The Free Press is reporting that D.C. police department supervisors have been under pressure to manipulate crime data to make it appear that violent crime has fallen compared to years past, according to the police union.
“ ‘When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,’ Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton said.” Sure, someone’s killed their girlfriend and is waving a gun in the air, but have you considered reporting it as a speeding ticket? The house has been broken into and the children are missing, but disorderly conduct has a better ring to it, I think. One police commander who allegedly changed crime data has been put on leave over it.
Daina Henry, a local transit police detective, detailed the altercation in a criminal complaint, alleging Dunn pointed his finger in the officer’s face and yelled, ‘Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city,’ minutes before ‘winding his arm back and forcefully throwing a sub-style sandwich’
Dunn has been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and employees of the United States – a felony. The charge could mean prison time and significant fines.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a social media post Thursday that Dunn had been fired from his job as an international affairs specialist in the Justice Department’s criminal division. She then unleashed a diatribe on the incident. You’d think Dunn was a mass shooter.
“If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you,” Bondi said in a post on the social media platform X. “I just learned that this defendant worked at the Department of Justice — NO LONGER. Not only is he FIRED, he has been charged with a felony. This is an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ. You will NOT work in this administration while disrespecting our government and law enforcement.”
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host, chimed in as well. “Let me be clear, if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, be certain we will come after you with the full weight of the law.,” Pirro said. “Our officers have a job to do, and they should not be abused in the process. This alleged assault is no joke – it’s a serious crime, and those who think otherwise will learn just how gravely mistaken they are.”
So much for charging people with a lesser offense to make it appear that violent crime has fallen in the nation’s capital.
The Pacific Northwest is in the national news with the appointment of Washington State’s Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Center, which is charged with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats, leads the way for the government in analyzing, understanding, and responding to the terrorist threat.. Of course the supine Republican-led Senate confirmed Kent’s appointment on Wednesday, with only one Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voting against Kent’s nomination to the role.
Joe Kent (Photo credit: Jenny Kane/Associated Press)
Kent initially went to Washington, D.C. in early 2025 when he was picked to be Chief of Staff for Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.
Kent has said he plans to devote the Center’s resources to targeting Latin American gangs and other criminal groups tied to migration. “President Trump is committed to identifying these cartels and these violent gang members and making sure that we locate them and that we get them out of our country,” Kent said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee in April.
Kent ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in Washington state’s Third Congressional District twice, once in 2022 and again in 2024, losing both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
In 2022, he paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer.
In March 2022, Kent endorsed remarks by Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) who had called Ukrainian President Volodymyr “a thug”. He added, “We, the west at large, pushed (Russia) into this situation of encroachment”.
“Zelenskyy was installed via a US backed color revolution, his goal is to move his county west so he virtue signals in woke ideology while using nazi battalions to crush his enemies,” Kent wrote on Twitter. “He was also smart enough to cut our elite in on the graft,” he said, while adding that Cawthorn “nailed it.”
At an April 2022 conservative political conference Kent claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin’s demands to take over the highly disputed Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine were “very reasonable.”
“No one who…says government-controlled agents were part of the Jan. 6 attacks should be in charge of counterterrorism – period,” Democratic Majority for Israel executive director Mark Mellman said in a statement on Kent’s nomination to be Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Joe Kent is a zealot whose blind devotion to an extremist ideology concerns us deeply.”
Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also critical. “At a time when domestic violent extremism is one of the fastest-growing threats to the homeland, we are being asked to put someone in charge of counterterrorism who has aligned himself with political violence, promoted falsehoods that undermine our democracy, and tried to twist intelligence to serve a political agenda,” Warner said in a speech on the Senate floor.
As a side note, the appointment of Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center is only slightly more despicable than the August 2, 2025 confirmation of former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in a 50-45 vote along party lines.
Jeannine Pirro (r) ( (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
“She has supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to exact vengeance on his political enemies and backed his challenges to federal judges who have questioned the legality of his immigration policies,” The New York Times reported. “And she was vocal in raising doubts about the legitimacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election to the presidency in 2020.”
Creator: CHRIS DELMAS | Credit: AFP via Getty Images
Donald Trump fired off more than 50 posts on his social media platform, Truth Social, during Kamala Harris’ Democratic Convention speech in August 2024
On Sunday, July 20, 2025, he posted 40 messages on Truth Social, bringing the total number of posts since his inauguration to 2,800.
He’s a damn machine with his stubby little fingers.
Previous presidents delivered significant, and even insignificant, policy pronouncements with carefully worded press releases that had been massaged by a raft of policy advisors. Trump just blurts things out, often in rambling, confusing word salad that veers off into unrelated topics.
Instead of delivering carefully thought-out foreign policy statements, Trump spews out declarations at all hours of the day and night. He probably would have announced “D-Day” , the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy, Franceduring WWII not with a stern, inspiring address to the nation but with a Truth Social post , “BOFFO!!!! WE DID IT. WE’RE SAVING THE FROGS. WATCH OUT KRAUTS. OUR TROOPS ARE ON YOUR DOORSTEP.”
On April 9, 2025, when the stock market was tanking, he posted: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” A few hours later, he announced a 90-day suspension of additional tariffs against dozens of countries, triggering a jump in the S&P 500 index.
In June, he shared a meme of himself walking down a dark city street with all-cap text that read, “HE’S ON A MISSION FROM GOD & NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING.” I doubt he knew the connection to the Blues Brothers line, “We’re on a mission from God”.
On July 21, 2025, in a bizarre effort to deflect public attention from the Epstein controversy, Trump shared an AI-generated fake video from a MAGA TikTok user depicting the arrest and imprisonment of Barack Obama after posting about Tulsi Gabbard’s claims that the Obama administration engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert his 2016 election victory. This followed another weird AI-generated video he posted on Truth Social in February depicting his plans for real estate development in Gaza, depicting Elon Musk and a shirtless Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu vacationing at a “Trump Gaza” resort in the Palestinian territory.
