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.

There’s been some guffawing — although not nearly enough — about Donald Trump’s not knowing when the U.S. Civil War ended. But if you listen to what he said, that’s not the only thing he’s ignorant about.

Trump: “If you look at the end of the Civil War — the 1800s, it was a very turbulent time. If you take the end day — was it 1869? Or whatever.” pic.twitter.com/7DaJhePIzD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 27, 2025

If you listen to this, notice that Trump refers to birthright citizenship as a “case.” Does he think birthright citizenship came about because of a court ruling? He doesn’t know the 14th Amendment, obviously, which doesn’t say bleep about the babies of slaves. And if Joe Biden had said something this stupid, he’d have been locked up in an Old Folks’ Home within an hour. But Trump gets a pass. I’d also like someone to look into his theory that the drug cartels are using birthright citizenship to somehow plant their people among us. I have doubts.

I understand the Senate is working overtime to salvage enough of the One Big Ugly Bill to pass it and get it to the House. Here’s a Politico article about stuff that’s changed over the past several hours. My favorite is that “Whaling boat captains in Alaska will be able to deduct more for whale-hunting-related expenses, up to $50,000 from the current $10,000.” Is this to get Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote? Commercial whaling is illegal, btw, but the Inupiat people still hunt whales for food and other resources. But at this point the 900-plus-page bill has got to be such a thrown together mess I doubt anyone knows what’s in it.

TPM reports that the Senate has put some of the stuff the Parliamentarian took out back into the bill, but with revisions. The plan to stop states from taxing Medicaid providers (and then give the taxes back to the states as state benefits, earning more federal dollars) is back in, but implementation is delayed until 2028. So the rural hospitals won’t close until Trump is out of office, I guess.

The fallout from Zohran Mamdani’s first-round win in the Dem NYC mayoral primary continues. Typically, the Dem establishment, which always goes on about unity, is keeping Mamdani and his supporters at arm’s length. As far as I can find out, neither of New York’s senators has endorsed Mamdani. See TPM, The Political World’s Five-Alarm Mamdani Meltdown.

See also Zohran Mamdani’s Win Is the Beginning of the End of the Old Democratic Party by Hamilton Nolan in In These Times. I don’t know if he’s right about the beginning of the end, but I got a kick out of reading it anyway. “The threat of the rich is that they will flee the city,” Nolan writes. “The flaw in their leverage is that almost nobody likes them anyhow.”

New Yorkers are tired of seeing high-rise luxury condo buildings go up all over the city while most working people, including people who make enough money to live comfortably anywhere else, struggle and do without to make rent. Low-income people rent unfurnished basements that flood periodically. And the luxury apartments are often purchased by people who only live there part of the time. It’s somewhere to stay when they’re in New York. So they sit empty. No love lost. But the real-estate people are going to fight like hell to keep Mamdani from becoming mayor.

Before getting to the Big Ugly Bill, this just happened — this morning SCOTUS seriously wounded birthright citizenship. Further, it handed Trump a whole lot of power to further shred the Constitution. The Court didn’t address birthright citizenship directly, but in a 6-3 vote it decided federal courts could not issue universal injunctions. So the injunctions to stop Trump’s denial of birthright citizenship have, as I understand it, suddenly all been canceled. It may be that a court’s injunction could still be in effect in that court’s district, but I’m not yet sure. Anyway, watch ICE start rounding up people who were born here and presumed to be citizens all their lives. This is horrible.

Now, on to the Big Ugly Bill.

As I understand it, the One Big Ugly Bill has been pretty much gutted by the Senate Parliamentarian. The only surprise here is that as of this writing Trump hasn’t tried to fire the Senate Parliamentarian. I’m wondering if he even knows what’s going on with the bill. He’s been obsessed with getting credit as Master of World Peace and Military Brilliance, and also with who leaked the bombing assessment that makes him look bad.  I don’t know if they’ve covered the OBUB on Fox News much. And his staff may be afraid to tell him. So he might not fully appreciate what’s going on.

Yesterday the Parliamentarian stripped out a provision that would have curtailed states from taxing Medicaid providers. And why would states tax Medicaid providers? The taxes collected are returned to the providers in the form of state Medicaid funds, which then earns the state matching funds from the feds. It’s a way to game the system to get more Medicaid money, in other words. Every state but Alaska does this. Crippling the practice would be a handy way to cut Medicaid without explicitly cutting Medicaid. And stopping those matching funds would save the feds about $250 billion. But now it’s out. Some folks are saying that this change alone threatens the survival of OBUB.

This was only one of more than a dozen provisions the Parliamentarian nixed yesterday. And I understand she’s tossed out several more today already. Naturally the dimmer lights in Congress — such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tommy Tuberville —  are screaming furiously and calling for the Parliamentarian’s removal. So far, John Thune is saying he will abide by the Parliamentarian’s decisions. That may change if Trump ever weighs in.

However —  and this is pure speculation — it may be that at least some GOP senators are secretly welcoming the Parliamentarian’s shredding of OBUB. One, the bill is hugely unpopular. A whopping majority of the public doesn’t want it. Two, at least some of the GOP senators seem to realize the bill would have lots of nasty real-world consequences that people would actually notice and blame on them. And it really would create a ruinous dumpster fire of debt.

However, there’s also a lot of speculation in media that the GOP will come together and pass whatever pile of crap the bill has become this weekend, because Trump wants a bill to sign on the 4th of July. This leave them no time for negotiation. Whatever is approved for reconciliation is what the House will have to agree to. I think that’s unlikely, but we’ll see.

