"It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held"

 

An Iconic Transformation

It was dark and cold when I first spotted him, sitting serenely, bathed in soft light. The statue of Abraham Lincoln at his memorial in Washington, D.C., sits 19 feet tall and weighs 120 tons — a white marble monument dedicated to one of the nation’s most intelligent, eloquent, and moral presidents. I hadn’t come to gaze upon Lincoln but at the reflecting pool that bears his name. It’s been transformed into a different kind of landmark by the inane, inarticulate, and completely immoral man who now holds that same office Lincoln did.

Donald Trump wants to remake the landscape of Washington D.C., tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a monstrosity of a ballroom; adding his name to the Kennedy Center or demolishing it if he can’t; and installing a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal Arch” that will “house … large numbers of drones, plus snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” This past weekend, the administration even defied a judge’s order and ripped up 430 mature trees at East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal course in southeastern Washington that Trump wants to refashion into a championship-level course, like those of his personal properties.

Trump’s rehabilitation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — planned to be complete for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4 — should have been the easiest lift of his planned remodel of the nation’s capital. But it quickly became a monument to failure.

Back in April, Trump said adding a bargain-priced “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” in “American flag blue” to the reflecting pool would leave it looking “gorgeous, beautiful” and would “last for 40 or 50 years.” Instead, the renovation — awarded via a no-bid contract and announced as America 250 festivities on the National Mall approached — started to fail within days. This was followed by a bright green algae bloom and finally a catastrophic lining failure that saw Trump’s chosen coating blister, peel, and then separate from the concrete.

When I visited, the only water in the iconic national landmark — which Martin Luther King Jr. overlooked as he made his historic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — was a stagnant puddle that stretched out toward a mass of rotting leaves, a motley collection of plastic beverage bottles, a silver-and-blue aluminum can of RAIN spring water, and a pair of heavy-duty spray bottles often used for commercial cleaning chemicals.

Nested Failures

What I witnessed was emblematic of a White House far out of its depth and completely overwhelmed by disasters — large and small — of its own making. From Washington, D.C., to the Middle East, the Trump administration has been humiliated. It’s a disaster wrapped in fiascos inside a swirling catastrophe, to riff off Winston Churchill’s famed line. These nested failures are legion. The attack on the elementary school in Minab — which killed more than 150 people, most of them children — within the larger failure of the Iran war. The extrajudicial executions of defenseless, shipwrecked survivors within the murderous boat strike campaign. The killings of unarmed people by federal immigration agents and deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody during the larger administration project of anti-immigrant cruelty.

The brutal deportation operations have spawned endless wrongdoing: military occupations of American cities; the arrest and detention of American citizens, the heartless expulsions to third countries; the shootings and beatings of protesters and immigrants, the targeting of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; the swirl of corruption allegations around then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; and on and on.

Then there is the debasing of democracy and the undercutting of the rule of law through politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department; turning federal law enforcement into a presidential goon squad; gutting of civil rights protections; targeting of political opponents; relentless attacks on the independent judiciary; executive overreach; and the pardoning or commuting of the prison sentences of insurrectionists.

Other scandals and revelations of wrongdoing have been legion: the failure to release the full Epstein files; the settling of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS; the floating of the “anti-weaponization” fund; the cover-up of the U.S. death toll of the Iran war; Signal-gate; the $400 million Qatari jumbo jet that turned into a security liability; crypto-grifting; quid pro quo tariff reductions; brazen self-dealing; and reckless actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which could result in more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030 — including approximately 4.5 million deaths of children under 5 — all to save Americans about 17 cents per day.

A Presidential Crime Scene

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — dry and barren behind a bevy of barricades — looked to me like an open-air prison. At its head, the west end by the Lincoln Memorial, several black metal crowd-control fences and a similar lone orange metal barrier guarded two layers of chain-link fencing. The rest of the perimeter was hidden behind a single layer of metal fencing supplied by National Rent-A-Fence.