On July 22, 2025, he took time out from his busy day to whine about late night TV hosts: “The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It’s really good to see them go, and I hope l played a major part in it!”
To some degree, Trump is probably wailing into the void, since only about 5 million people use Truth social each month. But his posts, no matter how garbled, vitriolic or non-sensical, often get picked up by other media and spread far and wide., multiplying his audience .
He often ends his rambling texts with curt sign-offs like “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
We’d all probably be a lot better off if we ignored him.
If President Trump really wants to undermine American influence in Asia, he should insult Asian countries by nominating incompetent and offensive ambassadors to serve there. Oh wait. He’s already doing that.
On July 9, Trump nominated Nick Adams to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia. Adams was born in Australia, emigrated to the United States in 2012 and became an American citizen in 2021.
Once asked by The Sydney Morning Herald why he had left Australia for the United States, Adams replied: “Because I love guns, hot dogs, chicken fried steak, barbecue, cheerleaders, American football, small town parades, beauty pageants, pickup trucks, muscle cars and 16-lane freeways lined with supersized American flags.”
The New York Times has described him as “an early, fawning supporter of Mr. Trump” and cited his “incendiary rhetoric and vulgar humor that elevated him to political prominence”. Questions have also been raised about his role at the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, a non-profit he founded in 2016.[1]
A prolific poster on social media (Adams has 625,000 followers on the social media platform X), he is unstinting in his ceaseless praise of Trump. “Just like King David from the Bible, President Trump is a good shepherd, and we are his flock!,” he posted on July 6. “President Trump should be added to Mount Rushmore, he should have a monument built on the National Mall, and he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” Adams posted on June 24.
He has “amassed a conservative following with his over-the-top ‘alpha male’ persona”, making him “part of an unruly world of online content that primarily appeals to young men, known as the manosphere,” the New York Times reported.
In 2023, Adams posted on X, “I go to Hooters. I eat rare steaks. I lift extremely heavy weights. I read the Bible every night. I am pursued by copious amounts of women. I am wildly successful. I have the physique of a Greek God. I have an IQ over 180. I am extremely charismatic. They hate this,” Adams posted on X in 2023.
Typical of his alpha male shtick, the Washington Post reported he had written about “how if your wife is ‘high-maintenance’ then you’re a ‘loser’ no matter how hot she is,” and at at a Capitol Hill Club Young Republicans gathering in Washington, D.C. , he said “ ‘nasty women’ are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles!”
Adams’ reputation precedes him in Asia. “Having risen to prominence on a wave of machismo, misogyny and crass humour, Mr Adams’ controversial online history includes Islamophobic comments, denigrating Mr Trump’s political rivals as supporters of Islam and railing against purported efforts to “teach Islam in schools,” reported The Straits Times, a Singaporean daily English-language newspaper.
“US President Donald Trump’s nomination of controversial internet personality Nick Adams as the next US ambassador to Malaysia has raised not only eyebrows but also questions about the fiery right-wing influencer’s suitability for the role and the state of relations between Washington and the Muslim-majority nation going forward,” The Straits Times said. Mainly Muslim ethnic Malays form the majority or nearly 60 per cent of the country’s 35 million population.
The South China Morning Post reported that Adams would be “a wrong fit” for Muslim-majority Malaysia which favors quiet diplomacy over headline-grabbing rhetoric.
I’ve lived in Malaysia and I know it is a key United States partner in promoting regional stability and economic growth. That’s particularly the case in its position as the current chair of The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional grouping of states in Southeast Asia “that aims to promote economic and security cooperation among its ten members.”
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has criticized Trump’s long-threatened tariffs as “sharpened instruments of geopolitical rivalry” and has opposed American support for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“He (Adams) will have to tread a delicate and sophisticated line as the US and Malaysia negotiate trade tariffs, joust over their respective relationships with China and deal with an increasingly unstable geopolitical climate,” reported The Guardian.
The Policy Circle has also pointed out, “The U.S. has a variety of interests at stake in the Asia Pacific region, with pressing diplomatic, national security, and economic considerations, all against the backdrop of increased geopolitical volatility.”
Will any of this matter to the Senate when, or if, it holds a vote on Adams’ nomination?
Probably not, given the slavish behavior of Senate Republicans in pursuing Trump’s agenda.
After all, Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, was confirmed by the Senate as the United States Ambassador to France and Monaco in May by a vote of 51 to 45. This despite his previous conviction and prison sentence for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions, for which he was pardoned by President Trump in 2020.
And Trump’s nomination of Kimberly Guilfoyle, a brash former model, former wife of now California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Fox News personality and former fiancée of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to serve as Ambassador to Greece appears to be moving along.
Kimberly Guilfoyle speaking at Republican National Convention, July 17, 2024
With these precedents, why block an unqualified, crude, vulgar, Islamophobic alpha male from his confirmation?
[1]The Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, (FLAG) is a non-profit “dedicated to promoting and providing high-quality civics education that informs students and families about the greatness of America and the power of the American Dream”. Nick Adams is Executive Director. According to a Form 990 filed with the Internal Revenue Service, Adams worked an average of 50 hours per week on Foundation business and was the only paid employee, in 2023 earning $411,209. That was a hefty increase from his 2022 compensation of $248,251. Why do so many of these political funds end up being just vehicles for personal grift?
The Senate has passed its version of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 reconciliation bill – the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the deficit impact , with interest, over the next 10 years will be $4.1 trillion. It would add $5.5 trillion to the nation’s debt if made permanent.
The Committee says the bill is littered with special interest giveaways and new tax and spending entitlements, relies on numerous budget gimmicks, makes the tax code more complicated and less fair and explodes interest costs to nearly $2 trillion per year – including by adding to the debt and pushing up interest rates throughout the economy.
