I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.
- Garrett Graff, "Slouching Towards Fascism"
This week's featured post is "Lysenkoism Comes to America".
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. There are a number of developments to note in the next section. But one interesting general trend is the increasingly willingness of publications that lean left to say explicitly what's going on. This week in The Guardian Jonathan Freedland wrote "Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode". Under a photoshopped image of Trump as Chairman Mao, Callum Jones wrote "Chairman Trump: has the US turned its back on free-market capitalism?."In Mother Jones, Garrett Graff wrote "Slouching Towards Fascism".
- Climate change. Summer in Europe isn't what it used to be. If a major Atlantic current changes, winter may never be the same either.
- Gaza. While the Israeli genocide continues, the Trump administration is picturing a fanciful reconstruction that depends on "at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls 'voluntary' departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction."
- Ukraine. Same old, same old. The war continues, both on the front lines and in the bombing of Ukrainian civilians.
The Trump vision of Future Gaza has to be seen to be believed.
This week's developments
Blue cities resist military occupation
National Democrats have been slow to mobilize against the National Guard going to Washington D.C. Trump justified his takeover of the city's police department by citing crime, which has been going down in recent years and is not as bad in DC as it is in red-state cities like Memphis or Little Rock. But crime is still a problem. Couple that with the number of times Democrats have been successfully smeared as "soft on crime", and it makes leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries gunshy.
But last Monday, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker [text, video] responded to reports that Trump was planning a similar occupation of Chicago with proper defiance.
Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, "Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?" Instead, I say, "Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here."
Pritzker rejected the whole notion that Trump's effort to occupy Democratic cities had something to do with crime. If Trump were serious about combating crime, he would not be "defunding the police".
He would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.
A president who actually cared about urban crime would be asking local officials what they need.
If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?
Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.
Pritzker made his speech flanked not just by his political allies, but by business, religious, and educational leaders of Chicago.
So far it seems to be working. The administration has subsequently announced plans to increase the ICE presence in Chicago, but is no longer talking about a complete takeover.
Pritzker did not just play the victim here; he threatened to strike back.
Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.
This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.
You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.
I am reminded of Boris Yelstin's response to the 1991 Soviet coup. At that time he was president of the Russian Republic of the USSR, and was armed with nothing but the dubious prestige of his office. But when tanks came to the center of government in Moscow, he stood on one of them and gave a speech pledging not just to end this coup but to hold its perpetrators to account. And he did.
This is a time to trust the perceptions of the American people. Democrats should tell it like it is, and not soft-pedal what is going on.
And finally, I want to call mainstream journalism out for its malfeasance. If you covered this speech as Pritzker positioning himself for 2028, you are part of the problem. America is facing a test of whether it can survive as a democratic republic. The 2028 horserace is a minor subplot, not the main story.
TPM calls attention to the inconsistency of sending troops because DC had become a "hellscape", after refusing to let the District spend $1 billion of its own money.
But before Trump reached for the old D.C. standbys to justify his occupation, he and his Republican allies in Congress did everything they could to weaken the district earlier this spring. They used the district’s lack of true self-governance to withhold over $1 billion of its own money, paid by its own taxpayers, in the middle of the fiscal year.
Other steps toward and away from authoritarianism
The big news this week was that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Court of International Trade that Trump's reciprocal tariffs -- which constitute most of Trump's tariffs -- are illegal.
The tariffs will remain in place pending the Supreme Court appeal that is surely coming.
The argument against the legality of the tariffs is fairly simple: Tariffs are taxes, and the Constitution assigns the taxation power to Congress, not the president. Congress can on occasion delegate that power, but the emergency laws Trump is invoking do not specifically mention tariffs. So Trump has no such power.
Unfortunately, the ruling is not unanimous, which means that four of the 11 judges thought there was enough wiggle room in the text to let Trump proceed. (The emergency law allows him to "regulate" foreign trade, which Congress might have intended to include tariffs.) That view is a stretch, but the Supreme Court's partisan Republican majority has been willing to stretch the law for Trump before. (After their immunity ruling, I have lost all faith in their objectivity.)