Some of the fencing — which stretched a little less than a mile — was covered in a dark mesh screen that hid the waterless pool. In other areas, the fabric had fallen or was torn down and lay in unsightly heaps. Closer to the east end, one small section of fence lay on the ground — a crumpled mess of metal mesh, poles akimbo, looking like a victim at a crime scene — behind a wall of yellow tape: 27 crisscrossed strands reading “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Beyond that, where the water should have been reflecting the rays of the rising sun, pickup trucks rolled through and workers slowly paced, nodded their heads, and stared out on the hardscape, as if waiting for a factory whistle to sound.

In the face of this fiasco, Trump — as always playing the victim and blaming perceived enemies for his shortcomings — has repeatedly claimed knife-wielding vandals slashed the pool’s liner. Several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, were arrested and charged with felonies and misdemeanors, but those cases fell apart. The Interior Department provided documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” 

The Justice Department also called it a “rushed and botched installation” and in July dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the monument. On October 1, a judge said federal prosecutors cannot refile charges against Hearn. But just last week, Trump was still pushing the lies. “We had vandalism there,” he told the press. “Only sick people do that, and we have their pictures.” Not far from Lincoln’s statue, the administration offered up these same excuses, complete with Trump’s “filthy dirty” language and vandalism falsehoods. A lone laminated sheet of paper affixed to the fencing read:

The National Park Service staff and contractors are repairing areas damaged by vandals and completing a historic effort to clean, fix, and beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Since 1922, prior administrations have neglected this iconic national landmark, evidenced most recently by more than half of the pool’s pipes being clogged and the sidewalks and granite coping stones being filthy dirty. The Reflecting Pool will remain drained while this work proceeds so that it can truly reflect the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital.

Last week, Atlantic Industrial Coatings announced on its website that: “All warranty repairs were completed Friday, 10/2/2026!” The company added: “It has been an honor to serve our great nation!” Trump followed by claiming that the reflecting pool re-do was nearly finished. “I think they’re gonna fill it up this week,” he said on October 6. “The Reflecting Pool is totally complete.”

The National Park Service did not respond to numerous detailed questions from The Intercept about the work by Atlantic Industrial Coatings and whether the pipes were completely unclogged and the granite completely clean. Atlantic Industrial Coatings also failed to respond to questions.

On Monday, a new sign appeared on the fencing as water began flowing back into pool. “The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being refilled as the National Park Service and contractors put the final touches on a historic effort to clean, repair, and beautify this iconic national landmark,” read a sign without any attribution. It also contained a caveat: “As part of the normal refilling process, the water may temporarily appear cloudy before clearing.”

Whether the Reflecting Pool will again stand as a fitting reflection of “the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital,” or suffer another catastrophe that leaves it looking like an eyesore, it is symptomatic of the larger issue of unforced errors heaped upon failures which the Trump administration is powerless to fix and can only sometimes, after multiple attempts, contain. It has become a pitiful, helpless giant, unable to achieve even its most modest goals with the power to do little more than spew out misinformation; cloak misdeeds in secrecy; undermine, sabotage, and destroy government institutions; and unleash pain on the most vulnerable and defenseless, like school children in Iran and undocumented immigrants in America.

With Malice Toward All

Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption but instead supercharged it and managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency. In late August, Trump took to Truth Social to claim he was “six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln” — a reference to a poll of present-day Republicans, of whom 53 percent said the president they most admire is Trump, compared to 8 percent who named Lincoln. That same month, he ranked himself above Lincoln and all other presidents. It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held.

Whether Lincoln could have imagined a president as depraved as Trump is unknowable but he did fear, in his own time “something of ill-omen, amongst us … the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” He couldn’t have anticipated the boat strikes, the term human trafficking victim, or the fact that the U.S. might kill the latter during the former, but in that same 1838 speech — when he was just 28 years old — he understood the perils of such summary executions, noting “when men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer.”