“The Senate took a bill that already borrowed way too much, and took it from bad to worse,” the Committee said. “The Senate expanded the House’s tax breaks, watered down its offsets, introduced new special interest giveaways, and added another trillion dollars onto the price tag.”
DonaldTrump and the Republican Party say the Committee and the Democrats who agree with it are wrong. The White House says the measure will actually cut the deficit by $1.4 trillion.
According to Factcheck.org, the Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, extending lower rates passed in 2017 and adding new tax cuts. But Senate Republicans have taken steps to remove consideration of the 2017 tax cuts in determining the bill’s impact on the deficit. Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty, who was presiding over the Senate in April, ruled that Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Senate Budget Committee chair, had the sole authority to decide whether extending the 2017 tax cuts officially adds to the deficit.
Graham and like-minded Senate Republicans have said that because the tax cuts have been in effect and are “current policy,” they are not new and do not add to future deficits.
The U.S. government announces its annual deficit and national debt each year, and often more frequently, such as monthly. The U.S. Treasury Department provides detailed information on the figures.
The national debt is the total amount of money the U.S. government owes from past and present borrowing, while the deficit is the difference between the government’s spending and revenue in a single year.
The TreasuryDirect website publishes data on the national debt, and the U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data website provides information on both the deficit and the debt. Additionally, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) releases monthly budget reviews that include the deficit or surplus for that month.
My question – If the Republicans are right, how are they going to explain the increase in the deficit and national debt that likely will be announced down the road if The One Big Beautiful Bill Act eventually gets Trump’s signature? Hmmm. Tis a conundrum.
Maybe they will just mimic Gilda Radner’s character, Emily Litella, on Saturday Night Live. When her misguided rants were challenged she just said, “Never mind”?
It was 1943. By all appearances, Rudolph Höss, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children – Klaus, Heidetraud, Brigitte, Hans-Jürgen and Annegret – had an idyllic life in the Polish countryside. They lived in an exquisite villa with a tranquil garden, a greenhouse and a small swimming pool.
The children played in the yard, Rudolph and Hedwig went about their daily lives and Hedwig adorned herself with lipstick and jewelry.
The Höss family’s backyard (Scene from The Zone of Interest)
But something was amiss.
Hedwig’s clothing and jewels were taken from a Jewish woman on her way to the gas chambers. Beyond the concrete wall at the property’s edge, topped with barbed wire, was a sprawling complex of gas chambers and crematoria known as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the largest extermination camp run by the Nazis in Poland during WWII. Rudolph Höss, a German SS officer, was the camp commandant. An estimated 960,000 Jews were killed there.
Women and children deemed “unfit for work” being unknowingly led to gas chamber #3 at Auschwitz, where two thousand people at a time could be murdered. Source: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
“Human beings did this to other human beings and it’s very convenient for us to try and distance ourselves from them because we think we can never behave this way, but I think we should be less certain than that,” said Jonathan Glazer, the director of a 2024 movie, “The Zone of Interest” that depicted the mundane daily activities of the family at their home during the war.
In the movie, when her husband is transferred to a new post in Germany, Hedwig is enraged. She demands that the family stay at Auschwitz, claiming, “This is the life we’ve always dreamed of.”
It all brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s talk about “the banality of evil”, which she cited when writing about one of Höss’ compatriots, Adolf Eichmann, in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
“Never again,” proclaimed the weary idealists, the peace-seekers, the hopeful.
So much for that.
Moises Sotelo, 54, of Newberg, OR was on his way to work at about 5:30 a.m. on June 12 when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers swooped in and took him into custody. According to an ICE detention database, Sotelo was transferred to ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington.
Moises Sotelo
“ICE Seattle arrested Moises Sotelo-Casas, 54, who is a citizen of Mexico, as a part of routine federal law enforcement activity that identifies, detains and removes criminal aliens to their country of origin,” ICE Public Affairs Officer David Yost said in a statement. “Sotelo has a criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, OR, and he will remain in custody pending removal.”
Sotelo’s family sought community support through a GoFundMe account with a $175,000 goal to “Help the Sotelo Family with Expenses After ICE Detainment”. The account had raised $142,751 from 2,100 donations as of June 30.
There was a time when Moises Sotel0’s plight would have generated little public concern and certainly fewer helping hands. .
In 2022, the public perception of an invasion of migrants across the southern border of the United States bore some relation to reality.
U.S. immigration authorities carried out 2.38 million migrant encounters (a term encompassing apprehensions and expulsions) at the southwest border during Joseph Biden’s presidency in FY 2022, according to the Migration Policy Institute. For the first time, not only were there more Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans encountered than migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but there were significant attempted crossings by Brazilians, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Ukrainians, Indians and Turks. Monthly encounters peaked at over 370,000 people in December 2023, nearly 12,000 a day. This isn’t count migrants who crossed the border and escaped detection. (For a better understanding of the brutal migration process, see Footnote 2)
The crescendo of arrivals overwhelmed processing capacities, federal infrastructure, and border communities. As the chaos at the border increased, the public became more hostile to the migrants. Donald Trump exploited that hostility in winning re-election to the presidency in November 2024.
His administration has since initiated vigorous, combative mass deportation efforts that resemble military-style attacks at homes, businesses and public spaces. Masked and heavily armed ICE agents wearing tactical gear and carrying high-powered rifles have been descending on areas in unmarked black SUVs and armored vehicles. Immigrants showing up at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices for routine check-ins are being arrested. “What should be routine appointments are becoming detention traps,” Katrina Kilgren, an immigration attorney and pro tem instructor at the Knight Law Center in Eugene, OR told the Register-Guard newspaper.
Increasingly, ICE has been targeting work sites, such as farms, meat production plants and restaurants, and migrant worker gathering places, such as Home Depot, in immigration sweeps.
