Trump’s Scare Tactics

 

Donald Trump is Scary Movie 6. How much is spoof and how much is genuine horror?

Going into 2025, the world was already pretty scary. Take your pick: climate change, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, pandemic, Elon Musk.

But in two short weeks, the current occupant of the White House has made life scarier still for specific communities of people. The Trump administration has already taken into custody thousands of undocumented immigrants and begun flying them out of the country. It has stripped trans Americans of federal recognition.

It has removed security protection for dozens of former federal employees, including former health official Anthony Fauci and diplomat Mike Pompeo, who have been the subject of death threats. And it tried to suspend all federal grants, disrupting countless people and communities.

As if that weren’t enough, Trump has let fly a quiver full of threats at a range of overseas targets. He has threatened tariffs against countries, some of them just for looking at him the wrong way. He has pledged to put the Panama Canal back under U.S. control.

He has made noises about seizing Greenland, regardless of what Denmark and nearly 57,000 Greenlagreenders have to say about it. Most recently, he promised maximum pressure on Colombia if it didn’t accept back its deported citizens (after some initial resistance, Colombia buckled).

Voters backed Trump because they wanted change, not chaos. Is the president driving America and the world to the precipice to give us all a good scare? Or does he intend to drive off the cliff because he can’t be bothered to take his foot off the accelerator and apply the brakes?

There’s no question that Donald Trump is Scary Movie 6 (release date: last week). What’s not entirely clear is how much is spoof—Greenland, really?—and how much is genuine horror.

Trump’s Record of Threats

In his first administration, Donald Trump gave a four-year preview of what he’d do if given a second chance and a team of loyal extremists.

In that distant time—before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, before the latest war in Gaza, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, before the coronavirus—Trump promised to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.

He threatened to repeal Obamacare. He pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. He was going to repeal federal funding for cities that provided sanctuary to the undocumented. He intended to kick China out of the World Trade Organization, end birthright citizenship, bring back waterboarding, balance the federal budget, and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

In all, Trump made 55 promises (or threats, depending on your point of view) that he didn’t keep. Many of these intended policies got bogged down in the courts. Or Congress blocked them. Or they were unconstitutional, impossible to implement, or deeply unpopular. In some cases, Trump probably forgot that he even made a particular threat in the first place since he made so many of them.

Before you get all optimistic about how this record of failure is predictive of his current trajectory, Trump did indeed make good on a number of his threats. He imposed import tariffs. He defunded Planned Parenthood and changed the composition of the Supreme Court so that it could, among other things, reverse Roe v. Wade.

He bullied European countries to pay more for their own military operations. He withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change and canceled U.S. participation in the Iran nuclear deal.

One speed bump the last time around was Congress. Though the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress during Trump’s first two years, the party had not yet been turned into a full-on personality cult. Senator John McCain, for instance, famously prevented Trump from repealing Obamacare, an initiative the Arizona Republican didn’t even like. In those days, some Republicans simply refused to bullied.

Now, under the dubious leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson, House Republicans have generally become a team of presidential lapdogs. In the Senate, traditionally a more independent-minded institution, only a couple Republicans dare to stand up to Trump (and not that often either).

In the confirmation vote for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s clearly incompetent choice to head up the Pentagon, only three Republicans dared to object. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are the last moderates in the party.

The third naysayer, Mitch McConnell, was the Senate majority leader during Trump’s first term. His occasional opposition to Trump is now something of a surprise. This was the guy who carried water for Trump during his first term. Oh, how the Senate has changed if McConnell has become a cornerstone of the tepid resistance.

Threats as Policy

Trump’s approach to foreign policy can be summed up with this shorthand: flatter up, threaten down.

If Trump thinks he holds the more powerful hand, he confidently shoots off his mouth. So, for instance, Denmark is tiny, so Trump’s going after Greenland. This is the tactic of a hostile takeover. Trump sees a business opportunity—a huge undervalued enterprise that can be seized from a distracted and comparatively weak owner.

But, of course, geopolitics does not operate according to the rules of corporate capitalism, and Trump seems almost bewildered that everyone isn’t just rolling over and accepting his plan.

U.S. allies often have difficulty saying no to Washington, given the power differential, so Trump has long tried to bully them into spending more on their own militaries. This time, he is pushing NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP, an absurd figure that even the hypertrophied United States doesn’t reach (though tiny Estonia and Lithuania have both knuckled under).

Trump likes to make examples of countries, killing chickens to scare the monkeys, as the Chinese like to say. Thus, he brought out the big guns to threaten Colombia if it didn’t accept returned deportees. There was no formal diplomatic process. The entire episode was conducted on social media, Trump’s preferred mode of discourse. 

Targeting Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump vowed to impose 25 percent tariffs on Colombian exports right away, which would obviously affect the crude oil, coal and coffee industries. The tariffs would double if Mr. Petro didn’t fold on the issue within a week…. Presumably, Mr. Petro looked at his chances of coming out on top of this conflict and decided it was zero. 

The objects of Trump’s flattery are generally the kind of strong-arm militarists that Trump aspires to be: Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un. These leaders don’t just make threats, they follow through on them. Putin threatened Ukraine, then invaded it. Netanyahu threatened the leadership of Hamas, then set about destroying it. Kim Jong Un threatened to build a nuclear arsenal, and then did so.