Trump is, however, content to kill without compunction and even recently appeared to invite the nuclear annihilation of Los Angeles and San Diego, although it’s increasingly impossible to divine meaning from Trump’s incoherent ramblings. (He has, though, threatened both cities in the past, deploying troops to LA and threatening to do so in San Diego.) Even Lincoln’s armies — turning to “total war” to end a long, brutal, and costly civil war — did not annihilate the South and decimate its people. And at its close, he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” with words Trump would choke on: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Lincoln did not believe that the U.S. could be felled by a foreign power but did foresee the possibility of America sealing its own fate. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in that 1838 speech. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” The reelection of a craven criminal who sought to subvert what remains of democracy in America certainly appears to be more than a mere cry for help. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855. Some 171 years later, it may well be complete.

The suffering meted out by Trump has been immense. And his penchant for failure may now be his essential quality. He may ultimately be remembered for turning a reckless military “excursion” into a forever-war failure or as the most debased reprobate to hold the office of the presidency. But Trump’s micro-mismanagement of a local construction project that turned a functioning national monument into a fenced-off blight might be his most illustrative disappointment: a small failure of epic proportions and, in some way, a sorry reflection on all Americans.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.  CounterPunch

 

Make America protect children again: EPA’s silence betrays the MAHA promise (by Jean-Marie Kauth)

More than a year ago, members of Environmental Protection Agency’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, on which I serve, were asked to help bring the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda to fruition. With a few important caveats, the first MAHA report laid out an argument most of us have been making for years — and who could argue with the desire to protect our children’s health?

Despite that agreement, as of this writing, the Trump administration has failed to actualize this bipartisan mission.

The Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee is the one committee that advises the EPA on how to protect our children from environmental health threats. Under the current administration, however, the committee has not been reconvened since that August 2025 meeting. New members should have been named by March, but those of us who would normally resume work have heard nothing. Previously, the committee successfully provided advice on how to protect children from hazards like take-home pesticide exposures, climate change and plastics. Now, it is utterly silent. 

Late last month, more than 70 children’s environmental health leaders, experts and organizations, including former members of the committee, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin calling on him to fulfill the agency’s statutory obligations and scientific mandate by appointing “scientifically credible, varied, and balanced expert viewpoints so it is capable of continuing the important mission to protect children’s health.” In that letter, we argue that the lapse of this important committee is inconsistent with the administration’s MAHA agenda.

As MAHA grows unhappier by the day, as promises are broken and ambitions go unfulfilled, a vacant Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee is yet another example of how this administration is abdicating its responsibility to protect our nation’s kids. 

Tragically, it is far too late for my own brilliant, beautiful child. Katherine died a slow, agonizing death at age eight from leukemia. We attribute Katherine’s cancer to unwitting exposure to the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos. The first move of Trump’s first EPA was to do away with a ban on this chemical.

My beloved daughter’s story is not singular, but it is representative. So many parents have seen their children similarly sicken, and many others worry that what their children eat, drink, breathe or touch will result in ill health or even death. They are right to worry. 

The Public Health community seems increasingly receptive to joining together with MAHA on shared concerns. The first MAHA report correctly identifies that 40 percent of American children suffer from a chronic illness, and appropriately lays the blame on toxic products and pollution — along with corporate interference in our political processes. 

Like many MAHA moms, I have learned about the failings of our regulatory systems through personal experience. In deciphering links between illness and exposures to chlorpyrifos sprayed for mosquitoes, I unraveled a vast body of peer-reviewed literature linking most of the increase in chronic illnesses to widespread contamination with pesticides, PFAS, plastics and the more than 350,000 synthetic chemicals in production today. 

One theme that emerged as I interviewed families and experts for my new book, “Poisoning Our Children: How Petrochemicals Imperil Every Life on Earth,” is how parents are often shamed and blamed for their children’s illnesses.

Yet it is becoming nearly impossible to maintain health given the contaminated and degraded surroundings in which we are all immersed from conception onward. And our regulatory agencies have done precious little to prevent this. 

Many believe that the EPA must protect their children from these chemicals, but they do not realize how harmful industries have insidiously dismantled commonsense protections by infiltrating these institutions. Parents across the political spectrum are now seeing this with their own eyes, and they want our political representatives to do something about it. That is their job — to safeguard the nation’s children and support their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

If we say we love our children, we should not be poisoning them. Most parents, regardless of political affiliation, are concerned about the same thing: threats to their children’s health and future. Most parents love their children deeply and are ready to challenge institutions and change systems to protect them. 