In April, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told attendees of the 2025 Border Security Expo in Arizona he wanted the agency to become as efficient at deporting immigrants as e-commerce giant Amazon is at delivering packages. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, describing his ideal deportation process as “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
In one deportation case reported by the Portland Mercury, Jorge (a pseudonym being used to protect his identity) received a text message on his cell phone in Spanish from ICE in early June.Jorge had immigrated to the US from Nicaragua in late 2021 as an asylum seeker. He has an active asylum case, a work permit, a job, and a young family. The message told him to report to the nearest ICE facility within 12 hours to check in and sign paperwork, or face deportation. After consulting a lawyer, he followed the instructions, only to be detained by ICE agents and sent to a federal detention center in Tacoma, Washington.
ICE was holding about 56,397 people in detention facilities across the country as of June 15, 2025 likely setting a record high, according to TRAC Immigration. Despite the government’s stated goal of pursuing criminals, 40,433 out of 56,397—or 71.7%—held in ICE detention had no criminal record, TRAC Immigration claims. Adams County Detention Center in Natchez, Mississippi held the largest number of ICE detainees so far in FY 2025, averaging 2,166 per day as of June 2025.
The vast majority of ICE detention centers are privately operated and for profit, with companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic dominant in the space. Tom Homan, Trump’s border adviser, has called for boosting ICE’s detention capacity to at least 100,000 people. In furtherance of that goal, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted a request in April asking contractors to submit bids for new detention facilities, transportation, security personnel, medical services and administrative support.
Florida is now turning a remote abandoned mosquito-infested 39-square-mile airport next to Everglades National Park in Florida into the newest migrant prison featuring mostly tents and trailers in sweltering heat and nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said the facility will be temporary and have “zero environmental impacts.”
“It’s like a theatricalization of cruelty,” Maria Asuncion Bilbao, Florida campaign coordinator at the immigration advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, told The Associated Press.
President Trump visited the Everglades detention center on July 1, 2025.
The Trump administration has also sent immigrants to detention facilities outside the United States, including to Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo ( CECOT) in El Salvador, where brutal conditions predominate.
The Trump administration is also trying to deport a group of migrants convicted of violent crimes from countries including Cuba, Mexico and Vietnam to South Sudan, a country embroiled in fighting between various political and ethnic groups. In a Travel Advisory, the U.S. Department of State advises: “Violent crime, such as carjackings, shootings, ambushes, assaults, robberies, and kidnappings are common throughout South Sudan, including Juba. Foreign nationals have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, armed robberies, and other violent crimes.”
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The Trump administration wanted the power to do so as part of its effort to discourage illegal migration by threatening to deport migrants a third country with no recourse.
Legal analyst Steve Vladeck told CNN, “…today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
To add insult to injury, Semafor reported on July 1 that the Trump administration is thinking about trying to void naturalized immigrants citizenship— potentially starting with New York City mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani. Asked about Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’ proposal to strip Mamdani, who was born in Uganda but became a citizen in 2018, of his legal status, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s “something to be investigated.” Semafor reported that GOP leaders are increasingly comfortable with revoking foreign nationals’ visas over their political beliefs or actions, and that may soon extend to citizens.
An American naturalization ceremony
NPR reported on June 30 that the Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship, a practice heavily used during there McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s. “Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online,” NPR said. Approximately 25 million immigrants are naturalized citizens.
Hans von Spakovsky, with the conservative Heritage Foundation, told NPR he supports the DOJ’s denaturalization efforts. “I do not understand how anyone could possibly be opposed to the Justice Department taking such action to protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals, and terrorists,” he said.
But Trump’s draconian efforts to halt border crossings and deport already settled migrants are now driving a new sympathy for migrants and resistance to ICE’s aggressive deportation efforts.
Even popular podcaster Joe Rogan is raising doubts about Trump’s deportation chaos. “Bro, these ICE raids are fucking nuts, man,” Rogan said in June. ” I don’t think if they, the Trump administration, if they’re running and they said, we’re gonna go to Home Depot and we’re gonna arrest all the people at Home Depot, we’re gonna go to construction sites, and we’re gonna just, like, tackle people at construction sites. I don’t think anybody would have signed up for that. They said, we’re gonna get rid of the criminals and the gang members first, right? And now we’re, we’re seeing, like, Home Depots get raided. Like, that’s crazy.”
Local government officials are raising concerns, too. A group of elected officials in one of Oregon’s most racially diverse counties pushed back Monday against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (See footnote 3)
“ICE has no place in our neighborhoods,” Cornelius City Councilor Angeles Godinez told OPB in June. “When fear enters our community, trust leaves,” she said. “Without trust, our schools, our cities and even our local economies suffer.”
“To the immigrant community across Oregon, I am one of you, I see you. I know what you’re going through and I stand with you in unwavering solidarity,” said Tigard City Councilor Yi-Kang Hu.
And then there’s the massive cost of Trump’s immigration program, a veritable cornucopia of cash.[1] “If the bill passes, it could make ICE the nation’s largest jailer, Wirth more funding for detention than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons,” according to immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
With the federal deficit already high, and projected to increase to destructive levels under the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill”, America is going to pay a heavy price for Trump’s deportation fiasco. With the immigration blowout, the Senate-passed a reconciliation bill that would add over $4 trillion to the national debt through Fiscal Year (FY) 2034, $1 trillion more than the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
Protests against immigration arrests are multiplying as people rail against government overreach and a majority of Americans now say actions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have “gone too far,” according to a new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll..
But it’s not enough.
As The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said earlier this year, the Trump administration’s widespread and persistent cruelty, indiscriminate immigration enforcement tactics, wrongful questioning and detention of American citizens, unjust profiling, and abuse of common decency “signals a troubling shift toward a more punitive and dehumanizing approach to immigration enforcement.”