China is in a category by itself. It is powerful, to be sure, and Xi Jinping thus receives his share of Trumpian flattery (“I like President Xi very much,” Trump said of the Chinese leader this week. “I’ve always liked him.”). But China also challenges American hegemony by controlling the supply chains of critical raw materials, replacing the United States as the primary trade partner for countries throughout the world, and outperforming everyone in producing renewable energy infrastructure.

With its capacity to make America look bad, China must be subjected to both threats and flattery, according to Trump’s playbook. This is perhaps the one place where Trump’s strategy resembles a kind of diplomacy, given its resemblance to past carrot-and-stick approaches coming out of Washington.

And Then There’s Ukraine

The real test of Trump’s threat-based foreign policy will be Ukraine. Initially, Trump’s approach was quite simple: threaten both sides until they come to the table and negotiate a settlement. It’s a classic Three Stooges skit: bang heads together until the two sides come to their senses. But again, geopolitics does not run according to the rules of the Three Stooges, which results in headaches more often than peace.

No surprise then that the Trump team now talks about a 100-day timeline for resolving the conflict, not the 24-hour deadline that Trump boasted of as a candidate. The 100-day plan is still built around a double-threat strategy. Most recently, Trump waxed ineloquent about the damage further U.S. sanctions could have on the Russian economy.

But this is where Trump’s approach breaks down.

Neither side is interested only in territory, which can be divided up in a peace deal. Putin wants Ukraine, obviously, but it is also sacrificing so many soldiers in order to catapult back into superpower status, to regain a place at the table to influence European security, the global economy, and the very DNA of the international community. If that option is not available under Trump, Putin has another strategy: ratchet up conflict with the West alongside a range of rogue states.

Ukraine, meanwhile, wants to eject Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, obviously, but it also wants to avoid full occupation, frozen conflict status, and perpetual limbo as a country-in-waiting for membership in the European Union. It wants NATO membership, too, but it would probably accept some form of heavily armed neutrality, at least for the interim.

Mere threats can do little to bridge such differences. Maybe Trump can achieve a ceasefire through sheer force of will. But it won’t last. The Three Stooges are not a good role model for conflict resolution.

What About Us Chickens?

Trump’s threats are meant to be entertainment—to grab the media’s attention, mobilize MAGA followers on social media, and enrage his adversaries at home and abroad. But these threats are also very real, as the record of his first term demonstrates. Threats, for Trump, are like seeds. He scatters them to the wind and then sits back to see what germinates.

The most important way of confronting Trump’s full-spectrum threats is to find a strategic point of resistance and allocate a lot of resources to reinforcing it. One recent example is the lawsuit that Democracy Forward launched to stop Trump’s suspension of federal grants. A federal judge temporarily halted the suspension. And then, under pressure from all sides, the administration backed down.

A lot of dead chickens will of course scare the monkeys. But a chicken that continues to cluck despite all the force deployed against it? The monkeys will see that courageous chicken and take heart. A powerful poultry pushback also sends an important message to all the rest of us chickens.

Resistance is not futile.

Foreign Policy in Focus, by John Feffer | January 29, 2025 | Scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the U.S. a more responsible global partner.

 

Trump, Nixon, Reagan, Kennedy Jr., Musk, Republican Lies...

 

In a conversation with Greg Sargent of the New Republic published [yesterday], writer Amanda Marcotte called out an important moment in White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first press conference yesterday.

When a reporter noted that “[e]gg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office,” and asked, “what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?” Leavitt answered: “Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs.

I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I’m not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything—not just eggs—bacon, groceries, gasoline, have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.”

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden for the post-pandemic inflation that afflicted the country and promised to bring down “the price of everything.” Even before he took office, Trump had begun to walk back his promise, and J.D. Vance has also suggested price relief would “take a little bit of time.”

Now coffee and egg prices are at an all-time high, and the administration’s solution is to attack Biden. No matter the incompetencies of the Trump presidency, Marcotte notes, it appears the answer will be: You might not like what we’re doing, but don’t you hate Democrats more?

President Richard Nixon’s team pioneered this strategy before the 1970 midterm elections to rally wavering Republicans around the president’s party. Nixon had won election with a promise that he would end the war in Vietnam honorably, but had, in fact, increased the U.S. presence there.

By the end of 1969, with opposition mounting, he insisted that a “silent majority” agreed with his Vietnam policies. Then, at the end of April 1970, he told the American people that he had sent ground troops into Vietnam’s neighbor Cambodia. Protests led to the killing of four college students at Ohio’s Kent State University. Members of Nixon’s key demographic, middle-class white Americans, threatened to abandon him.

Nixon’s advisors urged him to win his voters back by attacking their opponents as lazy, dangerous, and un-American. They called their strategy “positive polarization” because it stoked the anger, they needed voters to feel in order to show up to vote, a development they saw as positive.

Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon urging him to take much stronger control over the nation, to manipulate the media, and to go to war with his opponents, whom he considered illegitimate, warning: “[W]e are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise—it will be their kind of society or ours.”

Nixon so internalized this advice that by 1972 he was willing to sabotage his Democratic opponent’s campaign in order to win, convinced that a Democratic victory would destroy America.

He ended up having to resign when his participation in covering up the bugging of the Democratic National Convention’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel surfaced, but in his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan picked up the rhetorical technique of dividing the country in two.