If the EPA under the current administration will not act to protect children, parents should vote to oust the treacherous perpetrators of widespread poisoning from their positions of power. 

Jean-Marie Kauth, Ph.D., MPH, is a professor at Benedictine University and serves on the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee to the Environmental Protection Agency. Her new book, “Poisoning Our Children,” is due out from Johns Hopkins University Press in February 2027.  Tags children's health Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee Environmental Protection Agency EPA maha Make America Healthy Again

What happened to MAHA?

 

Trump's Illogic by Robert Hanna, Glen Brown, and Jancie Gindel

 

…Ever since his election as US President in 2016, and especially in view of Trump’s decisive popular-vote and Electoral College victory in the 2024 US Presidential election campaign, it has become self-evident that he is self-consciously operating with a highly deviant, highly devious, sophistical logic that is in fact in violation of the minimal law of non-contradiction.

This logic was fully on display, for example, during the first presidential candidates’ debate with Kamala Harris, as per the image at the top of this essay, but also throughout the seemingly endless campaign. I call Trump’s logic, the logic of mindfuck. The logic of mindfuck has two basic principles.

First, the principle of alt-facts: you can assert or deny (or assert and deny) any statement whatsoever, in any context, as desired. These assertions or denials are called “alternative facts” or “alt-facts” (CNN/Conway, 2017). According to Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is speech that systematically manifests a blatant disregard for truth, alongside a pretended concern for truth (Frankfurt, 1988). Therefore, by virtue of the principle of alt-facts, basically everything Trump asserts is bullshit.

More generally, the purpose of the principle of alt-facts is to mess with the mind of anyone who cares about truth, and therefore sharply disagrees with Trump — whom he then calls “creators of FAKE NEWS.”

Second, the principle of unrestricted entailment: you can infer any and every statement from any and every other statement, as desired. So, by virtue of the principle of unrestricted entailment, Trump is not merely a truth-hater but also a logical nihilist.

The purpose of the principle of unrestricted entailment is to mess with the mind of anyone who cares about logic and (minimal) consistency, and therefore sharply disagrees with Trump — whom he then calls “COMMUNISTS” or “LIARS.”

As rational human animals, we’re not only rationally obligated but also morally obligated to care about truth and logic (Hanna, 2006b). Therefore, as rational human animals, we’re not only rationally but also morally obligated to identify, criticize, and reject illogical Trumpism and Trump’s logic of mindfuck; and this is particularly important and indeed urgent now that Trump and his Republican myrmidons have been enabled by a substantial democratic majority for another four years.… 

-Robert Hanna

Trump, Truth, and Logic.. By Robert Hanna | by Mr Nemo | Medium

So, why do some people support this moronic, lying, illogical scoundrel? 

According to neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, “Some people support him out of ignorance. Basically, they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand.”

Consider when he still redundantly states the 2020 election was stolen, and they simply take his word for it. This is called “The Dunning-Kruger Effect. [In other words], the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed, which creates a double burden [for them]. Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise [or knowledge and intelligence].”

As psychologist David Dunning wrote in an op-ed for Politico years ago, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to [understand an issue at hand] are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is [unwitting] — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains [completely oblivious] and is [incapable of understanding complex issues]. This includes political judgment: These people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are correct [without the use of logic, inferential and divergent thinking, analysis, synthesis, common sense, evidence and facts].”

Moreover, why do MAGA politicians still support fallacious Trump? They want to hold on to their power, despite the consequential destruction of our democracy and the Constitution. There are also people who continue to support him because of their selfish greed. Why did they vote for him a second time? When he was in office, their idiotic rejoinder was usually “It’s the economy.” [And what has he done to the economy today?]. Of course, Trump and his cohorts do not care about millions of people who suffer while he continues to abet the American oligarchy. 