” History has shown us time and time again,” the Leadership Conference said, ” that when communities come together, our collective resistance has the power to rewrite the narrative and create change. While it may feel like we are in the midst of a dark chapter, together, we can write the next one — a chapter where compassion and justice prevail over cruelty and inhumanity. In the end, that’s what defines us — not just as a nation, but as human beings.”
We cannot be the Höss family. We cannot be innocent bystanders. Evil must not triumph. We must resist.
Immigration detention capacity: Expand capacity to detain immigrants taken into custody
$45 bil.
Border wall: Fund border barrier system construction and related activities
$45 bil.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Funding for hiring, training, transportation, facilities and legal resources to carry out immigration enforcement and removals
$31 bil.
State and local grants: Funding for border security, immigration enforcement and major event security. The Senate parliamentarian determined that this provision does not comply with the chamber’s rules, and it may be removed or modified.
$13 bil.
Homeland Security Department funding: For border security and immigration enforcement
$12 bil.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Funding to expand workforce and purchase new vehicles and technology
$12 bil.
Border surveillance technology
$6.2 bil.
Department of Justice grants: For state and local immigration and law enforcement
$3.5 bil.
Department of Justice funding: For immigration and other law enforcement
$3.3 bil.
Fund vetting for sponsors of unaccompanied alien children: Through the Office of Refugee Resettlement
$0.3 bil.
2. For a better understanding of what is driving migrants to the United States and who is guiding them through Mexico to the US border, read Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León. In 2015, he began a long-term ethnographic project focused on understanding the daily lives of Honduran smugglers who profit from transporting migrants across the length of Mexico. This 2024 National Book Award-winning story examines the complicated relationship among transnational gangs, the human smuggling industry, and migrant desires for safety and well-being.
3 .An immigration scholar, Austin Kocher, has written a Journalist Resource guide analyzing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest data, based on datasets published by the Data Deportation Project. His observations are revealing as to the Trump administration’s motives:
“The Trump administration is now demanding that ICE make 3,000 arrests per day. That is to say, ICE did not come close to meeting the quota set in January until June—and even then; only for a few days at a time. To be clear: this is a lot of arrests. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s also clear that the Trump administration’s daily arrest quotas are detached from the reality of what ICE can do—and even more so now that the new quota is 3,000 per day.
This prompts a further question: if these quotas are demonstrably unattainable, why have them? In my view, the answer is simple: the unattainability of the quotas is the point.
An essential component of Donald Trump’s longstanding approach to politics is to invent crises, or exploit existing crises, in ways that ensure they are unsolvable. No amount of funding for immigration enforcement will ever be enough to achieve his mass deportation goals. No amount of power concentrated in the office of the President will ever be sufficient to exercise totalizing control over immigration. The goal is not to solve a real problem, but to manufacture an ever-expanding crisis that justifies ever-expanding unregulated power.”
“ ’Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.“
Percy Bysshe Shelley
UPDATE: 05/12/2026: A group of Miami residents sued Trump, his library fund, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Miami Dade College and its trustees, and Florida officials to stop the construction of Trump’s presidential library, Heather Cox Richardson and other media outlets reported. The group is charging that state officials violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause when they transferred almost three acres of prime waterfront land, worth between $67 million and $300 million, to Trump’s library foundation for $10. Trump has already said he wants to build a hotel on the site rather than a traditional library.
UPDATE: 10/14/2025: A Florida court has put on hold the transfer of land held by a Miami college for President Trump’s presidential library, ruling that the college failed to provide reasonable public notice for its board vote to donate the land. The injunction Tuesday temporarily froze the transfer of 2.63 acres to commemorate Trump’s time in the White House. The Miami Dade College land is now a parking lot estimated to be worth more than $67 million, according to county appraisers.
UPDATE: 9/24/2025:NBC News reported today that Trump’s presidential library will be housed in Florida on land currently owned by Miami-Dade College, adjacent to the Freedom Tower and located on the city’s downtown waterfront.
Donald Trump, a man with the reading habits of an illiterate and the attention span of a hummingbird, wants to build a presidential library when he leaves office.
He also wants to fly away in a Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet gifted to the United States by Qatar. When he leaves office he plans to take it with him to his yet-to-be-built presidential library. A submissive Republican-led Congress may let him get away with this normalization of corruption.
The future Trump Presidential Library? An AI vision.
Trump is already trying to fill an account to build his library.
In December 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward the library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. Under the settlement agreement, the payment is described as a “charitable contribution.”
In January 2025, Meta Platforms agreed to settle a lawsuit for $25 million after suspending Trump’s Facebook accounts following the January 6 attack other U.S. Capitol, with $22 million of that going toward the presidential library.
After his last term in office, a top fundraiser on Trump’s campaign said the president had told supporters he wanted to raise $2 billion for his library. Back then, however, there was considerable skepticism about Trump’s political future or the likelihood of him being able to raise enough money for a library. “I thought to myself, what is this alternative fantasy life you’re living?” one prominent fundraiser said. “I have no clue where they think they’ll get this money raised. Anyone who gives to him will be radioactive.”
How times have changed.
The location of a potential Trump Presidential Library is yet to be determined. The Washington Post reported at the end of Trump’s first term that sources close to Trump said he planned to build a library and museum in Florida. In March 2025, it was reported that members of Trump’s team were looking at possible sites at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Palm Beach County, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is located and Florida International University (FIU) near the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort.
Trump’s inaugural committee has also said any money left over from its $250 million haul will go the presidential library, as will millions being paid by individuals to dine and meet with Trump at special events at Mar-a-Lago.
The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. was incorporated in Florida on December 20, 2024, shortly after the ABC News settlement, and a library website already exists.
As with the The Barack Obama Presidential Center, the website makes clear that The National Archives will administer the records of the Trump administration (textual, electronic, audiovisual, and artifacts) which will remain at National Archives facilities in the National Capital Region. In other words, there will be no actual presidential library at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library .
Still to be determined is what Trump’s library will look like, what will be in it or how much it will cost. Obama is still struggling to raise money to compete construction of his presidential center, 3050 days after the end of his presidency. The project has also been beset by controversy, including questions over high “executive compensation” paid to people running the project. The center’s projected cost has also nearly doubled from its original estimate and is now projected at close to $1 billion.
President Trump, never one to miss an opportunity for an insulting comment, has called the Obama Center “a disaster” and blamed “woke” construction workers” for problems at the site. “I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I’d give him help because I build on time and on budget,” Trump exclaimed at a White House meeting with new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meeting in early May. 2025. Trump has apparently forgotten the six bankruptcies from his over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City and New York and the destruction of his shuttered 39-story hotel and casino in Atlantic City, N.J. in 30 seconds with controlled explosions in Feb. 2021 .
Given Trump’s ability to generate controversy out of thin air, expect the path toward a Trump Presidential Library to be similarly erratic, filled with drama and leaving disillusioned supporters in its wake.
Of course all this controversy over a jet-themed presidential library would be moot if the practice of building such ego-satisfying monuments that aren’t even real research libraries any more ended once and for all.
As a matter of fact, presidential libraries filled with reading material are a thing of the past anyway.
The Barack Obama Presidential Center under construction, Oct. 2024
The Barack Obama Presidential Center on a 20-acres site in Chicago, if it’s ever finished, isn’t going to have a presidential library. Artifacts and records from Obama’s two terms in the White House are being digitalized and organized by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and will be stored in existing NARA facilities. The only library planned for the site is a new branch of the Chicago Public Library in a massive a 235-foot-tall fortresslike museum tower.
Obama has appealed to a roster of contributors to build his monument, with some heavy hitters donating $25 million or more. If Trump goes ahead with his library plans, he will likely have to copy Obama and initiate a massive fundraising effort to supplement the funds he has already squeezed out of lawsuits.
Is that really what the country needs, more Trump lawsuits to generate cash, an onslaught of solicitations to potential donors large and small, under-the-table deals with donors while Trump is still in office, more inevitable controversy and, in the end, just another monument to the ephemeral nature of political power?
It’s time to end this scattering of presidential shrines across the American landscape, to put a stop to more money-sucking temples to former presidents. With the digitization of records, there will be no need for a vast collection of paper records reminiscent of the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Kseniia Petrova (Polina Pugacheva, via Associated Press)
UPDATE
On May 28, the New York Times reported that a federal judge said she would grant bail to Ksenia Petrova in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing. She added that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.
_________________
To what levels of uncaring depravity have we sunk?
U.S. Government lawyers told a federal judge today that the Trump administration intends to deport a Harvard scientist back to Russia, a country she fled in 2022, despite her fear that she will be arrested there over her protest of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The New York Times reported the action today.
Christina Reiss, chief judge of the United States District Court in Vermont, asked the government to clarify whether or not it planned to deport Ms. Kseniia Petrova to Russia.
“You are asking for her removal to Russia?” she asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Jeffrey M. Hartman, an attorney representing the Department of Justice, replied, according to the Times.
That this is taking place in Donald Trump’s America is a travesty.
Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Returning to Boston’s Logan International Airport from a trip to France, she brought back frog embryo samples for her lab. The PBS News Hour reported on April 24 that ICE said she knowingly broke the law in failing to properly declare the embryos. According to the News Hour, A typical customs violation results in a fine, but Petrova had her visa revoked, was detained and flagged for deportation.
In moves more common in a police state, where people are swiftly moved from place to place to avoid detection, ICE first sent Petrova to a cell at the airport. The next day they transferred her to a jail in Vermont. She spent the next week there. Then ICE flew Petrova to detention in Louisiana. She has now been imprisoned at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana for two months in a one-room facility with 89 other women, wall-to-wall beds and almost no personal privacy. Yes, for two months now.
The News Hour reported that Petrova has been a vocal critic of the Russian government and its actions in Ukraine and fears persecution if deported there. “I am afraid that, if I come to Russia, I will be arrested, because we have in Russia special law,” she said. “If you say something against current war, you will be imprisoned, and you can be imprisoned for 15 years.”
“ICE is required to detain individuals … only if they are a flight risk or a danger to the community. Ms. Petrova is neither,” said her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky. “Her continued detention serves no purpose and wastes limited government resources.”
The Trump administration, banking on the support of its most dedicated backers, is running roughshod over human rights right here in America.
In another example of Donald Trump’s pay-to-play presidency, the Trump administration plans to accept a luxurious $400 million Boeing 747-8 plane as a donation from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One. Hopefully it won’t be loaded with ultra-sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. The plane will ultimately go to the Trump presidential library, ensuring Trump could continue to use it.. “This isn’t a good idea even if the plane was being donated to the US govt.”, said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT). “But Trump GETS TO KEEP THE PLANE???”
“…the issue with Donald Trump is he does not believe in rules and laws and norms,” David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, said on CNN. “The issue with Donald Trump is he does not believe in rules and laws and norms. He thinks they’re for suckers. And he thinks if you can get a free plane, as he said today, why wouldn’t you do it? You wouldn’t do it because it’s a bribe.” The Free Press observed, “Just consider the plain matter of our national security. A plane handed to the president by a foreign government? Let alone a government that hosts the leaders of Hamas; cooperates with Iran; fuels popular antisemitism throughout the Arab world through its government mouthpiece, Al Jazeera; and has poured nearly more than $2 billion into American universities since 2021, as these campuses express solidarity with Palestinian terrorism?”
The opulent gold interior of the Qatari plane echoes the aesthetic of Trump Tower and Trump’s gold-centered redecoration of the Oval Office.
President Trump was asked on “Meet the Press” whether every person on U.S. soil was entitled to due process. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m not a lawyer.”
On May 27, 2025, Trump pardoned Virginia Sheriff Scott Jenkins. Jenkins had been found guilty of 1 count of conspiracy, 4 counts of honest services fraud and 7 counts of bribery concerning programs receiving fed funds. Prosecutors said he accepted bribes from 8 people, including 2 undercover FBI agents. The men who bribed Jenkins paid for auxiliary deputy sheriff positions so they could avoid traffic tickets and carry concealed firearms without a permit. U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, appointed by Trump, posted the comment “No MAGA left behind” about his decision to recommend a pardon for Jenkins.
Sheriff Scott Jenkins
Trump also announced on May 27 that he would be pardoning TV celebrities, Todd and Julie Chrisley, famous for the reality show, “Chrisley Knows Best”. The Chrisleys were convicted in 2022 of tax evasion and conspiring to defraud banks in the Atlanta area out of more than $30 million in loans by submitting false documents. Prosecutors said the couple walked away from their responsibility for repayment when Todd Chrisley declared bankruptcy and left $20-plus million in unpaid loans. Julie Chrisley was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, and Todd Chrisley got 12 years behind bars. The couple was also ordered to pay $17.8 million in restitution, which will now be forgiven.
Todd and Julie Chrisley
The United States used to be a reliable trade partner with established policies, procedures and tariff rates so businesses could plan ahead. The Washington Post reported on May 15 that since Trump took office, he changed his tariff policies at least 50 times. Some didn’t last a day. “It’s been completely insane,” economist Michael Strain, with the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank, told the Post.
In with the gold, out with the old. President Trump has loaded down the historic Oval Office with gaudy gold decorations everywhere. “Gold has always been the color of absolute power and those who aspire to it,” says Kimberly Chrisman -Campbell. “But in more recent history, its meaning has become more complex: Its association with dictators, celebrities, and artists has also transformed it into a sign of excess, corruption, and cultural domination.”
Trump’s Oval Office/Biden’s Oval Office
On January 10, 2025, Trump released an “ethics agreement” that prohibited the Trump Organization from making deals with foreign governments. The Trump Organization subsequently cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company plans to build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student on a valid F-1 student visa ,was arrested on March 25, 2025, by six masked plainclothes agents from the US Department of Homeland Security and transported to a detention facility in Louisiana.
The arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk
The only evidence cited against her was an op-ed she co-authored in the university newspaper a year earlier critical of Tufts response to the war in Gaza. She spent six weeks in detention before being freed after US District Judge William K. Sessions III ordered her immediate release.
On April 8, 2026, Trump said countries were “kissing my ass” to secure trade deals before increased tariffs were levied.
While ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghans who came to the United States after our chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, exposing them to possible deportation, the Trump administration is using taxpayer dollars to fly white Afrikaner South Africans to the U.S. on chanter flights. Earlier this month, Trump said on Truth Social that “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State, and Troy Edgar, Deputy Homeland Security Secretary, greeted dozens of Afrikaners at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Monday, May 12.
The first group of Afrikaner refugees from South Africa arrived on May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson).
On May 4, 2025, Trump said he decided to announce he was reopening the Alcatraz prison. His reasoning? “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order,“ he said. “Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies…. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order… but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak.
Alcatraz Island today.
Trump launched a $TRUMP meme coin on January 17, 2025, just before he took office. In promoting the meme coin, there coin’s website says “Celebrate Our Win & Have Fun!” The website selling the tokens says the coins “are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type”. By late April 2025, it had fallen 88% from its high. Just 58 wallets cashed in over $10 million each on the coin, while a staggering 764,000 wallets were sitting on losses as of May 7, 2025, according to a report from Chainalysis. Trump offered an “intimate private dinner” with him for the 220 top holders of the meme coin, along with a private reception and White House tour for the top 25 investors. The promotion bumped up sales and generated an estimated $900,000 in trading fees. “With this meme coin dinner, Trump is giving the highest bidders access to the president while lining his own pockets,” MSNBC reported. Buying the meme coin allows investors to make an end-run around U.S. ethics laws: While noncitizens can’t donate to political campaigns, they can invest in those assets. “It looks very corrupt,” Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) told the New York Times.
Where’s the public outrage? As Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker, “The American public has been inundated with news of the Trump family’s self-enrichment for so long that many of their dealings now barely create a stir.”
The U.S. is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, the Wall Street Journal reported on May 6, 2025. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, a NATO ally, “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information, said Director of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. “They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”
“As the stock markets crashed on Friday April 4, Donald Trump left Washington,” Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic. “He did not go to New York to consult with Wall Street. He did not go to Dover, Delaware, to receive the bodies of four American servicemen, killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. Instead, he went to Florida, where he visited his Doral golf resort, which was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV golf tournament, and stayed at his Mar-a-Lago club, where many tournament fans and sponsors were staying, too. His private businesses took precedence over the business of the nation.”
On May 8, 2025, the Trump administration fired the head of the Library of Congress, Carla Hayden, the first Black woman and the first woman to hold the job, with a blunt two- sentence email, “”Carla, On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.” Confirmed by the Senate to the job in 2016, her 10-year term was set to expire next year. On May 12, Trump named Todd Blanche, the lead defense lawyer in hTrump’s criminal trial in Manhattan last year, to replace Hayden, but encountered resistance when staff members at the Library refused to give two Justice Department officials access to the Library’s headquarters on Capitol Hill, insisting that Congress must have input on Hayden’s replacement.
Carla Hayden
On May 6, 2025, Kari Lake, asenior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government body that oversees Voice of America, said the far-right news coverage of the One America News (OAN) Network will fuel the Voice of America. Since World War II, the Voice of America has provided news coverage and cultural programming to people around the world who don’t have access to a free press. Its weekly audience is about 360 million. OAN is “a conspiracy-boosting outlet with a far fringier voice than right-leaning outlets like Newsmax and Fox News.,” reported CNN.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, said on May 9, 2025, the White House was considering suspending habeas corpus for illegal immigrants in the United States. “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion.” he said. “So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at.”
Stephen Miller
President Trump has nominated Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, who has a reputation as a strong Trump defender on “The Five” talk show, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, DC. Pirro is the 23rd Fox employee Trump has appointed so far to his administration this term. Pirro was named in a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for questioning the validity of ballot tabulations on Fox’s broadcasts. Fox settled the case and was forced to acknowledge that statements by Ms. Pirro and others were false. In 2021, Trump pardoned Ms. Pirro’s former husband, Albert J. Pirro Jr., who was convicted of conspiracy and tax evasion charges in 2000.
Jeanine Pirro
House and Senate Republicans under Trump have come up with plans to pass tax cuts and defense and border security spending increases without requiring equal amounts of offsets. They would allow $3 to $7 trillion in new debt—making it one of the largest deficit increases in history. “At this moment—when the national debt is skyrocketing, we spend more on interest than national defense, and trust funds are on the brink of insolvency—if there is one thing that should be clear from a fiscal perspective, it is that we should not be passing new policies that add more to the national debt.,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. By 2027, under a reconciliation bill, debt would exceed the previous record of 106 percent of GDP set just after World War II.
Unfortunately, there is a risk that the bill could get even worse, according to the Committee.. Already, some members are trying to add to the bill’s costs – and the Senate reconciliation instructions allow for twice as much borrowing as the House’s.
In his second term, Donald Trump has been generous in issuing pardons. Early in his term, he issued about 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 Jan. 6 criminals, including people convicted of violently assaulting police, then pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists and former Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich. In late March, he pardoned Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton for his October 2022 conviction of federal crimes related to defrauding investors with false claims about the success of the electric and hydrogen-powered truck maker. CNBC reported that after his criminal sentencing, Milton had “made significant political donations to Trump and his allies” including $920,000 to the Trump 47 Committee in October of 2024. The Trump administration also terminated the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, Elizabeth G. Oyer, after she opposed restoring actor Mel Gibson’s rights to carry a gun, her spokesperson and two Justice Department officials familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Shortly after being sworn in, Trump signed an executive order that pardoned roughly 1,500 people who were involved in the January 6 Capitol riot. Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images
By Peter L. Steiner, “Hopeless but not Serious”, Jan. 25, 2025
NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” His reply: “I don’t know.”
President Donald Trump has pressured nine of the nation’s largest and most prestigious law firms to capitulate to demands that they provide nearly $1 billion in free, or pro bono, legal work to causes Trump supports.[1]
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said one of the firms, the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP law firm (“Paul, Weiss”) agreed that:
Paul, Weiss will take on a wide range of pro bono matters that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society, whether “conservative” or “liberal.”
Paul, Weiss will dedicate the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services over the course of President Trump’s term to support the Administration’s initiatives, including: assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.
Paul, Weiss affirms its unwavering commitment to these core ideals and principles, and will not deny representation to clients, including in pro bono matters and in support of non-profits, because of the personal political views of individual lawyers.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that Paul, Weiss also “… acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz”, who had worked as a prosecutor in Manhattan and had pushed for Mr. Trump to be charged criminally. A copy of the agreement provided to the media by Brad S. Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, did not, however, include any mention of Pomerantz. The New York Times also reported that five people briefed on the matter said Mr. Karp said he did not criticize Mr. Pomerantz with the president, in spite of Mr. Trump’s assertion to the contrary.
In a particularly hypocritical move, Trump added to his Truth Social post, “Our Justice System is betrayed when it is misused to achieve political ends,” despite the fact that Paul, Weiss only agreed to Trump’s terms after he threatened the firm,
Initially, the compliant law firms are said to have agreed to the free legal work assuming it would be for such uncontroversial causes as helping veterans. But Trump, who has a habit of wandering into unexpected territory in his remarks, now appears to have a broader view of what the law firms may be pressured to work on.
“Over the last week, he has suggested that the firms will be drafted into helping him negotiate trade deals,” the New York Times reported on April 16. “He has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry. And he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms…as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes. White House officials believe that some of the pro bono legal work could even be used toward representing Mr. Trump or his allies if they became ensnared in investigations.”
Whatever issues Trump chooses to rope the law firms into working on, what will the public know?
On one side, even though the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applies to records created by federal agencies within the executive branch, the White House Office itself is exempt from FOIA. This means the public cannot directly request information from the White House Office[2] under FOIA.
A FOIA memo from the U.S. Department of Justice on White House Records states:
“By its terms, the FOIA applies to “the Executive Office of the President,” 5 U.S.C. § 552(f), but this term does not include either “the President’s immediate personal staff” or any part of the Executive Office of the President “whose sole function is to advise and assist the President.” Meyer v. Bush, 981 F.2d 1288, 1291 n.1 (D.C. Cir. 1993) (quoting H.R. Rep. No. 1380, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 14 (1974)); see also, e.g., Soucie v. David, 448 F.2d 1067, 1075 (D.C. Cir. 1971). This means, among other things, that the parts of the Executive Office of the President that are known as the “White House Office” are not subject to the FOIA.”
Records originating with the Office of the Vice President or any of its component offices, are likewise not subject to the FOIA.
Similarly, the records of communications between the law firms and the White House or of work done by the law firms at Trump’s request would not be subject to the FOIA.
So how will the public know what Trump’s White House and the law firms bending the knee to Trump are doing? It won’t. And how will Congress know what Trump’s White House and the law firms are doing? It won’t. And how with the media know what Trump’s White House and the law firms are doing? Unless they are particularly aggressive, they won’t either.
The nearly $1 billion of pro bono work the nine law firms, and potentially more, will be doing for Trump could have a major impact on American life. And it looks like it can all be done in secret.
Shameful.
[1] The nine firms are Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; Latham & Watkins; Milbank; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; A & O Shearman; Kirkland & Ellis; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
ThinkingOregon 