In other news —Trump Says He Gave Iran Permission to Bomb U.S. Base in Qatar and…Well, Mostly Crickets?

The first-round result of the New York City Dem primary certainly is welcome news. This is from the New York Times:

With NYC’s ranked choice system it’s still possible for Mamdani to lose the nomination.  Since he fell short of 50 percent,  there will be another round of vote counting.  Next week the least-popular first choice winner will be eliminated, and the second-rank choice on those ballots will be counted as firsts. The rounds continue until somebody gets more than 50 percent, or until there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. But if I were Mamdani I’d be feeling pretty good about my chances now.

The Republican nominee is Curtis Sliwa, of “Guardian Angels” fame, who ran unopposed. I have a hard time believing he can win a general election in New York City. He’s too much like Trump. Just a right-wing blowhard.

But it’s especially satisfying that Cuomo got significant top Democratic Party endorsements and way more money and he still couldn’t close the deal.

See Democratic Leaders Tried to Crush Zohran Mamdani. They Should Have Been Taking Notes. by Rebecca Kirszner Katz at the New York Times. The Democratic Party continues “to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices,” she writes, in favor of the Same Old Centrism that has been losing for them since forever.

Since their losses last fall, Democrats have obsessed over how to reverse their declining fortunes. By and large, the consensus has been that we need candidates with a sharp economic argument that can connect with young people, men, voters of color and the working class.

In the New York City mayoral race we got a candidate who checked many of those boxes: Mr. Mamdani.

My media consulting firm made ads for Mr. Mamdani, so maybe I’m a bit biased. But whether you agree with him on the issues or not, it’s clear from early results — and Mr. Cuomo’s stunning concession Tuesday night — that he succeeded. The race may not be called until next week, and the general election isn’t until November, but Mr. Mamdani indisputably managed to leap from obscurity to front-runner in mere months. He did so by staying relentlessly on message and grounding that message in affordability. Ask an Andrew Cuomo voter for some of his top policy ideas, and he or she will probably struggle to name one. Ask a Mamdani voter, and I bet he or she could name a few: “Freeze the rent,” “free buses,” “a city you can afford.”

For that matter, if you asked New Yorkers what Cuomo accomplished in his ten bleeping years as governor, you’d mostly get mumbles and head scratches. And he had to resign in disgrace. Yet as soon as he announced he was running for mayor, the Dem establishment got in line with money and endorsements and by all accounts was “terrified” by the possibility of a Mamdani win. What is wrong with these people? 

See also Nate Silver, Zohran delivered the Democratic establishment the thrashing it deserved.

There’s a legitimate worry that, if elected, Mamdani would fail to deliver on all his promises. Some of them will be a heavy lift, I think. But campaigning on nothing but empty pledges to “work for you” isn’t inspiring people that much.

In other news: The One Big Beautiful Bill is still stalled. Over the past few days the Senate parliamentarian has been taking lots of stuff out of it that failed to meet the “reconciliation” rules, which I believe I predicted. And which most of those Republican senators must have known would happen also.

Sarah Posner writes at Talking Points Memo,

Public support for the One Big Beautiful Bill is remarkably underwater by double digits in multiple polls, NBC reports. Similarly, bombing Iran is not popular, Greg Sargent explains at The New Republic. An analysis last week by the Pew Research Center found respondents had “mixed to negative views” on Trump’s immigration policies. The least popular actions, with the public disapproving by nine or more percentage points, were ICE raids at workplaces (-9%), building more detention facilities (-12%), ending Temporary Protected Status (-20%), suspending asylum applications (-21%), and deporting people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador (-24%).

This morning headlines that were not about the New York mayoral race were about the intelligence assessment that said Trump’s bombing set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. Naturally the administration is on the warpath to find out who leaked. And Trump is making The Usual Fool out of himself by insisting to anyone who will listen that his bombings were a brilliant military achievement comparable to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that “stopped the war.”

So yesterday evening Trump announced a cease fire with great exuberance and way too many exclamation points on Truth Social. And in a phone interview he confidently predicted the ceasefire would last forever.

“I think the ceasefire is unlimited. It’s going to go forever,” Trump said in a phone interview.

Asked whether the war was completely over, Trump said: “Yes. I don’t believe they will ever be shooting at each other again.”

Forever didn’t last long.

President Donald Trump said that he is “not happy” that Israel fired fresh rockets at Iran, adding that he is also displeased with Iran. He said today that he believed both sides violated the ceasefire, adding in a post on social media afterward that the truce remains in effect.

How can it be “in effect” if the two sides are still firing missiles at each other?

But soon after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday morning that Israel had accepted Trump’s plan, the Israeli military said it had identified a missile launched from Iran toward its territory—and vowed to launch new strikes in response.

Iran denied firing a missile after the ceasefire began but warned that it would give a “decisive and regretful response” if Israel resumed its attacks.

Outside the White House on Tuesday morning, a visibly angry Trump ranted against “gutless” and “loser” TV news networks and said he was unhappy with both Israel and Iran. His frustration, however, was especially directed at Israel, which he said needed to “calm down.”

Some poor sap in the House had already nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize because of the Great Ceasefire Deal. The Nobel Committee may be less than impressed.

But Trump always way underestimates how difficult long-standing problems are to solve. I mean, Nobody knew health care was so complicated, right?