tax of 15 percent straight to the U.S. government, which I’m sure somewhere will get laundered around to end up in Donald Trump’s presidential library like all of these other fees and fines. But this is just insanity, and it is nothing like any version of America that we have seen in modern times.

Sargent: And by the way, reinforcing your point are the threats against the media. In two separate rants on Truth Social, Trump said ABC and NBC should have their licenses revoked by the FCC. He also said they should “pay up BIG.” Now, it’s true that Trump is botching things a bit here on the specifics of how FCC licenses work, but still the threatened action is a direct response to criticism of him. He’s explicit about this in the tweets. He says this is about bad stories about him. I just can’t help but notice that there’s a real snowballing here where we’re really seeing Trump get a whole lot more comfortable with making it a lot more explicit—this demand for absolute capitulation on every front.

People and institutions capitulate to him because it’s easier and less messy than standing up to him. If you’ve ever been in a situation in which you have to work with or deal with someone who is, shall we say, psychologically compromised, it can be quite remarkable how quickly everyone around that person adjusts to his or her issues. You’re not really interacting with a human being as much as with a psychiatric condition. But everybody adjusts. Or leaves.

In Trump’s case, the deeper his terror, the more extreme his response. As I said in a post last week, Trump’s approval numbers are so low you’d think there would be no penalty in crossing him. And, politically, there wouldn’t be. But Trump, and whatever True Believers or Opportunists are sticking with him, have the levers of power. And they will be used as Trump’s deteriorating mental and psychological condition demand.

So Trump is going to get worse and more radical until he’s stopped. I don’t know how that’s going to happen. The thing I most don’t want is an armed rebellion. I want to see people and institutions taking back their rightful power and just saying no to him. Until they do, he’s going to demand more and more.

Oh, and all those “second amendment” activists who have been lecturing us for years that the Founders meant for us to be armed for protection against a tyrannical government? That’s historically not true, but they genuinely believe it. They may be about to find out how little armed citizens can do against a fully equipped and trained military.

In other news: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker stands up and says no to Trump. This is a thing of beauty.

See also Dan Froomkin, We have become an authoritarian state, and our top newsrooms are in denial.

And Paul Krugman, In the Matter of Lisa Cook.

This made me laugh. We need to laugh.

Trump declares “people are saying” they’d like a dictator, says Rolling Stone.

Trump was answering questions about his administration’s military takeover of Washington, D.C., which he has said he will likely expand to other cities, including Chicago. “As you know, Chicago is a killing field right now, and they don’t acknowledge it,” the president said, referring to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and other Democrats who don’t want Trump to send troops into the city. “They say, ‘We don’t need him! Freedom! Freedom! He’s a dictator! He’s a dictator!’”

“A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator,” Trump then asserted, before claiming he doesn’t want a dictatorship. “I’m not a dictator,” he said. “I’m a man with common sense and a smart person.”

This is Trump’s way of arguing that he’s not a dictator if he’s ruling like one by popular demand.

By now you’ve probably head that Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been detained again. Trump wants him deported to Uganda. To recap, Abrego Garcia was returned from El Salvador in June to face trial for some dubious charges the DOJ was able to dredge up. While awaiting trial in a Tennessee jail, DoJ lawyers pressured him to take a plea deal or risk being deported again. He refused. He was released three days ago and allowed to go home to Maryland awaiting trial. Then this happened:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has never set foot in Uganda, but President Donald Trump’s administration is currently “processing” his deportation to the East African nation after rearresting him at a mandated check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Abrego Garcia’s renewed detention is the latest escalation by the Trump administration in their campaign against the Maryland father they wrongfully deported to El Salvador earlier this year, before bringing him back to the U.S. to face new charges in Tennessee. 

The arrest was expected given that the Department of Homeland Security had openly stated that it would seek to remove Abrego Garcia should he be let out on bail in the Tennessee case. 

“Today, [DHS Secretary Kristi Noem] announced that ICE arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He will be processed for removal to Uganda,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X.

It’s fairly obvious the DoJ doesn’t think it can get a guilty verdict against him, and that would be a huge embarrassment to Trump. So they have to disappear him again.

And I understand Chicago is next.

Josh Marshall has something to say about the resistance. See No Kings, No Occupations — Toward a Democratic Opposition Politics. Here’s a chunk of it:

Under the American constitutional order, states and localities are entitled to local control of civil policing, administration of elections and various other features of state and local government. President Trump is trying to upend that part of the federal order not because he thinks he can run this or that local government service or administration any better, but to deprive those states and localities of their liberty and right to self-government. Because he wants that power for himself.