On the other hand, there are those who still support irrational Trump and choose to ignore his seditious and treacherous behavior, his reprehensible ignorance, egregious incompetence, intentional maliciousness, anti-social personality disorder, pathological narcissism, psychopathic dominance, impulsivity, remorselessness, cheating and lying. 

One can assume they continue to support his absurdity today because of their own illogic, xenophobia, fear, resentment, racism, hatred, anxiety, insecurity, avarice, credulousness, submissiveness, powerlessness, and indifference. 

September 29, 2020

-Glen Brown

 glen brown: Telltale signs of Trump’s pathological lying

Trump's betrayal over Starlink undermines Ukrainian defense

 

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he feels personally betrayed by Donald Trump after it emerged that Ukraine’s military has had its access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite squeezed, raising doubts about long-term US support for Kyiv. The Ukrainian president, on a visit to London, accused Trump of picking the other side after more than four years of war, risking a breakdown in relations already strained by the US agreeing to buy diesel from Moscow.

Ahead of a meeting with prime minister Andy Burnham in Downing Street, Zelenskyy appeared in a TV interview where he was asked whether the sudden restriction of Starlink was deliberate and if he felt betrayed by Trump. “Really, yes … but it’s a little bit more complicated ⁠than just my emotions or my feelings,” the Ukrainian president replied, adding: “It’s a pity that we are losing, we are losing a strong partner.”

Overnight, Ukraine’s military reported that, without explanation, the Starlink satellite communications system, produced by Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, was no longer working at speeds greater than 100mph. That effectively rendered most of the drones used by Ukraine to strike behind the frontlines inoperable – and it later emerged, affected the most effective air defence system to stop Russian jet-powered attack drones bombing Kyiv.

“I am sure they knew what they did, absolutely. Because it was 1am at night, Starlink was blocked by SpaceX and the United States,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Piers Morgan. “This decision will bring a lot of human losses … of course, people will die.”

The sudden outage came as Russia launched ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from the US for a second night. For years, the US has provided Ukraine with intelligence when strikes were about to take place.

Trump denied that his administration had cut intelligence sharing on Tuesday, but Zelenskyy said in an interview with US broadcaster NPR, aired on Wednesday, that military advisers had received threats from the US that intelligence sharing could be limited in the future. [He] has demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian oil refineries, which he has blamed for the high cost of diesel, although most analysts say the closure of the strait of Hormuz after the US-Israel attack on Iran has had a far larger impact on global energy prices.

The two leaders fell out in the spring of 2025 during a disastrous visit by Zelenskyy to the Oval Office, where the US president said: “You don’t have the cards” to win the war. The row was followed by a brief pause in intelligence sharing and a desperate scramble by European allies to calm the row.

Burnham met Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Wednesday, hours after he promised MPs that the Ukrainian president “would not leave empty-handed” and that he had tasked officials with drawing up further sanctions and options for speeding up military aid.

As the pair met at No 10, he promised that Britain’s support for Ukraine would remain constant. “You have seen the solidarity and the support you have got from everybody here in Britain. We are behind you and that will not change,” he said. Zelenskyy had met King Charles in Buckingham Palace earlier on Wednesday. In brief remarks to reporters, Zelenskyy said he hoped to raise access to Starlink and intelligence sharing in his meeting with the British prime minister.

Burnham pledged that he would accelerate the supply of British lightweight multi-role missiles to Ukraine, which the country uses to counter Russian drone strikes and said they were looking for “all possible avenues” of further support. The prime minister also said he was prepared to discuss the ceasefire proposed by Trump on attacks on energy infrastructure but acknowledged that Moscow had not abided by it. “Sadly, what we have seen from Russia is further attacks on critical national infrastructure in Ukraine,” he said.

Earlier Burnham told MPs at PMQs that he wanted to be “careful” about potential criticism of Trump that might risk exacerbating tensions, saying he was “laying the ground” for a reconciliation: “I will listen to President Zelenskyy carefully, but he won’t be going away from Britain today empty-handed.” The UK is also set to give £17m in funding towards repairs to the protective roof over the destroyed Chornobyl nuclear power plant which was damaged by Russian drone strike last year.