An interesting feature of the ruling is that it invokes the "major questions doctrine", which the Supreme Court created out of whole cloth in 2000, and greatly expanded so that it could strike down things President Biden did, like cancel student debt. SCOTUSblog defines that doctrine as "the idea that if Congress wants to give an administrative agency the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must say so clearly".
Trump's reciprocal tariffs are reorganizing the world economic order. Their significance dwarfs Biden's student-debt relief. If the Court thinks that big a power can be hidden inside a speculative interpretation of "regulate", then Justice Jackson is right: They are playing Calvinball.
The WaPo points out a simple fix if the tariffs are as important as Trump says: Go to Congress to get the power that the appeals court said you don't have.
It's a sign of the times that Trump's attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook is not the week's biggest story. The Supreme Court has upheld an extreme view of unitary executive theory that has allowed Trump to fire officials previously thought to be beyond his reach, like the heads of independent agencies established by Congress. However, the Court explicitly exempted Fed governors from that ruling, so they can't be fired at will.
So Trump is attempting to fire Cook for cause, citing an accusation that she claimed two homes simultaneously as her primary residence. If Court allows this, the Fed exemption becomes meaningless: If "cause" is whatever the President thinks is a cause, then he can make up something against anyone, and essentially fire them at will.
An executive order issued last Monday instructs the Secretary of Defense to create a "quick reaction force" of National Guardsmen who could be deployed to any state to "quell civil disturbances". It sounds like a way to use troops to put down peaceful protests against Trump.
Trump informed Congress that he won't be spending $4.9 billion that Congress appropriated for foreign aid. He's taking advantage of a loophole in the law known as a "pocket rescission".
The Impoundment Control Act (ICA) lays out rules governing that process and allows the administration to temporarily withhold funding for 45 days while Congress considers the request. If lawmakers opt not to approve the request, the funds must be released. A pocket rescission would see the president send 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.
In general, Trump sees congressional appropriations as a ceiling on government spending, not a floor. There are some situations where this view makes sense and others where it doesn't. If, say, Congress appropriated $100 million for a new bridge and the administration managed to get it built for $90 million, it would be silly to object. But if the administration decides to save the whole $100 million by not building the bridge at all, that seems like a usurpation of power.
No president has used the pocket rescission in 50 years, and it throws yet another wrench into Congress' efforts to fund the government when the new fiscal year starts on October 1. Typically, the last negotiations on a spending package are between the two parties: I'll support your project if you support mine. But all that goes out the window if Trump can decide to spend the money on the Republican projects, but not the Democratic ones.
The redistricting wars have moved on to Missouri.
Alligator Alcatraz, Florida's immigrant gulag in the Everglades, is shutting down with a major loss for the state.
US District Judge Kathleen Williams denied requests to pause her order to wind down operations, after agreeing last week with environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe that the state and federal defendants didn’t follow federal law requiring an environmental review for the detention center in the middle of sensitive wetlands.
and the CDC
The decapitation of the CDC was covered in the featured post.
and you also might be interested in ...
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to China this week, attending the Shanghai Cooperation Summit, along with Russia's Vladimir Putin and several other leaders. For years, US diplomacy has tried to position India as a fellow democracy in competition with China, and India has tried to appeal to US businesses as an alternative to Chinese factories. But Trump's tariffs have changed all that. The NYT reports:
President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs landed like a declaration of economic war on India, undercutting enormous investments made by American companies to hedge their dependency on China.
Unofficial reports say Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa will not seek reelection next year. Iowa Democrats have a prime candidate to run for the now-apparently-open seat: Josh Turek, who has won a seat in the legislature twice in a very red district.
Ernst' decision may have something to do with Democrat Catelin Drey flipping an Iowa state senate seat in a very red district in a special election held Tuesday.
and let's close with something far out
If you want to get away from the stress of everyday life, you need only look up. Well, assuming you have billions of dollars of equipment. Here, the Hubble telescope looks at the Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation, formations of gas and dust that are in the process of creating new stars.
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