I’m making these general points because the opposition to these actions is deeply embedded in American civic culture — citizens’ basic understanding of what they’re entitled to and what they think is right. So shaping political actions explicitly around opposition to it is not only right and merited but the basis of opposition with the best shot at success. Whether one thing or another violates the Posse Comitatus Act is good for lawyers to know for the purposes of wrenching whatever minimum is possible out of a corrupted judiciary. But it’s not the basis of any opposition. And in political terms it’s basically a distraction. Most Americans intuitively know this isn’t the deal on which our government is based and they don’t like it. Again, it’s deeply woven into the fabric of the country’s civic tradition. It wouldn’t become fine just become some dork at the Claremont Institute came up with some over-clever interpretation of law or the Constitution that made it fine. All that is beside the point.

In this sense Trump and his degenerate advisors are doing us a favor by making face masks a part of the standard ICE and CBP uniform. It marks them out as something different. They’re not soldiers precisely. But they are occupiers. They function in the same way. Masks are for secret police and criminal gangs. They have no place in any kind of legitimate policing authority.

These are all the makings of a powerful opposition politics and Democrats must not run away from it. It’s not only critical to the future of American democracy and civic freedom. It could not be more mainstream, something that appeals to a broad range of the American electorate, across race and ethnicities, regions and ideologies.

Trump is un-American. What he’s doing is un-American. That should be easy to understand.

I recommend reading (or listening to) Greg Sargent’s interview of Will Stancil, “a policy researcher and attorney in Minneapolis who’s been a relentless online critic of the Democratic Party’s failure to rise to this moment.” I had never heard of Stencil, but he’s got some interesting things to say. Much of the interview centers on Gavin Newsom’s recent social media counteroffensive.

I think that what Newsom is doing is he’s finally doing what Democrats should have been doing for a decade. There is a singular factor in American politics since probably 2015 or so, and that’s Donald Trump. He’s defined American politics since 2015. And what we have seen, especially since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, is that Democrats have been afraid to talk about it directly. They beat around the bush. They talk about how they want to work with Trump. They talk about how they want to focus on kitchen-table issues, they want to lower prices. They’re afraid of being accused of having Trump derangement syndrome. They’ll be afraid of being accused of focusing on nothing else. They’re afraid of being accused of abandoning the working man.

In the meantime, in the country that I’ve lived in—in the real world—everything has revolved around Trump. Everything has been propelled forward by the choices he’s making, the things he’s done. Even when he’s out of office, this has largely been the case. And so finally, we have a Democrat who seems to have thrown those worries to the wind. He seems to be saying, I don’t care if you think I’m obsessed. It’s worth being obsessed. This is scary stuff. This is a scary man. He’s going to ruin our country. And I’m going to fight him as if I believe that was true. And it’s striking. And what I also think is interesting about it is that it’s working.

See also Tom Nichols, MAGA World Is So Close to Getting It at The Atlantic and Tim Walz being Tim Walz.

Tim Walz: “Think of how easy it would be to be a damn Republican. ‘Oh, what should I wear today? This stupid frickin’ red hat. What should I say today? I don’t know, just make sure it’s cruel. Who do we listen to? That guy — the felon in the White House.'”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 25, 2025 at 12:30 PM

Today the John Bolton raid is getting more media attention than the Ghislaine Maxwell transcript and tapes, which are available online. As Rolling Stone put it, Ghislaine Maxwell understood the assignment. She denied she ever saw Trump do anything inappropriate or non-consensual with women. But she also denied she saw Jeffrey Epstein do anything inappropriate or non-consensual with women of any age. She admits she knows now that Epstein was guilty, but says she didn’t observe him abusing women herself. She only knows what she reads in the papers, in other words. And she denied being Epstein’s procurer. She just found him masseuses. That’s all. Basically, she lied her ass off. But she got her reward, a transfer to Club Fed in Texas.

And the Trumpsters released this work of fiction during the traditional Friday afternoon “document dump” time, possibly hoping no one would read it too closely. The MAGAts have decided the case is now closed, of course. But most people aren’t buying it.

The DoJ also sent a bunch of Epstein files — 33,295 pages — to the House Oversight Committee on Friday. But the New York Times is reporting that nearly all of this material was already public.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the panel, said that of the files the committee had received, only 3 percent contained new information.

The remaining 97 percent of the pages, he said, had information previously released by the Justice Department, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s office.

Among those files were video from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York from the night of Mr. Epstein’s death; Supreme Court filings from Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime associate who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence; a Justice Department inspector general report on Mr. Epstein’s death; and a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director.

So, same old foot dragging.

Also — following up yesterday’s bit about energy costs, see Why utility bills are rapidly rising in some states.