The meeting, which lasted just over an hour, began as Burnham greeted Zelenskyy with a hug on Downing Street, before the pair walked to the door of No 10 and posed for photographs, flanked by Irish Guards in full ceremonial uniform. Musk said the decision to curtail Starlink was not one made by him. The communications system is not directly licensed to clients who are using weapons, and the Ukrainian military was linked to a related network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” Musk said, referring to Trump. Terminals travelling at more than 100mph and using a version of Starlink for the military and other national security agencies suddenly lost connectivity, said Serhiy Beskrestnov, an adviser on military technology to Zelenskyy, in what appeared to be a targeted outage meant to disrupt military operations.

“Our armed forces did not receive a warning about these restrictions, and this led to the failure of a number of missions,” said Beskrestnov, who is also a popular military blogger. “It’s clear that this action cannot be a coincidence and is connected to the current political situation.”

Limiting Starlink’s access speeds would have a significant effect on Ukraine’s air defences because it is being used, according to Beskrestnov, in “the most current effective solution”: interceptors that target the jet-powered Shahed drones now deployed in large numbers to bomb Ukraine. 

“With their actions, our partners are depriving us of one of the few chances we have to defend ourselves,” he added in a follow-up post. Shahed interception rates had already dropped from more than 90% to about 60% when Russia upgraded its engines to jet power in the early summer.

It also complicates Ukraine’s use of medium-range, mid-strike drones for hitting targets in its territories occupied by Russia. But ironically, it would have no impact on Ukraine’s deep strike bombing of oil refineries because Kyiv is banned from using Starlink to hit targets inside of Russia.

Russia carried out a massive strike against Ukrainian energy infrastructure late on Tuesday evening, Zelenskyy said, launching 39 ballistic missiles and 120 attack drones against Kyiv and Kharkiv. The strikes hit five big power plants, key substations and other infrastructure that sustains major cities including Kyiv. At least 600,000 people were now without power, he said, adding that outages could become more widespread.

Trump last week announced an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine that has not been confirmed. Zelenskyy said he had not heard of the deal until Trump announced it on his Truth Social site, and the Kremlin on Wednesday claimed it was abiding by the ceasefire because Trump had not specified which energy infrastructure it included. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, told reporters: “The energy truce proposed by Trump was not specified in detail, so it cannot be claimed that Russia is failing to observe it.”

-Martin Belam, The Guardian

"Congress must fully assert itself as the primary branch of the federal government"

 

As scholars of democracy, we are watching America’s warning signs flash red. We expect America’s long-building constitutional crisis to soon escalate. Earlier this year, we hosted a national workshop to assess the threats facing our society in the months leading up to and following the November midterm elections. We also studied the preparations of American social movements, communities and institutions to meet those threats.

Our basic goals were straightforward. Every qualified voter should be able to vote and have that vote counted. We must head off and block political violence. Duly certified winners should be able to take office without obstruction.

One product of that workshop, published this fall and signed by dozens of scholars, is “The American Crisis” report. “The American Crisis” analyzes the likelihood of the administration thwarting electoral due process, escalating military and paramilitary occupations of U.S. cities, and other emerging threats that would worsen any electoral, constitutional or military crisis.

It’s not hard to see the shape of what may come. In the weeks preceding Election Day, we anticipate that election administration responsibilities could be seized from states and cities and attempts made to disrupt, sabotage or otherwise capture their administrative powers.

Alongside this, we see a high risk of dangerous physical escalation in our streets. Federal military forces are being deployed domestically without the consent of American cities and states. These federal deployments are often coupled with a rhetoric that treats communities as territories to be occupied and controlled rather than as constituencies to be protected.

We also expect efforts to obstruct or delay the swearing-in of newly elected officials. These efforts might include the removal of the Clerk in the House of Representatives or the refusal of the vice president and outgoing House speaker to swear in newly elected members to the Senate and House of Representatives, respectively.

In our report, we address in detail these military, electoral and constitutional crisis points — as well as how American communities, movements and institutions are preparing to respond. Congress must fully assert itself as the primary branch of the federal government.

