Letters from an American – August 25, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, August 25, 2025, By Heather Cox Richardson

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 25, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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The Urgency Of Trump’s Destruction – by Liza Donnelly

The Urgency Of Trump’s Destruction

We need to feel it

By Liza Donnelly, Aug 25, 2025

When you slightly remove yourself from the news for a few days, as I just did, it feels odd. I stayed in touch with the headlines, but didn’t go deep during my time away. It was restorative, for sure, but also made me unsure of how to jump back in. Things right now seem to be a case of more-of-the-same, which is not good. Trump is continuing to be destructive, and the opposition is continuting to try to find a way to stop him.

I find California Govenmor Newsom’s loud, mocking tweets to be very effective in bringing attention to the fact we have a deranged, dangerous president. He recently posted a hysterical tweet that advertised a shop that included a bible for sale for $100 (“SOLD OUT” —but I imagine it never was for sale). The link included more items, and it was unclear to me if you could actually order these things and where the money would go. The site is administered by a group called Campaign for Democracy.

There are tons of Newsom memes, too.

Chicago and New York are next up in Trump’s sights for sending National Guard troops. The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has spent weeks preparing for an operation in Chicago that would include National Guard troops and potentially active-duty forces. WEEKS.

Civil Rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton spoke in Washington yesterday, and said it is clearly about targeting Black and Brown communities.

“This is laced with bigotry and racism. Not one white mayor has been designated. And I think this is a civil rights issue, a race issue, and an issue of D.C. statehood.”

The liberal cities’ leadership is pushing back hard, “An authoritarian power grab of major cities,” Gov. JB Pritzker called the move in a Friday post on X, placing it as the sole item on a list of “things People are NOT begging for” and needling Trump for his administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said on X that deploying the national guard could “inflame tensions between residents and law enforcement” and “threaten to undermine the historic progress we have made” in fighting crime.

There are tons of Newsom memes, too.

Chicago and New York are next up in Trump’s sights for sending National Guard troops. The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has spent weeks preparing for an operation in Chicago that would include National Guard troops and potentially active-duty forces. WEEKS.

Civil Rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton spoke in Washington yesterday, and said it is clearly about targeting Black and Brown communities.

“This is laced with bigotry and racism. Not one white mayor has been designated. And I think this is a civil rights issue, a race issue, and an issue of D.C. statehood.”

The liberal cities’ leadership is pushing back hard, “An authoritarian power grab of major cities,” Gov. JB Pritzker called the move in a Friday post on X, placing it as the sole item on a list of “things People are NOT begging for” and needling Trump for his administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said on X that deploying the national guard could “inflame tensions between residents and law enforcement” and “threaten to undermine the historic progress we have made” in fighting crime.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Urgency Of Trump’s Destruction – by Liza Donnelly

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Letters from an American – August 23, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson

 

Letters from an American

  August 23, 2025, By Heather Cox Richardson     “It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”

It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.

It was not always this way.

After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 23, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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Letters from an American – August 22, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American

August 22, 2025, by Heather Cox Richardson

In these last days of August, with Congress on hiatus and the Epstein files looming, the Trump White House appears to be making a big move to consolidate power over the federal government, weaponize it against Trump’s opponents, and keep him in power indefinitely.

At around 7:00 this morning, FBI agents searched the home and office of Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who has been a fierce critic of Trump since leaving his first administration. Officials told reporters the search was part of an investigation into whether Bolton illegally retained classified information or leaked it to news media. But as J.V. Last of The Bulwark noted, an investigation into classified documents from several years ago—as opposed to a search of, say, a drug dealer—would normally mean the government officials would have a conversation with Bolton’s lawyers and arrange for a routine search to which Bolton agreed. Instead, agents stormed his house and office in an early morning raid.

The raid seems a pretty clear warning to those Trump perceives as enemies that he will bring the full weight of the United States government to harass them. Bolton has been a thorn in Trump’s side for years because he is a well-known right-wing figure who has not been shy about speaking out against Trump. As recently as last week, Bolton told CNN that Trump had “achieved very little” by meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and that “Putin clearly won.” He also noted that Trump “looked tired.”

Earlier this month, when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Bolton if he was worried Trump would come after him as part of the president’s “retribution campaign” being waged through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Bolton pointed out that Trump had already come after him by removing his Secret Service protection despite specific Iranian threats against his life. Bolton added: “I think it is a retribution presidency.”

Targeting Bolton has been a goal of FBI director Kash Patel, whom Trump appointed after Patel made it clear he intended to use the power of government against Trump’s opponents. “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in 2023 on Trump associate Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

Indeed, Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House Intelligence Committee that broke the story of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to smear Trump’s 2020 political opponent Joe Biden; New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud; and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who suggested on August 6 that the revision of the last few months’ jobs numbers might signal a turning point in the economy.

Those investigations come after another Trump loyalist, William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that the three committed mortgage fraud years ago. All three have denied the allegations, and Allan Smith, Steve Kopack, and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News note that accusation of mortgage fraud “has long been a common tactic in opposition research on political campaigns. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, pointed out that the administration does not appear to be investigating Trump loyalist Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who, divorce filings released this July show, claimed three different properties as his primary residence, thus securing lower-interest mortgages on them.

Earlier this week, bodycam footage released from a court filing by Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has charged with assaulting federal agents during the chaotic arrest of Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka on May 9, shows that the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general Todd Blanche personally ordered Baraka’s arrest. The case was later dismissed.

And yet Trump loyalists are not just targeting people in order to intimidate opponents. They seem determined to rewrite history to suit Trump.

In July the Department of Justice launched investigations of former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan, alleging they had made false statements to Congress about the investigation into the attempt by Russian operatives to help Trump’s 2016 candidacy. After all these years, Trump continues to come back to the scandal that he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Read more: Letters from an American – August 22, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 22, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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