In part, that depended on constructing a false world, claiming when challenged on his stories of government mismanagement that a “liberal media” was determined to undermine him. When voters elected him, Reagan began the dismantling of the post–World War II government that protected equality before the law, equal access to resources, and the right to have a say in government.

Whenever it seemed that voters were turning against the Republicans’ policies, which moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans doubled down on the idea that popular government programs were “socialist” or “Marxist,” designed to redistribute wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving “liberals.”

By 2020, accompanying that rhetoric with voter suppression and a flood of money into Republican election war chests had made many Republican voters loyal to the party above the country. So convinced were they that the government was corrupt and that they were fighting a war for America that they were willing to die of Covid in order to “own the Libs.” And in 2021 they tried to overturn democracy in order to keep their leader in power.

Now, in 2025, the impulse simply to hurt Democrats no matter how badly such actions would hurt the country showed in a social media post today by Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) that the Senate should confirm Trump’s deeply problematic nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because “no Cabinet nominee could damage the political future of Democrats more than RFK.”

Kennedy is before the Senate Finance Committee today in confirmation hearings to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Food and Drug Administration, among other agencies.

Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who opposes the vaccines that have slashed deadly illnesses in the U.S. and has attacked the institutions he would oversee; more than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter opposing his confirmation.

Yesterday, Kennedy’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, broke her silence about him to write an open letter to senators. She warned that he “lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience” and, calling him a “predator,” warned that he has “gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life.”

Forcing the Republican agenda by continuing to portray political opponents as dangerous to America because of wasteful spending and misguided priorities has reached cartoonish extremes. Trump has nonsensically claimed that thanks to him, the U.S. military has “TURNED ON THE WATER” in California, apparently misunderstanding that the Army Corps of Engineers had conducted maintenance on federal water pumps for three days and turned them back on when the maintenance was complete.

Yesterday, Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration tried to stop all foreign aid because Biden supposedly sent $50 million of condoms to Gaza and that the administration was just focusing on being “good stewards of tax dollars.” The story is simply false. The U.S. Agency for International Development spent about $7 million on condoms in 2023, the vast majority of which went to Africa through anti-AIDS programs; Trump’s first administration made similar investments.

At the same time, they are portraying Democrats as wasteful and misguided, Trump and MAGA Republicans are claiming Democratic accomplishments for themselves. Last night, Trump claimed he had “just asked Elon Musk and [SpaceX] to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” and Musk chipped in that it was “[t]errible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”

In fact, as fact-checkers quickly noted, NASA says the astronauts whose damaged spaceship has returned to Earth are not stuck in space but are staffing the space station, and that a SpaceX capsule has been docked at the station since September in an arrangement made by the Biden administration to bring them back to Earth as soon as a new crew arrives.

True MAGA is buying the lies the administration is selling—Fox News Channel pundit Jesse Watters suggested Gazans were using condoms as balloons to float explosives into Israel—but it is possible Nixon’s system of polarization is reaching the end of its rope.

Key to Trump’s 2024 win was his insistence that violent crime was skyrocketing in the U.S.—in fact, it was plummeting—and he vowed to deport “criminal” migrants. Since he took office, a number of made-for-television sweeps have tried to demonstrate that he is making America safer.

But his commutations and pardons of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes has made that a hard sell, especially as one is now wanted for soliciting sex with a minor and another has been killed by Indiana police for resisting arrest. In addition, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that Trump officials ordered prosecutors to divert resources away from truly dangerous drug traffickers to go after undocumented immigrants.

Those who believed Trump would not come for anyone, but “criminals” are learning otherwise: NBC News reported on Monday that nearly half the migrants arrested in a Chicago sweep on Sunday either had nonviolent offenses or had committed no offense.

While the Trump administration defends its sweeps by saying it considers anyone who has broken immigration law to be a criminal, being undocumented is in fact a civil offense, not a crime, and many of Trump’s supporters did not think he would make such general sweeps.

But the biggest wake-up call for those embracing the longtime language of polarization is that when Trump on Tuesday shut down all federal funding and grants to stop what he called the “Marxist” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives of the government, he was attacking virtually all Americans.

The administration’s pause of all federal funding and grants until it could make sure “DEI” had been purged out of them cut everything from Meals on Wheels, a food delivery program for shut-ins, to education, local law enforcement, and the Medicaid on which programs for the elderly depend.

The outcry was so strong that today the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to rescind its previous memo freezing all federal programs. But Leavitt immediately contradicted the apparent content of the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that the plan seemed to be “to create as much chaos as possible.”

That chaos keeps attention on the administration, and it appeared to be a way for the White House to upend lawsuits against the freeze. So far, that has not worked. U.S. District Judge John McConnell said he was inclined to grant a restraining order, noting that “the administration is acting with a distinction without a difference.”

The Trump administration’s cutting of the federal funding on which Americans depend in the name of opposition to “Marxism” and “DEI” contrasts spectacularly with its embrace of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk; the billionaires in Trump’s Cabinet; and the billionaires who have poured money into the Trump administration.

CNN’s Chris Isidore notes that government subsidies built Musk’s fortune and that he continues to receive government contracts worth billions of dollars. In addition to government contracts, Trump’s tax policy favors the very rich. On Monday, January 27, the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee billionaire Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary. 

In his confirmation hearings, Bessent told the Senate that he believes extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts is “the single most important economic issue of the day…. If we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity.”

Republicans identify the rapidly growing federal deficit as a crisis for which Democrats are to blame, but in fact, President Bill Clinton—with an assist from Republican president George H.W. Bush—eliminated the federal deficit in the 1990s.

What threw the deficit into the red was the tax cuts and unfunded wars under George W. Bush, along with Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy and corporations. The U.S. Treasury estimates that extending the TCJA as is—Trump has mused on deeper cuts—would cost $4.2 trillion over the next ten years.

Slashing the federal funding that supports ordinary Americans will make it easier to fund federal contracts and further tax cuts for the wealthy. With that tradeoff so visible in 2025, will “owning the Libs” still be worth it?

Trump seemed to be worried that it might not be. This afternoon he threw red meat directly at the MAGA base with an announcement that he would be signing an executive order to open a 30,000-person-capacity migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

What We Can Do about Authoritarianism

 

1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented.

This is an urgent moral call to action. As Donald Trump’s Ice begins roundups and deportations, many good people are endangered and understandably frightened.

One of Trump’s new executive orders allows Ice to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, healthcare sites, shelters and relief centers – thereby deterring them from sending their kids to school or getting help they need.

If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community. Join others in voluntary efforts to keep Ice away from schools, hospitals and shelters.

Organize and mobilize your community to support it as a sanctuary city, and to support your state as a sanctuary state. Trump’s justice department is already launching investigations of cities and states that go against federal immigration orders, laying the groundwork for legal challenges to local laws and forcing compliance with the executive branch. Your voice and organizing could be helpful in fighting back.

I recommend you order these red cards from Immigrant Legal Resource Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC. You might also find these of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC.

2. Protect LGBTQ+ members of your community.

Trump may make life far more difficult for those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and of other expansive identities through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws or changes in how such laws are enforced.

His election and his rhetoric might also unleash hatefulness by bigoted people in your community.

I urge you to work with others in being vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.

3. Help protect officials in your community or state whom Trump and his administration are targeting for vengeance.

Some may be low-level officials, such as election workers. If they do not have the means to legally defend themselves, you might help them or consider a GoFundMe campaign. If you hear of anyone who seeks to harm them, immediately alert law-enforcement officials.

4. Participate or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.

5. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump.

Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts. The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund and Common Cause.

6. Spread the truth: [Talk to your neighbors about this situation. Write letters to your legislators. Create a blog and disseminate the truth.]

Get news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Trump propaganda, including local media, contradict them with facts and their sources.

Here are some of the sources I currently rely on for the truth: the Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, the New Yorker, the American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, the Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson and, of course, my Substack.

7. Urge friends, relatives and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram.

They are increasingly filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.

8. Push for progressive measures in your community and state.

Local and state governments have significant power. Join groups that are moving your city or state forward, in contrast to regressive moves at the federal level. Lobby, instigate, organize and fundraise for progressive legislators. Support progressive leaders.

9. Encourage worker action.

Most labor unions are on the right side – seeking to build worker power and resist repression. You can support them by joining picket lines and boycotts, and encouraging employees to organize in places you patronize.

10. Keep the faith. Do not give up on America.

Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only one and a half points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won.

America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it – or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law. The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. But we cannot allow them to.

We will never give up.

What is giving me hope now.

Finding room in life for joy, fun and laughter. We cannot let Trump and his darkness take over. Just as it’s important not to give up the fight, it’s critically important to take care of ourselves. If we obsess about Trump and fall down the rabbit hole of outrage, worry and anxiety, we won’t be able to keep fighting.

-Robert Reich, The Guardian

 

"The real witch hunt is here" -Joyce Vance

 

Donald Trump’s acting attorney general fired the prosecutors who worked on the January 6 and classified documents prosecutions against Trump. Acting Attorney General James McHenry told the people he fired that he “does not trust” them “to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”

An administration can’t fire career federal prosecutors based on their perceived political loyalties. Prosecutors can be fired based on their conduct or performance if they are given notice, an opportunity to improve, and sufficient time to do so. But that’s not what happened here. They were fired because they were assigned to prosecute Donald Trump.

The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.

Also today, the interim U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., who identifies himself in his Twitter bio as “@EagleEdMartin” has launched a probe into the 250+ January 6 cases the office prosecuted. His announcement follows Trump’s day one executive order on “weaponization of the federal government” that directed the attorney general to search out what he characterized as misbehavior in Biden’s DOJ and asked for “recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.” In an email to staff earlier today, Martin called the cases “a great failure for our office” and said they need to get to “the bottom of it.”

“You played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” the letter said, according to parts read to NBC News. “The proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust superior officials place in their subordinates. Given your significant role in prosecuting the president, I do not believe that the leadership of the department can trust you to assist in implement the president's agenda faithfully.”

This is an extraordinary step for a U.S. Attorney to take. My former U.S. Attorney colleague from Michigan and #SistersInLaw podcast cohost Barb McQuade characterized it like this, “Prosecutors did nothing wrong in bringing obstruction cases just because the Supreme Court subsequently interpreted the statute to require a connection to documents, despite no such limitation in the text.

Besides, Martin has all the public records he needs to determine who participated in these good faith prosecutions. By assigning supervisors to conduct an internal investigation, he creates an impression of misconduct. Trump and his allies often complain about witch hunts. This is what a witch hunt really looks like.” 

These cases were indicted by grand juries. Judges accepted guilty pleas in open court or juries convicted the defendants. Some of the cases were affirmed on appeal. Going back to revisit them now is politics in a place where it doesn’t belong, the Justice Department.

There are ways to assess and punish misconduct by prosecutors. The Office of Professional Responsibility investigates allegations of professional misconduct involving Department attorneys. DOJ’s inspector general has jurisdiction to look at violations of fraud, abuse, and integrity laws that govern DOJ employees, and their investigations can lead to criminal prosecution or civil or administrative action in appropriate cases. Those offices intervene in cases where they see reason to open an investigation.

But political appointees in a new administration don’t have the authority to fire prosecutors just because they worked on cases they were assigned to. It’s an abrupt capture of the Justice Department by the White House and deeply alarming. As with the inspectors general, Trump is violating the law to test just how far he can go before there is opposition.

Past history suggests Trump backs down when challenged forcefully. The question in this critical moment is whether the people with the power to do so, largely on Capitol Hill and in the courts, will stand in his way. The rule of law is meant to be a shield for democracy in moments like this. 

But Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, a member of the Senate’s inspector general caucus, offered this weak tea: “There may be good reason the IGs were fired. We need to know that if so. I’d like further explanation from President Trump. Regardless, the 30 day detailed notice of removal that the law demands was not provided to Congress.”

Grassley, who proudly announced he had joined the Senate’s IG caucus, saying, “Inspectors General play an essential role in protecting taxpayer dollars and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the executive branch. I rely heavily on these independent watchdogs when carrying out my constitutional responsibility of oversight, and I’m glad to join Senator Ernst’s effort to support their invaluable work,” didn’t announce any intent to support them now that push has come to shove.

Tonight, I had intended to write more about Trump’s pardon of the January 6 defendants, and these new developments highlight the point I wanted to make: the outrage here is the attack on democracy.

Much of the initial outburst following the pardons came from people in law enforcement and others who were upset that the pardons meant there were no consequences for assaulting police officers. That was certainly one impact of the pardons and deeply disturbing. But it shouldn’t obscure the fact that Trump pardoned people who deliberately attacked democracy itself and that they did so on his behalf.

The goal of January 6 was to keep Trump, who had lost the election, in power. He rewarded the people who attacked democracy with pardons. The lawlessness is front and center in the pardons, as it is in firing the IGs and in firing DOJ employees. It’s all about loyalty to Trump, and you can’t have that and a functional democracy living in the same room.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which supported Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 criticized him because the pardons included violent rioters who attacked police officers. “Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety,” the FOP’s joint statement with the International Association of Police Chiefs said. “They are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law …

When perpetrators of crimes, especially serious crimes, are not held fully accountable, it sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”

The point about police is well-taken. And even more so when we’re talking about an attack on democracy.

Trump did an interview last week with Sean Hannity on Fox News. He explained the pardons like this: “They were in there for three and a half years … treated like nobody’s ever been treated. So badly. Treated like the worst criminals in history …

The other thing is this: some of those people with the police, true. But they were very minor incidents. They get built up by a couple of fake guys who are on CNN all the time.” The whole narrative at that point was about police and pardons; democracy had been forgotten.

We cannot allow Trump, or even well-intentioned concerns about attacks on police, to obscure what these crimes and these pardons were really about. Motive is not an element the government has to prove for most federal crimes, but here, the motive was apparent throughout.

We understood it when Trump told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by, when he summoned his followers to Washington, D.C., on January 6, tweeting, “will be wild,” and when he spoke to them at the rally on the Ellipse, claiming the election had been stolen from him and telling them, “We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”

That same level of lawlessness and disregard for democracy is back. It’s happening in front of us again. In 2020 the voters went to work, and the courts held. Trump is trying to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

What can you do? Don’t be quiet. Talk with people about why it isn’t okay for a president to routinely operate by breaking the laws. And know it for what it is: Trump could have fired the IGs by giving Congress 30 days' notice of his reasons, and he could have transferred prosecutors into minor roles like prosecuting misdemeanors in the District of Columbia. Instead, he chose to proceed lawlessly, threatening anyone to tell him he can’t. And it’s not just the outright lawlessness.

We’re seeing the fallout from executive orders now, and we know that it’s as widespread as stopping treatment for cancer patients and canceling job offers made to people who wanted to become public servants.

It’s time for Americans, even the ones who supported Trump, to raise their voices and say they didn’t vote for any of this, before their voices don’t matter at all. For us here, we can provoke those conversations, and of course, we have to write to our elected officials and make sure they know we’re watching what they’re doing at this critical moment.

This video, posted by Aaron Rupar, is from today. Trump, again, is contemplating whether he can run a third time. It’s not a joke; it is clearly something that stays on his mind. The Senate abdicated its constitutional obligation to engage in advice and consent and confirmed Pete Hegseth. Now, Trump is violating laws regarding who he can fire from government service and how he can do so. If there is no push back, where does it all end? Where is this leading? I think we know the answer.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

Mass Deportation Is a Bad Idea for the U.S. Economy

 

There were many lies about immigrants spread during the 2024 presidential campaign. It is necessary to replace the misinformation with facts to think clearly about the economic impact of immigration and deportation on the US economy – especially since Donald Trump says he intends to move forward on mass deportation.

For all of the 21st century, there have been millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The peak year on record was 2007, when there were 12.2 million unauthorized immigrants living here. In 2022, there were 11 million – 1.2 million fewer or about 10 percent less than in 2007. The provisional estimate for 2023 is 11.7 million, still below the 2007 peak.

In some cases, a sudden, rapid increase in immigrants – authorized and unauthorized – could put social and economic stress on the specific communities receiving the influx. There might be difficulties finding housing and finding space in schools, and social service organizations might find their capacity strained. At the same time, many anecdotal reports detail the economic benefits of increased immigration in particular communities.

At the US-Mexico border, migrant encounters – which refers to apprehensions and expulsions – dramatically increased from 2020 to 2023, but there was a sharp reversal in 2024. The foreign-born population, authorized and unauthorized, in the United States increased 1.6 million from 2022 to 2023. While this was the largest increase in 20 years, it was not large enough to have an impact on the day-to-day lives of most of the over 300 million people in the country.

In a population of nearly 12 million unauthorized immigrants, it would not be surprising to find that there are some number of them who commit serious crimes. The research clearly shows, however, that the rate of criminal offending among immigrants is lower than for the native-born. 

A study of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, for example, found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” Further, research suggests that immigrant populations actually help to reduce crime ratesin communities.

In sum, the situation in the United States in relation to immigrants today is not much different than it was a decade ago. There is no new crisis.

Unauthorized Immigrants and the US Economy

How would Trump’s planned mass deportation impact the US economy? Recent history gives us some indications. From 2008 to 2014, about 400,000 people were deported from the United States. This mass deportation allowed scholars to study its economic effects. A recent analysis concluded that for each half million immigrants deported, the US-born population would actually lose 44,000 jobs. 

The work that the immigrants did was necessary to the jobs of US-born workers, so the loss of the immigrants caused the loss of jobs for the native-born. Also, the spending of immigrants (on food, clothing, etc.) paid the wages of US-born workers. Without that spending, jobs for US-born workers were lost. The deportation of millions of unauthorized immigrant workers will mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs for the US-born.

While the overall number of unauthorized immigrants is small in comparison to the entire US population, the fact that they are concentrated in particular sectors of the economy would make their rapid removal disruptive. Unauthorized immigrants are overrepresented as maids, housecleaners, cooks, grounds maintenance workers, janitors, agricultural workers, and construction workers. 

A large and rapid deportation program would increase the costs of the products and services connected to these industries. In Texas, the construction industry is expressing alarm about how Trump’s plans will devastate their ability to build homes and other infrastructure.

Because unauthorized immigrants are also a significant part of our caregiving economy, the deportation from 2008 to 2014 disrupted this sector. Economists have found that the loss of childcare workers led to a reduction in the number of college-educated mothers with young children in the paid labor force.

Legal Immigrants and the US Economy

Although the Trump campaign has spoken loudly about curtailing unauthorized immigration, there is reason to believe that the new administration will reduce authorized immigration to an equal or even greater degree than unauthorized immigration. As the libertarian Cato Institute has pointed out, the first Trump administration significantly reduced legal immigration but largely failed to reduce unauthorized immigration.

People may have a stereotype of immigrant workers as low-wage workers, but immigrant workers can be found throughout the economy. For example, many immigrants work as nurses, computer programmers, educators, and architects. There is also a higher rate of entrepreneurship among immigrants than among the US-born. Almost half of the 500 largest companies in the United States were founded by immigrants or their children. Losing these workers and entrepreneurs will have a negative effect on the U.S. economy.

The Immigration System is Broken – Politics Prevent Potential Solutions

Millions of people are waiting years to enter the United States legally. This gummed-up system is one of the factors causing people to pursue unauthorized immigration. There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the US immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed, but political gamesmanship continues to stymie reform. A 2007 bipartisan effort was blocked in the Senate. A 2013 bipartisan effort was blocked by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner. In 2024, another bipartisan effort was killed by Donald Trump, who sought to campaign on the issue.

Donald Trump has assured his voters that he intends to carry out the xenophobic anti-immigrant policies he espoused as a candidate. He has not said that he will pursue the comprehensive immigration reform needed to fix the broken system and to strengthen the US economy.

Algernon Austin, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has conducted research and writing on issues of race and racial inequality for over 20 years. His primary focus has been on the intersection of race and the economy. 

CounterPunch, this article first appeared on CERP.

 

Bishop who angered Trump with call for mercy says she will not apologize

 

The bishop at the National Cathedral prayer service in Washington on Tuesday who urged Donald Trump to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, has defended her remarks and said that she will not apologize.

The Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon on Tuesday garnered national attention when she made a direct plea to Trump to show mercy and compassion toward scared individuals, including “gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families”, as well as immigrants, and those fleeing war and persecution.

Following the sermon, the president attacked Budde online, labelling her a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” in a lengthy social media post early on Wednesday. He argued that she had “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way” and described her tone as “nasty”.

Trump characterized the service as “boring” and “uninspiring”, and asserted that Budde and her church “owe the public an apology”. His allies quickly joined the criticism, with one Republican representative suggesting that Budde “should be added to the deportation list”.

In the past few days, Budde has given interviews about her sermon and the backlash it sparked. She told reporters she would not apologize for her remarks, despite the criticism from the president and his allies.

“I don’t hate the president, and I pray for him,” Budde told NPR. “I don’t feel there’s a need to apologize for a request for mercy.

“I regret that it was something that has caused the kind of response that it has, in the sense that it actually confirmed the very thing that I was speaking of earlier, which is our tendency to jump to outrage and not speak to one another with respect. But no, I won’t apologize for what I said.”

When asked by MSNBC about the hostility she had faced following her sermon, Budde emphasized her desire to “to encourage a different kind of conversation”. “You can certainly disagree with me,” Budde said. “But could we, as Americans and fellow children of God, speak to one another with respect? I would offer the same to you.”

Budde told MSNBC that she took the tone she did during the sermon because she believed we are currently in a “particularly harsh moment” when it comes to talking about immigrant populations.

“I wanted to make a plea, a request that he broaden his characterization of the people that are frightened now and are at risk of losing everything, and I thought that that would be the more respectful way to say it,” Budde said, adding that her appeal was to both the president and anyone who might be listening.

Budde said an interview with the New York Times that she felt her sermon offered a “perspective that wasn’t getting a lot of airtime right now” and a perspective of Christianity “that has been kind of muted in the public arena”.

“To plea for mercy is actually a very humbling thing to do,” she said. “I wasn’t demanding anything of him. I was pleading with him, like, can you see the humanity of these people? Can you acknowledge that there are people in this country are scared? … If not him, if not the president, could others?”

Budde thought her plea would be “taken differently”, she said, believing that it was an “acknowledgment” of Trump’s “position, his power now, and the millions of people who put him there”.

Budde told Time Magazine that she was “saddened by the level of vitriol” her sermon had “evoked in others” noting that “the intensity of it has been disheartening”. “I’m perfectly happy to be in conversation with people who disagree with me,” Budde stated, adding: “The level of attack has been sobering and disheartening.”

Ultimately, Budde hoped her intended call for “dignity, respecting dignity, honesty, humility and kindness” was “resonating with people” and said that amid the backlash, she had heard from many who say they are grateful for her remarks.

Budde said she did her best to “present an alternative to the culture of contempt, and to say that we can bring multiple perspectives into a common space and do so with dignity and respect”.

“And that we need that,” she continued, as “the culture of contempt is threatening to destroy us. And I’m getting a little bit of a taste of that this week.”

As of Thursday morning, more than 30,000 people had signed a petition supporting her sermon. The petition describes Budde’s sermon as “courageous” and “faith-filled” says it represents “the prophetic voice we desperately need right now”.

-The Guardian

 

Hegseth's Far-Right Beliefs

 

In a series of newly unearthed podcasts, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, appears to endorse the theocratic and authoritarian doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR) and espoused by churches aligned with far-right Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson.

In the recordings, Hegseth rails against “cultural Marxism”, feminism, “critical race theory”, and even democracy itself, which he says, “our founders blatantly rejected as being completely dangerous”.

For much of the over five hours of recordings, which were published over February and March 2024, Hegseth also castigates public schools, which he characterizes as implementing an “egalitarian, dystopian LGBT nightmare”, and which the podcast host Joshua Haymes describes as “one of Satan’s greatest tools for excising Christ from not just our classrooms but our country”.

Elsewhere in the recordings, Hegseth expresses agreement with the principle of sphere sovereignty, which, in CR doctrine, envisions a subordination of “civil government” to Old Testament law, capital punishment for infringements of that law such as homosexuality, and rigidly patriarchal families and churches.

Julie Ingersoll, a professor and director of religious studies at the University of North Florida who has written extensively about Christian reconstructionism and Christian nationalism, told the Guardian: “When these guys say they believe in the separation of church and state, they’re being duplicitous. They do believe in separate spheres for church and state, but also in a theocratic authority that sits above both.”

Hegseth’s far-right beliefs have garnered attention as his nomination to lead the world’s largest military has proceeded. The former elite US soldier and Fox News television star has also garnered negative attention over media reports on his allegedly excessive drinking and allegations of sexual assault.

On Hegseth’s probable assumption of a high-ranking cabinet position in the Trump administration, and how he might view his constitutional role, Ingersoll said: “These folks are not particularly committed to democracy. They’re committed to theocracy.”

She added: “If the democratic system brings that about, so be it. If a monarchy brings it about, that’s OK, too. And if a dictatorship does, that’s also OK. So their commitment is to theocracy: the government of civil society according to biblical law and biblical revelation.”

Logan Davis, a researcher, consultant and columnist from Colorado, grew up in a reformed Calvinist church similar to Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which Hegseth now attends, and spent middle and high school in a classical Christian school affiliated to the one Hegseth’s children now attend. In November he wrote a column entitled “Pete Hegseth and I know the same Christian Nationalists”.

Asked how Hegseth would understand his oath if sworn in as secretary of defense, Davis said: “Hegseth will be swearing to defend the constitution that he, to the extent he is aligned with Doug Wilson, does not believe includes the separation of church and state.”

Asked if Hegseth’s performance of his duties might be influenced by the belief that, as Wilson put it in a 2022 blogpost, “We want our nation to be a Christian nation because we want all the nations to be Christian nations,” Davis said: “I can tell you that the reformed leaders around him … are all sincerely hoping that that is how he will view his mandate.”

The Guardian contacted Hegseth with questions about his beliefs on the separation of church and state, and sphere sovereignty, but received no reply.

Podcast

The podcast series, recorded for Pilgrim Hill’s Reformation Red Pill show, was ostensibly a discussion of Hegseth’s 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, co-written with David Goodwin. The book claims to reveal a “progressive plan to neutralize the basis of our republic” via public schools, core curriculums, and even rituals such as the pledge of allegiance, all of which stretches back at least a century.

Hegseth’s co-author, David Goodwin, is also the serving president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), an organization founded in Moscow, Idaho, which promotes and certifies “classical Christian” schools, and is closely associated with Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho, and a leading promoter of classical Christian education.

Both the John Edwards Classical Academy, which Hegseth’s children attend, and Franklin Classical School attended by Davis are affiliated with ACCS. Each is near Nashville, which Davis describes as “one of the cradles of the movement”, but Classical Christian Education has by now exploded nationwide. By his reckoning the number of schools affiliated to ACCS around the country has more than doubled in the last decade to 475.

The Guardian has reported extensively on how Wilson and the church he founded, Christ church, have sought to expand their influence in Moscow; how the church resisted Covid-19 public health mandates despite members pocketing government loans associated with the pandemic; and how figures associated with Christ church, including Wilson’s son, sought to expand their activities into the entertainment industry, including, apparently, mainstream children’s entertainment.

Wilson has also attracted broader criticism. Controversies have arisen from his apparent defense of slavery; his church’s handling of abuse accusations and the tolerance of convicted pedophiles in their ranks.

Wilson’s teachings include that “wives need to be led with a firm hand”, that “Christians do not set aside the death penalty for homosexual sin”, that “all the nations of man are to be brought into submission to Christ”, and that in a Christian nation, non-Christian religions would be banned from the public square.

In a discussion of sexuality, Wilson once wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”, adding: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

Earlier this month, Right Wing Watch reported that Wilson outlined his Christian nationalist objection to H1-B visas by saying: “That’s a lot of Hindus.”

In the first of the recorded episodes, Hegseth tells Haymes, the host, that writing the book with Goodwin led him to move his family to Tennessee so he could enroll them in a classical Christian school.

“The whole writing process was a red pill,” Hegseth says at one point, adding: “We moved to Tennessee to move to a classical Christian school because of this book. Because when I started writing it, we didn’t have all our kids in that form of education.”

Later, he adds: “We landed on one in middle Tennessee, and we moved to it. We thought we were moving to a school, but we moved to a church and a community and a whole view of the world that has changed the way we think, too.”

The church, Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, is in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, the same community where Hegseth in 2022 acquired a more than 8,800 sq ft house standing on over 76 acres for some $3.4m, according to Sumner County property records, MLS records, and data brokers.

The church is, in turn, a member of the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), another organization co-founded by Douglas Wilson, which unites a growing number of churches around the country who subscribe to Wilson’s theological vision.

In the recordings, Haymes or Hegseth directly and favorably quote Wilson at least three times, with Haymes praising his criticism of the concept of white privilege, and sharing his criticism of the founders for “not making our country distinctly Christian in the [founding] documents”, and Hegseth reporting that he would read a book from a rightwing Catholic publisher at Wilson’s recommendation…

-The Guardian

  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/24/trump-pete-hegseth-extremism?utm_term=679387c92bd9f84a10b449818baf2f53&utm_campaign=USMorningBriefing&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=usbriefing_email

 

Trump in the news

 

Donald Trump has described attacks by insurrectionists on police officers at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “very minor incidents” after he offered sweeping clemency to those who took part.

Giving his first televised interview since his return to the White House to the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Trump defended his decision to include those who committed violence, saying: “Most of the people were absolutely innocent. OK. But forgetting all about that, these people have served, horribly, a long time. It would be very, very cumbersome to go and look – you know how many people we’re talking about? 1,500 people.”

Trump also suggested that those who put him through “four years of hell” of criminal prosecutions should be investigated, adding ominously that his predecessor, Joe Biden, was “badly advised” not to pre-eminently pardon himself.

Why so many pardons? Media reports suggest Trump was too impatient to go through cases individually, with Axios quoting an adviser as saying: “Trump just said: ‘Fuck it: Release ’em all’.”

What other action are Republicans taking related to January 6? House Republicans will continue investigating the insurrection to try to undermine the previous inquiry that found Trump responsible for the deadly attack.

Trump’s executive orders threaten healthcare of 24 million Americans

Donald Trump has signed several executive orders that put more than 20 million lower-income and middle-class Americans’ access to healthcare in jeopardy. Within two days of his return to office, the president had ordered the repeal of Biden-era directives that had expanded Americans’ healthcare access and options. The healthcare access of about 24 million people who bought their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) this year is now at risk. Trump also repealed Biden-era orders to cut the cost of prescription drugs for people using the government health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid. The core beneficiaries are older and lower-income Americans. Which aspects of the ACA will be affected? Trump cannot repeal the act by executive order, but his directives are restricting eligibility requirements, cutting federal subsidies and affecting enrolment deadlines. Trump to sign anti-immigrant act after it passes in House

The House has passed a bill to require the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, which will now return to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed.

Under the Laken Riley Act, named after a 22-year-old murdered last year by a Venezuelan national who was in the US illegally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) must detain undocumented immigrants charged with crimes such as “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting”. The proposal does not include new funding, despite ICE warning that the agency lacks the resources to enforce it.

Democrats argued it would “do nothing to fix the immigration crisis” and would just result in more racial profiling and fearmongering. Opponents emphasized that it ignored the principle that someone charged with a crime had not been convicted and had a right to due process.

How much did it pass by? The House vote was 263 to 158 – all present Republicans voted for it, as well as 46 Democrats.

-The Guardian