Neighborhoods, communities, and their governments have been thrust forward to protect themselves against federal repression and dysfunction. In the process, they have demonstrated remarkable resilience. If sufficiently connected with one another and backed up by labor unions, state governments and major public, faith, business and community institutions, municipalities offer our best hope for avoiding authoritarian takeover.

However, they are often fragmented. Neighborhood networks, labor organizations, community businesses, faith communities, public institutions and local governments frequently operate without shared language or protocol, trusted coordination or practiced ways of acting together.

The central preparedness challenge is not only to build more capacity, but to connect, test and mobilize what already exists. Intermunicipal communications and coordination systems will serve as critical crisis infrastructure in the months ahead.

The report draws one other major conclusion. Following the November elections, Congress must fully assert itself as the primary branch of the federal government. The generation of 1776 gave Congress supremacy over the rest of the federal government. This is the reason the legislative branch is described first in the U.S. Constitution, as Article I.

Over many years, much of congressional supremacy, representing the sovereignty of the American people and their states, has been abdicated or stolen. At this moment, without Congress, there is no republic, only dictatorship. If the U.S. is to remain a republic in 2027, members of Congress must honor their oaths to uphold the Constitution by ensuring a successful democratic transition of power.

To our fellow Americans: This is not the time to look away. More than ever we need the kind of courage that history books heroize. We implore you to step forward and face the crisis. The full report is available is americancrisis.report.

-Ben Manski, Michael Shank, April Doner / OtherWords

-Truthdig

"Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies..." -Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar

I’ve always pushed back on characterizing the execution of a lawful, court-ordered search warrant as a “raid.” I’ll do my best to stick to that tonight, although the context of the search warrant executed at Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence early Monday morning makes it difficult.

We do not yet know what charges the government may be contemplating; we haven’t seen the affidavit accompanying the warrant. There are a lot of unanswered questions. Omar came to this country in 1995—she was 12—and there is a five-year statute of limitations on most federal crimes. 

There’s a possible way around that because some immigration offenses are treated as continuing crimes for statute-of-limitations purposes. But that doesn't necessarily help the government here. Anonymous sources have characterized this investigation as involving her original immigration paperwork, perhaps some type of false statements case.

That raises additional questions. The government would already have all of the paperwork that accompanied her entry into the country. So what are they looking for? And what probable cause do they have to believe it would be found in her temporary D.C. residence, not her family home in Minnesota, which does not seem to have been searched?

We don’t know who the target of the investigation is. Omar’s age at the time would make it hard to establish criminal intent. And while others involved might have some technical liability depending on the facts, her father, who allegedly completed her paperwork, is deceased.

Here’s another question: Why now? DOJ has a longstanding policy against taking overt steps, like executing a search warrant or announcing an indictment, this close to an election. Often referred to as the 60-day rule, it’s meant to prevent prosecutors from using their power to unfairly influence an election's outcome. The concern is that the target has little meaningful opportunity to clear their name of the damaging insinuations before voters cast their ballots.

Without knowing what the government proposes to charge and who it proposes to charge, it’s difficult to assess whether this is another rank political investigation that will never develop into an indictment, a pure political stunt, or whether there’s more to it. 

But given the bad faith with which this administration has abused the criminal justice system to go after people Trump considers enemies, it’s hard to rule it out. Given the timing, you’d expect the government to make it known if there was some risk of evidence being destroyed, one situation that might warrant an action like this. But it hasn’t offered any explanation despite the unusual circumstances.

Omar was quick to respond.

While there is a lot left to learn, we do know for certain that the election is already underway in Minnesota. Early voting is in progress and Omar is on the ballot. Even if this is a legitimate investigation, there was no apparent urgent need to execute a search warrant today. The original “crime” is decades old. It’s hard to imagine that DOJ just learned about the existence of evidence it so urgently needed to recover that it couldn’t wait the few weeks for the election to be over before striking.

It seems more likely that this is about politics than legitimate prosecution. And isn’t that what the Trump administration has turned the Justice Department into? A political tool in the president’s toolkit, no longer a bastion of the rule of law. No longer a place that prides itself on being above the political fray and doing justice regardless of who is in the White House.

The search warrant was signed by a judge. But we don’t know what facts the government shared with the judge to justify issuance of the warrant. It could be a solid case. Or it could be another revenge operation where they’ll never obtain an indictment. And it probably doesn’t matter to the man in the Oval Office who seems to be calling the shots at DOJ. 

Another investigation is open. That’s all it takes. Early voting in Minnesota is underway. The Trump administration has accomplished its mission. But whether it will have the effect the man calling the shots wants is an entirely different question. There’s already outrage over the timing of the search warrant. It could easily backfire...

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

How have Ilhan Omar’s Democratic colleagues reacted to the raid? House Democratic leaders, including minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, party whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar, issued a joint statement excoriating the president for the search, calling it “deeply disturbing”. The Democratic leaders vowed to “deliver full accountability for the rogue abuse of power” from the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.  

-The Guardian

Trump's Attempts to Silence the Press

The New York Times reported that the Trump Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks that participate in the White House pool—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox—violated the law by refusing to cover Donald Trump for a brief period after he suspended the White House hard passes for CNN, MSNOW, and Politico. The Time report was based on six sources. The Washington Post has now confirmed that report.

Here’s what we know so far:

The investigation seems to center on whether suspending pool coverage was a violation of federal antitrust law. A DOJ spokesperson, Emily Covington, said, “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” one of the primary antitrust laws.

The Times reports that DOJ sent letters to the networks on Friday and “demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool.” They specifically sought “communications among network officials that concerned pool coverage of Mr. Trump, along with any communications about Mr. Trump’s revocation of CNN’s access to the White House grounds, according to two people with direct knowledge of the documents.”

The Times report calls it “a profound escalation of the Trump administration’s ongoing battles with the White House press corps. It also follows a pattern of the Trump administration using the levers of government against its perceived foes in the media.”

Covington said, “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.” But when the DOJ launches a major investigation against the press, there’s nothing “simple” about it. As with so much of Trump’s revenge docket, the investigations into Jim Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, and others, the process is the punishment. Targets have to hire lawyers. It gets expensive, and it’s stressful.

Trump has tried, repeatedly, to intimidate the press. “Quiet, Piggy.” During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the U.S. last month, Trump lamented the fact that they are not as biddable as the Chinese press. Now, despite his losses in court, Trump is back on the offensive against the people who keep the First Amendment for our democracy.

The Sherman Antitrust Act provides that “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.” Violating the Sherman Act is a felony, punishable by fines of up to $100,000,000 for corporations and $1,000,000 for individuals, as well as imprisonment for up to 10 years. The government can also bring civil proceedings to prevent or restrain violations.

But it’s doubtful that the networks’ boycott is the type of restraint on trade that antitrust laws are intended to prevent. The networks didn’t agree to fix prices, allocate customers, or exclude commercial rivals, which is the type of behavior the law is meant to prevent and punish. The pool networks were responding to the president’s treatment of journalists, a temporary protest. Not every “refusal to deal” is an antitrust violation, a restraint on trade that the law prohibits, so it’s a real stretch to investigate here, given the First Amendment implications of the White House’s conduct.

But Donald Trump has long been a fan of announcing investigations into his enemies—regardless of whether they ever come to fruition—as a bully tactic. During his first impeachment inquiry, the Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, testified Trump didn’t care about the outcome of an investigation into the Bidens’ Ukrainian business dealings. He only wanted Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “just” publicly announce that his country was opening one. Trump did the same thing after he lost the 2020 election, asking acting DOJ officials to announce an investigation into election fraud. They declined.

It looks like we’re back there again.

I hope posts like today’s are what you come to Civil Discourse for. My goal is to follow the investigations and lawsuits that help us stay informed about the state of our democracy. Your support makes it possible for me to devote time to tracking new developments and getting an early read on the law involved. And most importantly, your paid subscriptions help me keep this work available to everyone.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance