President Pedophile?
Whether Trump's political career will survive the complete opening of the Epstein
files is problematic. Assuming the salacious stories are true, will his supporters
tolerate a pedophile?
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
TRUMP DEPLOYS NATIONAL GUARD TO POLICE D.C., SAYS OTHER CITIES MAY BE NEXT. Donald Trump on Aug. 11 moved to deploy the National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C., while also officially taking over the city’s police department, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (8/11).
What’s more, Trump suggested that this could be a model for other American cities.
As reported by NBC News, Trump said during his announcement on plans to deploy the National Guard in the nation’s capital that “other cities are hopefully watching this” and that he hoped it would make them “self-clean up, and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all of the things that caused the problem.”
Trump then named Baltimore, Oakland, New York, and Chicago as potential future targets for National Guard deployments and other measures.
Shortly after Trump made his announcement, Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb indicated that he was not taking the president’s attempt to take over his city’s police force lying down.
“The administration’s actions are unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful,” he declared in a post on X. “There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia. Violent crime in D.C. reached historic 30-year lows last year, and is down another 26% so far this year. We are considering all of our options and will do what is necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents.”
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) was also quick to condemn the president’s takeover of D.C. law enforcement as an unnecessary power grab.
“The president’s attempt to federalize the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard on the streets of our nation’s capital is an abuse of power,” she said. “It’s an egotistical, pathetic attempt to stoke fear and distract from his failures: America is less affordable, healthy, and safe under this administration.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who last year served as the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee, chided critics who had accused him in the past of exaggerating the authoritarian threat of a second Trump term.
“The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting,” he wrote on X.
The NAACP, meanwhile, compared Trump’s enthusiasm for deploying the National Guard in Washington, D.C. to purportedly battle crime with the lackadaisical attitude he took toward deploying the National Guard when his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
“As a reminder: The same president who proclaims he wants to take back our capital during a historic 30-year low crime rate also couldn’t find the National Guard on Jan. 6,” the organization wrote.
Politico reported Trump’s seizure of the D.C. police is on borrowed time from a legal perspective. While the Home Rule Act gives Trump the power to take control of the D.C. police force for emergencies, this power only lasts for 30 days, after which he must seek authorization from Congress to maintain control.
TRUMP NAMES CLUELESS CRANK TO RUN BUREAU OF LABOR STATS. President Trump announced E.J. Antoni as his nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Aug. 11, after he fired the former commissioner Aug. 1, blaming her for a weaker-than-expected jobs report.
Antoni, chief economist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, was a contributor to Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint for taking over the U.S. government, .Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (8/11)
Dr. Erika McEntarfer, a labor economist who was nominated by Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in January 2024, was fired by Trump in retaliation for a jobs report showing the job market beginning to stagnate since he began implementing his tariffs, with only 73,000 jobs added in July—far below the expected 110,000. The report also showed downward job number revisions for May and June.
Instead of admitting that he made a mistake or changing course, Trump has pushed a twisted and false conspiracy theory alleging that jobs numbers are being manipulated.
Antoni’s candidacy for the top BLS job has the open support of former Trump chief of staff and right-wing conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon.
“EJ Antoni as the new head of Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s what we’re pushing,” Bannon said on his podcast, on which Antoni previously appeared to call for McEntarfer’s ouster.
After BLS released a revised jobs report on the state of the economy in August 2024, Antoni declared that it was the sign of a recession.
“Wall Street is increasingly waking up to the fact that the economy post-COVID has never been as good as the government bean counters claimed, and a recession may have already begun,” he told the right-wing Daily Caller.
Similarly, after the passage of the American Rescue Plan in 2021, Antoni wrote an analysis arguing that it would cause millions of jobs to be lost.
He was extremely wrong on both counts.
At the end of his 4-year term, President Biden added 16.6 million jobs to the economy after signing several key pieces of legislation to stimulate the economy, including the Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Most Republicans—and the Heritage Foundation—opposed those bills.
The economy that Trump inherited from Biden was stabilized after the height of the coronavirus pandemic under Trump and was growing. But now that costs are being artificially increased because of Trump’s tariffs, that growth is under significant threat.
Trump’s tariffs are already hurting the economy, and now someone who couldn’t see economic improvements coming when they were well on their way is likely to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What could go wrong?
RAIL WORKERS WARN UNION PACIFIC-NORFOLK SOUTHERN MERGER WOULD ‘SIMPLY LINE THE POCKETS OF WALL STREET.’ An inter-union U.S. rail coalition on Aug. 11 announced its formal opposition to Union Pacific’s $85 billion bid to purchase Norfolk Southern and any other private consolidation of railroad giants, warning that such mergers serve only to enrich investors at the expense of workers, passengers, and communities across the nation, Jake Johnson noted at Common Dreams (8/11).
Railroad Workers United (RWU)’s steering committee adopted a resolution outlining its opposition to the pending Union Pacific (UP)-Norfolk Southern (NS) deal, noting that rail mergers “have more often than not been fraught with inefficiencies, confusion, service disruptions, clogged terminals, staffing shortages, exhausted workers, and general malaise.”
RWU “opposes this UP-NS merger as well as any and all takeovers, mergers, or other combinations of the remaining Class One railroads under the current system of private ownership,” the resolution states.
“The only further consolidation of the continent’s rail system that RWU would support is one that is publicly owned—how most nations’ rail infrastructure is owned and operated today—and where the railroad workers are included in all aspects of managing railroad operations,” the document concludes.
RWU joins other prominent rail labor leaders and policy experts who have expressed deep concerns about the proposed takeover, which is part of a wave of mergers in the U.S. industrial sector this year under the Trump administration. The UP-NS merger still must receive federal approval.
“If the Union-Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger is approved, BNSF, the other western railroad—owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway—will almost certainly pursue CSX, the other eastern railroad, to avoid being boxed out,” Arnav Rao, a transportation policy analyst at the Open Markets Institute, warned in a piece for Washington Monthly.
“If the United States is serious about reshoring manufacturing, it cannot afford to let its rail system become a duopoly,” Rao added. “Allowing Union Pacific to absorb Norfolk Southern would leave just two national carriers, each with incalculable leverage over customers, workers, and regulators.”
MOST OF TRUMP’S NET WORTH COMES FROM ‘CRYPTO,’ WHICH TRUMP’S TEAM IS WORKING TO DEREGULATE. Over his nearly seven months as president, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been taking a sledgehammer to regulations on cryptocurrency. A new report sheds further light on the reasons why, Stephen Prager noted for Common Dreams (8/11).
The president may be profiting far more from his “rapidly-growing crypto empire” than was previously known and has used it to dramatically increase his net worth, according to an investigation released by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US.
While a report from Bloomberg on July 2 estimated the billionaire president’s crypto holdings to total about $620 million of his nearly $7 billion net worth, Accountable examined other investments that had not previously been reported, but indicated Trump’s net worth could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets, or 73% of his net worth.
As part of what they called “Crypto Week,” House Republicans passed multiple industry-friendly pieces of crypto legislation in July, the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, which Accountable says would allow Trump to directly profit.
The GENIUS Act purported to create a regulatory framework for so-called “stablecoins,” which are pegged to existing financial assets like the U.S. dollar and are poised to become part of the portfolios of increasing numbers of companies. However, as Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote for Rolling Stone in June:
“One of Trump’s priorities has been the normalization of these so-called stablecoins — a type of asset that his family is now hawking.
“Despite the moniker, stablecoins can be extremely unstable. A 2023 study published by the Bank for International Settlements found that of 60 stablecoins analyzed in their review, all of them had become de-pegged from their underlying asset at least once.
“The 2022 crypto crash was triggered by the failure of Terraform Lab’s Terra/Luna “algorithmic” stablecoin—the collapse of which saw $45 billion erased in the span of a week.”
The bill places only very light regulations on stablecoins, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that since he controls such a large percentage of the stablecoin market, their uptake into the broader economy could “create a superhighway for Donald Trump’s corruption.”
“As soon as the players understand that Trump’s intervention is a real possibility, then the stablecoin market is no longer about a careful review of whether there are adequate dollars to back up a particular stablecoin, or whether the stablecoin issuer has an AAA rating,” Warren said.
“Instead, the whole game becomes one of trying to engage the president to weigh the end and make one set of coins more valuable, and therefore another set of coins less valuable,” she added. “It’s corruption, but it’s also a market manipulation that ultimately drains away any development … It undermines all the markets at that point.”
But the CLARITY Act, which has been passed by the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate, is “the real prize” for the industry. It would dramatically narrow the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ability to regulate cryptocurrencies—most notably by recategorizing many assets as commodities instead of securities, which places them under the much smaller and less-resourced Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Trump would be one of the foremost beneficiaries of this bill, which would exclude digital assets like his $TRUMP and $MELANIA “meme coins” from SEC regulation.
It would also likely affect the classification of Bitcoin, which Trump Media has explicitly acknowledged would benefit the president. “If Bitcoin is determined to constitute a security,” the company said in a June SEC filing, it could “adversely affect” the price of Bitcoin and the price of Trump Media’s holdings.
Not only does this benefit Trump, said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk, but the legitimization and entrenchment of these unstable assets has the potential to make the whole economy less stable.
“Eerily reminiscent of the risky behavior that gave us the 2008 financial collapse, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of casino-like speculation on Wall Street with highly volatile crypto trading in retirement accounts,” Carrk said.
“While the Trump family stands to win either way with crypto investment product fees,” Carrk added, “throwing such a wild card into the financial system with little to no guardrails could lead to history repeating itself—with everyday Americans footing the bill when things inevitably go south.”
VETS FACE DIRE NEW HEALTH CARE CRISIS. President Donald Trump’s policies are causing doctors to turn down job offers in Veterans Affairs hospitals, a new report has revealed. Simultaneously, the administration is engaging in anti-union actions in the veterans health care system and Democratic lawmakers say veterans will ultimately suffer, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (8/8).
ProPublica reported that a new analysis of hiring at VA hospitals since Trump took office shows that doctors are rejecting job offers. Of the roughly 2,000 doctors who were offered jobs between January and March, nearly 40% turned down the offer. That turndown rate is a 400% increase from a year ago when former President Joe Biden was in office.
ProPublica also revealed that doctors and nurses already in the system are leaving. Every month that Trump has been in office has seen a decline in doctors employed by the VA. Between January and June, twice as many nurses left the VA system as have been hired.
The brain drain is occurring at the same time that the administration is focused on slashing the agency’s workforce.
Under Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, a longtime Trump cheerleader and apologist when he served in Congress, the administration has pursued significant cuts. The agency announced Aug. 7 that it is on pace to cut 30,000 jobs by the end of the 2025 fiscal year.
“This announcement makes clear VA is bleeding employees across the board at an unsustainable rate because of the toxic work environment created by this Administration and DOGE’s slash and trash policies,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, (D-CT) ranking member of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, said.
ProPublica noted in its report that wait times have increased for patients seeking primary and specialty care, along with wait times for outpatient surgery and appointments.
Collins also announced that the agency is terminating collective bargaining agreements for more than 350,000 unionized employees. Democrats slammed the action as another attack on veteran care.
FBI PURGE INCLUDES OFFICIAL WHO TRIED TO PROTECT JAN. 6 INVESTIGATORS. Amid accusations that President Trump is turning the Department of Justice into his “personal weapon,” multiple media outlets reported Aug. 7 that his administration is ousting at least three top officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jessica Corbett noted at Common Dreams (8/7).
The FBI purge includes Brian Driscoll, who served as acting director earlier this year; Walter Giardina, a special agent involved in the investigation of Trump’s ex-trade adviser, Peter Navarro; and Steven Jensen, acting director in charge of the Washington Field Office, unnamed sources told outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, and Fox News.
Jensen was involved in investigating the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Driscoll—as head of the FBI before Trump’s appointee, Kash Patel, was confirmed—resisted the administration’s demand that he turn over a list of agents who worked on probes of the insurrectionists, who were promptly pardoned when Trump returned to power.
Highlighting that battle over the list of agents, the AP detailed:
Emil Bove, the then-senior Justice Department official who made the request and was [in July] confirmed for a seat on a federal appeals court, wrote a memo accusing the FBI’s top leaders of “insubordination.”
Responding to Bove’s request, the FBI ultimately provided personnel details about several thousand employees, identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by names.
The three men were reportedly told to leave the FBI by Aug. 8. According to Fox, one source described the removals as “retribution,” and multiple people told the outlet that “more ousters are expected at the bureau by the end of the week, though the exact number of personnel included, or their roles at the bureau, are unclear.”
The Times noted that “the fresh ousters reflect, in part, a long-running effort by senior Trump administration officials to dismiss agents and prosecutors who worked on cases related to the president. Those have included the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia during his first term, the investigation into his handling of classified documents after he left office, the investigation into his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and the investigations of rioters at the Capitol.”
US MANUFACTURING SECTOR ‘SPUTTERING’ AS TRUMP TARIFFS HIT CONSUMERS. After multiple delays, the “reciprocal” tariffs first announced this past spring by Donald Trump went into effect Aug. 7 even as the American economy is showing serious signs of weakness, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (8/7).
As reported by CNBC, the new tariffs hit nations all over the world and included particularly hefty tariffs on longtime trading partners such as Brazil, which got hit with a 50% tariff as Trump tries to pressure the country to drop criminal charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro, who allegedly plotted a coup attempt after losing the 2022 general election to current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
While many longtime U.S. allies such as the European Union and Japan struck deals with Trump ahead of the deadline, their products are still getting hit with 15% tariffs that are far higher than any duties placed on foreign goods in decades.
On his Truth Social page Aug. 7, Trump celebrated the implementation of the tariffs and declared that “tariffs are flowing into the USA at levels not thought even possible!”
However, the president’s triumphant tone does not match what consumer sentiment and economic data are currently showing. The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 6 that the American manufacturing economy, which Trump has claimed will benefit the most from his tariffs, is currently “sputtering” as companies face higher costs of key inputs such as steel, aluminum and copper.
“From March to July, U.S. manufacturing activity contracted, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s monthly survey,” noted WSJ. “The Manufacturing PMI last registered at 48, below the 50 score that differentiates growth and decline.”
The Journal also cited top domestic manufacturers such as Whirlpool, Polaris and Harley-Davidson who say that consumer demand has been hit in recent months as consumers pull back spending in the face of the president’s tariffs. In fact, Polaris CEO Mike Speetzen told investors during a recent earnings call that “consumers are really just reluctant to go spend right now unless they really need to or they’re fortunate enough to have the financial flexibility to do that.”
Data released in late July also showed that the American labor market overall has nearly ground to a halt over the last three months, as the economy added an average of 35,000 jobs per month from May through July.
TRUMP WANTS TO USE RACIAL MATH TO RESHAPE ELECTIONS. President Donald Trump announced Aug. 7 that he is directing the Department of Commerce to start work on a new U.S. census—one that would exclude undocumented immigrants from the population count, Alex Samuels noted at Daily Kos (8/7).
“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
If implemented, this move would mark a significant break from the way the census has traditionally been conducted. For centuries, it has counted every person living in the U.S., regardless of citizenship status.
Trump’s announcement comes as the White House urges GOP-led states to redraw their congressional maps to boost Republicans’ chances of holding their House majority after next year’s midterm elections. Texas has started that process, though Democrats there stalled it by fleeing the state, thus denying the legislature a quorum.
Some of Trump’s critics correctly criticize the census plan as yet another blatant power grab.
“The next part of the plan to steal the midterms and/or the 2028 election—an attempt to do a mid-decade census to take seats and electoral votes away from blue states,” former Republican and anti-Trumper Ron Filipkowski posted on X. “I knew this was coming.”
Naturally, MAGA supporters are fully on board. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia reposted Trump’s announcement while promoting her “Making American Elections Great Again Act,” which would order “a new census counting American citizens only” and demand reapportionment based on that revised count.
However, that plan runs afoul of the Constitution. The law requires a national census every 10 years to count all residents, not just citizens. The official census website clearly states that the decennial count is “designed to count every resident in the United States.” That’s how congressional seats and Electoral College votes are assigned.
But legality has never stopped Trump before.
During his first term, he attempted to force the U.S. Census Bureau to include a citizenship question—“Is this person a citizen of the United States?”—despite warnings it would discourage responses. A federal court called the move an “egregious” violation of the law, and the Supreme Court eventually blocked it.
Trump persisted. He directed federal agencies to collect citizenship data without directly involving the census. His main push failed then, ahead of the 2020 census, but now he appears to want to restart the process midstream.
If successful, states with large undocumented populations—like California—are expected to lose congressional seats, while whiter, more rural, redder states could gain influence. A 2020 Pew Research Center report indicated that excluding noncitizens from the census might cause some states, including California and Texas, to lose seats in the House.
There’s also the logistical aspect. The 2020 census cost nearly $14 billion and took years to prepare. The idea that Trump’s Commerce Department could produce a new census within a year or two is unrealistic. Preparations for the 2030 census are already underway, and federal law requires any proposed questions to be submitted to Congress at least two years before data collection.
The Grand Social Experiment Undone:
I asked a normally very optimistic friend if he thought this country would survive Trump's second term. "No", he replied. "I really don’t think it can". Sadly, many in my circle share his bleak outlook.
Elected officials are being arrested for doing their jobs and promoting the public good. The military is deployed to subdue peaceful protests. Student activists are jailed and deported. Civic institutions are targeted and penalized by the federal government. Because of insane tariffs and foreign policy, our allies will never trust us again. EPA closures will ensure the planet eventually becomes an uninhabitable oven.
I could go on. But I won’t.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Republicans in Congress have been unwilling or unable to control Donald Trump as he has pushed the use of executive orders and a pliable Supreme Court that lets him assume dictatorial power.
Out of the box in his second term, Trump asserted executive power unconstrained by the checks and balances of the Constitution. He tried by executive order to restrict birthright citizenship of immigrants’ children, disregarding the 14th Amendment. He fired inspectors general in government agencies without providing notice or explanation to Congress and he gave Elon Musk and his unvetted “Department of Government Efficiency” a free hand to take over agency computer systems and fire government workers. And Trump shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and “paused” grant funding to universities and research institutions.
Lately, Trump has threatened to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell before his term expires in May 2026, for refusing to reduce interest rates, before business leaders warned Trump that would spook the markets. So instead, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the jobs numbers she reported Aug. 1. That undermines confidence in future jobs reports.
Trump expanded his plan to control immigration by stepping up the seizure and deportation of undocumented immigrants with expansion of the corps of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. But while he promised to go after the “worst of the worst dangerous criminals,” who he says entered the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration, ICE was unable to find enough dangerous criminal immigrants to make their quotas.
As of June 29, ICE statistics show, of 57,861 people detained by ICE, 71.7% had no criminal convictions, and many of the “criminals” were involved in traffic infractions. But Trump had promised to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history, so the activity devolved into raids of Latino markets and neighborhoods, where heavily armed, masked agents swarmed in what appeared to be random stops of Brown-skinned people and arrests of those who lacked proper IDs or appeared to be “suspicious characters,” many of whom were detained and held for days before they could prove their citizenship.
“President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Associated Press. “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.”
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security also targeted foreign nationals, particularly students, researchers and legal residents who lost their student visas and green cards after they were accused of engaging in pro-Palestinian activism, AP reported.
Total ICE arrests shot up at the end of May after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gave the agency a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 650 a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term. ICE arrested nearly 30% more people in May than in April, according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse, or TRAC. That number rose again in June, by another 28%.
“What you’re seeing is this huge increase in funding to detain people, remove people, enforce immigration laws,” Eisen said. “And what we’re seeing is that a lot of these people back to sort of the original question you asked, these are not people who are dangerous.”
Trump’s preoccupation with tariffs is wreaking havoc on working-class families and small businesses who must absorb the 15% tax Trump arbitrarily placed on European goods, with even higher tax rates on imports from other countries. Trump used tariffs to intimidate foreign nations with minimal consultation with members of Congress, who actually have the authority to set tariffs (but Republicans aren’t sticklers about that). While Trump insists the tariffs are a boon for the Treasury, American businesses, not foreign governments, must pay Trump’s tariffs and pass those higher along to American consumers, in what amounts to a national sales tax on imported goods. That will increase inflation, with no benefit for American consumers and workers.
The Center for American Progress, on the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, reported that during the first six months of the second term Trump waged an all-out war against disabled people.
“From executive orders intended to roll back civil rights protections to legislation that cuts key services and support, the disability community has faced structural violence in the form of federal policy. This all comes as the community continues to suffer severe impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic that have resulted in further disablement, isolation, and death. It has even been alleged that President Donald Trump once told his nephew, Fred C. Trump III, that he should let his son, who has “complex” intellectual and developmental disabilities, “just die” because of the cost of care.
Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a slim 7-seat majority next year, with four vacancies, including three seats remaining to be filled after the deaths of Democratic incumbents this past spring, and Democrats are encouraged by polls that show potential voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by an average of 42.7% to 42.2 in a Real Clear Politics average of 10 national polls as of Aug. 11. But those polls motivated Trump to order Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw Texas congressional lines to eliminate five Democratic districts in a special legislative session. That prompted more than 50 Democratic state representatives to leave the state to break the quorum needed to advance the redistricting bill.
Some Democrats fear Trump plans to declare martial law to stop the elections if it appears he might lose control of Congress. Some saw the deployment of California National Guards and active-duty Marines in Los Angeles in June when protesters disrupted ICE raids was a dry run for such a declaration.
In the next step toward authoritarianism, Trump used an attempted carjacking of a former member of Musk’s DOGE team in Washington, D.C., as a pretext to take over the Metro Police Department and deploy the D.C. National Guard and the FBI to patrol the streets of the nation's capital Aug. 11, despite D.C. crime rates at a 30-year low. Trump said Baltimore, Oakland, New York, and Chicago are potential future targets for National Guard deployments and “other measures.” Facts don’t matter.
People should not be intimidated by Trump’s overreach, nor despair that elections won’t be held. The Constitution makes states responsible for holding elections, not the president. Elections were held during the Civil War, and we’re not likely to be anywhere near that level of emergency next year. Also, if elections are not held next year, there will be no House of Representatives, as incumbents’ terms expire Dec. 31, 2026. In the Senate, terms of 35 senators would expire, leaving a 1-vote Democratic majority in the next Senate.
Republicans can’t risk that. So, in the meantime, progressives need to get organizing, and plan to elect more Democrats. — JMC
The Royal Presidency:
The Supreme Court has granted the president broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office.
It has reduced judicial oversight and curtailed judges ability to block presidential actions nationwide.
These decisions have not been unanimous. Republicans have approved these measures. Democrats have not.
Through these and other measures whereby Republicans have refused to assert their Constitutional authority, they have created a Royal Presidency, a Dictatorship.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which features more tax breaks for the rich and cuts programs that help working people, survived several near-death experiences as “moderate” Republican lawmakers promised they would never vote to strip Medicaid and food stamps from their constituents or blow up the national debt with tax breaks for the rich, but Republican House and Senate leaders reeled enough of them in to bring the ugly bill home for the Lyin’ King’s signature on July 4.
Trump got the budget reconciliation bill through the Senate with the narrowest Republican majority, as Vice President JD Vance broke a tie July 1. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who had said he could not vote to strip Medicaid from his constituents, flipped his vote to “yes” after Republican leaders made some changes in the language, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, switched to "yes" after securing concessions for her state, leaving Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who said he would not seek re-election after Trump threatened to primary him, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine voting “no.”
In the House, five “solid” Republicans who opposed the bill July 2 collapsed to two “no” votes after they were summoned to the White House to visit with the president. They returned with Trump merchandise and gave the Big Lie Party a 216-214 win on July 3.
One of the flippers, Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, denied they were pressured. “The president of the United States didn't give us an assignment. We're not a bunch of little bitches around here, OK? I'm a member of Congress. I represent almost 800,000 Wisconsinites," Van Orden told journalists near the back entrance to the House of Representatives chamber.
Responding to Van Orden's claims on the social media platform X, Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan.) said, "Yes, he did, and yes, you are."
Republicans overcame a unified Democratic minority to enact $5 trillion in tax breaks over the next 10 years, mainly benefitting the rich, while budgets for programs helping working people are cut. The bill provides $350 billion for Trump’s border and national security agenda, which will allow Trump to expand the Immigration and Customs Enforcement force to abduct immigrants and hold them in remote detention centers, such as the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp in the Florida Everglades while they await deportation. New immigrants would face new fees, including a minimum $100 fee when applying for asylum protection.
To partly offset the lost tax revenue and new spending, Republicans imposed cuts that will save $1 trillion from Medicaid and $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. “food stamps) for people below the poverty line in the next decade.
Republicans argue they are trying to adjust the safety net programs for the population they were initially designed to serve, mainly pregnant women, the disabled and children, and root out what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse.
“What we’ve talked about is returning work requirements,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters in early April.“So, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They’re draining resources from people who are actually due that. So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.”
The bill requires adults receiving Medicaid and food stamps to prove they work at least 80 hours a month, including older people up to age 65. Parents of children 14 and older also would have to meet the program’s work requirements. The verification also will be required for the Affordable Care Act’s federal premium subsidies, which could also leave some middle-income Americans uninsured.
There’s also a proposed new $35 co-payment that can be charged to patients using Medicaid services.
More than 71 million people rely on Medicaid, which expanded under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and 40 million use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. About 64% of adult Medicaid recipients work either full-time or part-time, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in May. Others do not hold traditional jobs but 12% have caregiving responsibilities, 7% attend school and 10% have an illness or disability that prevents them from working.
That leaves about 8% of Medicaid recipients who are not working for other reasons, including retirement, inability to find work or other reasons.
Within this group, nearly 80% are women, according to nonpartisan researchers at the University of Massachusetts Boston, who analyzed Census Bureau data from the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) to reach their conclusion.
Medicaid recipients who are in this smaller group of able-bodied recipients are primarily women who are, on average, 41 years old. A quarter are over 50. Most have a high school education or less. They are also poor: Their average household of 4.4 people has an annual median income of less than $45,000, Barbara Rodriguez noted at 19thNews.com.
“This is really an attack on formally caregiving, older women who have a very hard time getting back into the workforce — not young men who are able bodied and sitting around because they don’t feel like working,” said Alison Barkoff, a health policy professor and program director at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates 11.8 million Americans would become uninsured by 2034 and 3 million more would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.
Also, Trump’s imposition of tariffs are expected to cost American consumers $2 trillion in higher costs for imported goods, if the tariffs are left in place over a decade, Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimated. “Taking a low-end figure of $2 trillion, that would come to $16,000 per household over the next decade,” Baker wrote.
Republicans are proposing to dramatically roll back tax breaks designed to boost clean energy projects fueled by renewable sources such as energy and wind. The tax breaks were a central component of President Joe Biden’s 2022 landmark bill focused on addressing climate change and lowering health care costs.
A provision thrown in at the final hours will provide $10 billion annually to rural hospitals for five years, or $50 billion in total. The Senate bill originally provided $25 billion for the program, but that number was upped to win over holdout GOP senators and a coalition of House Republicans warning that reduced Medicaid provider taxes would hurt rural hospitals. However, hospital administrators say that is not nearly enough to make up for the anticipated shortfall.
Altogether, the Congressional Budget Office projects the bill would increase federal deficits over the next 10 years by nearly $3.3 trillion from 2025 to 2034.
To cap it off, the bill contained a provision to increase the nation’s debt limit, by $5 trillion, to allow continued borrowing to pay the debts Trump and the Big Lie Party have piled up so far. So much for fiscal conservatism on the right. — JMC
Reluctant Cargo:
Was Trump's decision to drop bombs on Iran constitutional? Probably not. He should have consulted Congress.
Was this country in imminent danger of attack - nuclear or otherwise? No, we were not. The Israeli's themselves reassured the USA and the world that their strikes had disrupted Iran's nuclear program and pushed it back by several years.
Did Trump's desire to look like a tough guy give him the right to commit the nation to what may well be a long, protracted conflict?
Definitely not. Yet, here we are.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Clown on Parade:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continues to face questions about his competence.
He refuses to follow basic protocols which puts lives at risk. During the congressional review process,
it was said that "He lacks the credibility and experience required to lead a body as massive and as critical as the Department of Defense" So far, he's done nothing to prove his critics wrong.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
A Clown and his Chicken:Robert F Kennedy Jr has fired over 10,000 HHS employees and shut down many departments.
He has also dismissed all 17 members of the CDC advisory board. He's replacing them with vaccine skeptics.
This is lunacy but par for the course in this Trump administration.
With new strains of avian flu looming, what could go wrong?
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
A Future Trump Monument:
This will be Trump's legacy. The world economy is suffering. Our allies feel betrayed. Wall Street stocks are in decline. Republican lawmakers are starting to waver. How long before Trump's base starts turning on him. As the prospect of a full blown depression looms,
Trump continues to lead the country over a cliff. This is my proposal for a statue greeting visitors to a future Trump library.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Breaking Eggs
The world has changed and tariffs don't work like they used to. Trump's economic problems are all of his own making and may take decades to rectify. Whether he's fully aware of this is uncertain. It's worth noting that Trump and his buddies appear to be benefiting financially from the chaos. Regardless, our longtime trading partners and allies may never trust us again.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Still the same old Crud:
I did this during Trump's first term and it still holds true today. Trump's in this for the money - ours.
While the nation's economy is in chaos, Trump and his buddies are doing pretty well.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
In the midst of all the chaos and darkness we currently live in, I was reminded of the phrase "I am the light of the world". No biblical scholar, I looked it up. It is a declaration made by Jesus in John 8:12. Jesus is telling his congregation to walk with him in the light of life, away from the darkness of ignorance and sin. This served as the inspiration for the above illustration.
I have great expectations for Pope Leo XIV. He’s been described as very Eisenhoweresque - quiet, compassionate, a superb administrator. He’s offered Vatican resources to mediate world disputes. I suspect we’ll need them and soon.
Beyond his obvious qualifications, Pope Leo’s friendship with former Pope Francis provides all the proof I need. My man Frankie thought very highly of Leo and considered him a worthy successor.
Nuff said.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Donald Trump appears to be preparing to go to war in California as a show of force to scare off liberals who dare to protest his right to rule.
On June 14, Flag Day, King Donald has ordered an expensive, over-the-top military parade in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his 79th birthday as if he were a Soviet premier, and despite warnings that tank and rocket launcher treads likely will tear up Washington streets.
On the same day, citizens will take to the streets in cities large and small across this nation to celebrate “No Kings Day,” to remind the Trump administration that no one is above the rule of law and declare: no thrones, no crowns, no kings.
But first the Department of Homeland Security, on orders from the White House to step up the pace of deportations, sent agents from ICE, DHS, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration on raids across Los Angeles June 6, including at two Home Depots, a doughnut shop, and a clothing wholesaler, in search of workers they suspected of being undocumented immigrants.
The feds arrested 121 people but were met by protesters (unrelated to “No Kings”) who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed by police wearing riot gear, holding shields, and using batons, guns that shot pepper balls, rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash bang grenades against the protesters, Robert Reich noted.
Trump on Saturday, June 7, ordered deployment of 2,000 California National Guard troops to quell the protests, which had already subsided. Trump said any demonstration that got in the way of immigration officials would be considered a “form of rebellion.” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called the protests an “Insurrection.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said deployment of National Guard troops was illegal and California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit against the Trump administration over its move to take control of the National Guard and deploy troops in Los Angeles. Trump later sent 700 U.S. marines to Los Angeles, further exaggerating the threat.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added to the hyperbole: “The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil. A dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK. Under President Trump, violence and destruction against federal agents and federal facilities will NOT be tolerated.”
Bonta said local law enforcement had been capable of handling the situation and could have requested support from state partners. He also said the situation had been calming before Trump incited new unrest.
The coalition organizing the “No Kings” national day of action accused the administration of “escalating tensions” in a statement Sunday that “people are peacefully and lawfully protesting the administration’s abuses of power and the abduction of their neighbors by ICE.”
“Instead of listening, the Trump administration is escalating tensions,” the coalition wrote. “Against the guidance of local leaders, they are deploying military force to suppress free speech. They do not care about our safety—it’s about silencing opposition. It’s a blatant abuse of power designed to intimidate families, stoke fear, and crush dissent.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Sunday denounced the lawbreaking, but also laid blame on the Trump administration for provoking more protesters to turn out.
“What we’re seeing in Los Angeles is chaos that is provoked by the administration,” Bass said. “When you raid Home Depot and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart, and when you run armored caravans through our streets you cause fear and you cause panic.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut on MSNBC June 9 discussed Trump’s outsized military response to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.
“Donald Trump only cares about protests when they’re opposing him, Murphy said. Every single day we should be reminding the American public that there were protesters at the Capitol fighting for Donald Trump to install him in power permanently on January 6 of 2021, who beat the hell out of police officers with metal poles and tasers and are out on the street today.”
Murphy added that Trump’s unbalanced approach to power, sending in the National Guard despite state and local law enforcement’s objections, is “fundamentally undemocratic,” and a dangerous endorsement of violence.
“The message is simply, if you’re violent in service of a Republican cause, you’ll get a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. But if you’re engaged in protest against the administration, well then we’re sending in the National Guard,” he continued.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump refused to deploy the National Guard, even as violence from his “Stop the Steal” rally turned into an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol. The House select committee later uncovered evidence that his administration intended for the National Guard to be used solely to “protect pro Trump people,” Walter Einenkel noted at Daily Kos.
Since returning to power, Trump has pardoned more than 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists who were convicted in federal courts of participating in acts of violence and conspiracy against the United States. Trump has even floated the idea of financially rewarding them for their role in attempting to overturn the democratic process.
Trump’s selective use of force and his pattern of threatening and punishing dissent while protecting the criminal behavior of his allies highlights just how dangerous he is to democracy.
In concluding their statement about Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and marines, the “No Kings” coalition struck a defiant tone. “From major cities to small towns, we’ll rise together and say: We reject political violence. We reject fear as governance. We reject the myth that only some deserve freedom,” they wrote.
Reich said Trump wants a replay of the violence that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder in 2020—riots, mayhem, and destruction that allow him to escalate his police state further—imposing curfews, closing down parts of Los Angeles, perhaps seeking to subdue the entire state. And beyond.
“Please do not give him this. Don’t fall into his trap.” — JMC
This edition of The Progressive Populist starts the transition of our Journal from the Heartland to a monthly publication schedule for the printed edition. The transition back to a monthly journal, which was our production schedule in our first four years, was made necessary by the rising cost of printing and mailing the printed edition in the past few years. Instead of the second monthly printed edition, we’ll be offering supplemental editions by email.
Your generous support to our sustainability fund over the past nine months has given us time to plot our future, and we have concluded that costs will continue to rise, as periodical postage rates are expected to take effect in July, while postal delivery standards for periodicals have declined. The time it takes to deliver the newspaper across the United States has increased, from 2 to 3 days in the good old days to more than a week nowadays. And Donald Trump continues to threaten tariffs on Canadian lumber, which provides an estimated 80% of the newsprint used to print U.S. newspapers, so tariffs on lumber would further increase our printing costs.
So we will continue printing one issue per month in the current tabloid newspaper format, which will feature the works of our primary correspondents and syndicated columnists and features, delivered by the US Postal Service. The supplemental digital editions will mainly carry extra syndicated columns and features, delivered by email.
This arrangement will allow us to continue to serve our current subscribers who prefer a paper edition, as well as those who don’t have internet access. If you don’t have internet access to take advantage of our digital supplement, perhaps you can get a friend with internet access to print it and share it with you.
We also will develop our online presence as an alternative to the U.S. Postal Service, as Trump has signaled his intention to bring the Postal Service under his direct rule and reorganize it with an eye to privatization. In 1970 the Postal Service was set up as a separate subsidiary of the federal government, which is supposed to be managed by an independent Board of Governors. But the board on May 9 picked a FedEx board member, David Steiner, to serve as the new postmaster general. Steiner succeeds Louis DeJoy, who was widely believed to have been hired at Trump’s direction in 2020 to foil mail-in balloting efforts by Democrats. DeJoy has engaged in major reorganization in the past five years, resulting in the rate increases and declining delivery standards. DeJoy worked with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to make further cuts in the roughly 650,000 Postal Service employees before he quit in March.
The Washington Post reported that the board of governors had selected finalists, and Trump made the final call on hiring Steiner as the next postmaster general.
Steiner’s debut has drawn the concern of postal workers as well as people who rely on the Postal Service, particularly in rural areas whose residents fear universal service and six-day delivery could be subject to further cost cutting.
“The apparent choice of a postmaster general that comes directly from service on the board of directors of FedEx, one of the Postal Service’s primary competitors, presents a clear conflict of interest,” Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said in a statement. “This is an unmistakable push to hand business over to private shippers. Letter carriers and the over 300 million people we serve every day recognize this attempt at a hostile takeover of a beloved American institution for what it is, privatization-by-proxy.”
Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said the board’s selection was troubling because it could lead to the privatization of the agency, which he thought could result in worse service in rural areas and higher prices for customers.
“It begs the question of whether this is a post office that is going to be run for the good of the people of the country,” Dimondstein said, “or whether it’s going to be a post office that serves private corporations like FedEx.”
At $45 for 12 issues, our rates are still competitive with most monthlies, even without the digital supplement, but if we have to send the The Progressive Populist by FedEx, subscription rates are really going to blow up, so renew now and, if you can afford it, send us a few bucks for our sustainability fund. And call your reps and senators, particularly if they’re Republicans, and tell them to knock off Trump’s move to privatize the post office.
Pope Leo: A Long Way from the South Side
Election of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a native of the South Side of Chicago, as Pope Leo XIV on May 8 is good news for progressives, even if you’re not Catholic. Leo, a member of the Order of St. Augustine, was ordained in 1982 and served as a missionary in Peru before he was elected prior general of the order from 2001 to 2013 and returned to Peru as Bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023,. Then he was promoted to the rank of Cardinal by Pope Francis and he was brought to Rome to lead the office that selects new bishops and preside over the Pontifical Commission for Latin America,.
As a protégé of Francis, Cardinal Prevost took the Papal name of Leo, after Leo XIII, who was an architect of Catholic social teaching in the late 19th century, which legitimized the right of workers to form unions. The new Pope Leo XIV is expected to maintain Francis’ prioritization of the needs of the poor, workers and migrants, as Jesus expressed in the Gospels. That comes as close as the College of Cardinals is likely to come to rejection of the works of Donald Trump, who made a mess of his appearance at Pope Francis’ funeral and later offended many Catholics by releasing a digitally altered photo showing him in papal garb.
The Catholic vote usually tracks national vote results. Trump’s 53% share of the Catholic vote in 2024 was three percentage points higher than 2020 and one point higher than 2016, National Catholic Reporter noted. With a quarter of the electorate, Catholics may have made the difference in the 2024 race, which Trump won with 49.8% of the vote, 1.5 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris. Much of Trump’s gain apparently came from Hispanic Catholics, as a Public Religion Research Institute poll found 55% of Hispanic Catholics voted for Harris last year, while a Pew Research Center study showed 66% support among Hispanic Catholics for Joe Biden in 2020 — a double-digit shift in four years. Trump’s mishandling of the economy, his disregard for the poor and his abuse of immigrants might cause Hispanic voters to rethink their support of Republicans and swing the Catholic vote back into the blue column in 2026.
Keep the debate on social justice instead of culture wars. — JMC
Trump has no regrets as he steers the U.S, toward a second Gilded Age, which will further enrich his wealthy supporters but could plunge the economy into a recession leading to depression.
Leaders of the Greedy Oligarchs Party have no regrets, either, as they allowed Trump to unilaterally impose the tariffs, which are supposed to be a congressional prerogative, except in cases of national emergency, which Trump declared, and now we have an emergency.
Senate Democrats got four Republicans to support a resolution to block tariffs on Canada. On April 2, the Senate passed the resolution 51-48, with Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joining co-sponsor Rand Paul of Kentucky. The vote came just hours after Trump announced tariff increases of 25% or more on goods from more than 100 nations, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) blocked the resolution’s consideration in the House. Trump proceeded to impose tariffs worldwide, but paused them for most nations after Wall Street market values plunged.
Democrats now need to lure four moderate House Republicans to caucus with them to restore accountability to the Lyin’ King.
The White House also bet the public would applaud the deportation of hundreds of immigrants from the United States to a prison in El Salvador on unsubstantiated claims by the Department of Homeland Security that they were gang members and/or terrorists, and ignore that the immigrants’ were denied their constitutional rights to due process, which would require a court hearing before the subjects could be sent to another country for indefinite detention.
Advocates of constitutional rights succeeded in putting a face on the issue, with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who fled to the U.S. in 2012 at age 16 to escape gang threats in his native El Salvador. He entered the U.S. illegally, and worked until 2019, when police picked him up and turned him over to immigration officers, but an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal” status due to the danger he faced from gang violence if he returned to El Salvador. He was allowed to live and work legally in the U.S. He married an American citizen and was living in Maryland with his wife and three children, checking in with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, with no problems until DHS agents arrested him on March 12, as he was going home from a union sheet metal job. He was told his immigration status had changed. He was taken to a detention facility in Texas. On May 15 he was put on a plane headed for El Salvador and placed in a prison where El Salvador was holding deportees on contract with the Trump administration.
The Trump administration alleged the deportees were members of criminal organizations, but Bloomberg News found 90% of them had no U.S. criminal record other than traffic or immigration violations. A Justice Department lawyer later admitted in court that Abrego Garcia was deported in error. That lawyer was placed on leave.
On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador was illegal. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted the government implied it “could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
Trump and federal authorities continue to insist Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, without substantiation of the claims. Trump posed with a photo that appears to show “MS13” tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s fingers, but the photo apparently was digitally altered, as recent photos show his fingers have tattoos, but not “MS13.” So Trump and his flunkies appear to be comfortable with taking a gang victim from his family and sending him to another nation to be held in prison indefinitely, and then lie when called on it. And Trump said he is considering sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador.
In another overreach, the White House froze more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University and threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status if it doesn’t submit to Tump’s demands.
The Harvard Crimson reported, Trump called on Harvard to “derecognize pro-Palestine student groups, audit its academic programs for viewpoint diversity, and expel students involved in an altercation at a 2023 pro-Palestine protest on the Harvard Business School campus.”
Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said in response that “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, warned that “if Trump gets away with weaponizing the tax system to target a political enemy, every American is at risk.”
“The First Amendment and federal tax law make clear no president can raise a university’s taxes because he doesn’t like what they teach,” said Wyden. “If this corrupt shakedown scheme stands, nonprofits from churches to temples to hospitals could be forced to echo Trump’s MAGA line or see their taxes hiked. Any Republican who claims to believe in the Constitution and doesn’t speak up is responsible for what happens next.”
Trump’s attack on Harvard is part of a broader campaign of retribution against universities and other institutions and organizations that are unwilling to capitulate to his administration. The Guardian reported that administration officials “have launched investigations into progressive and climate organizations, colleges, and recipients of government grants.”
Republican Congress members have been intimidated against opposing Trump’s overreaches, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said.
In September 2024 we asked subscribers to help us cope with increased printing and postal costs. Our readers responded generously over the past eight months to help us keep publishing the paper, as well as developing digital alternatives. We got a few inquiries about whether the donations were tax deductible. We explained we couldn’t seek tax-exempt status. because it would limit our ability to engage in political reporting and endorse candidates and bills.
Weaponization of the IRS and other federal agencies by the Trump administration has confirmed our caution. The last thing we need is a letter from the White House threatening legal action if we don’t change our attitudes about diversity, equity and inclusion to accommodate the Chief Extortionist’s prejudices.
The Progressive Populist has never counted on (or had access to) government grants or wealthy patrons to keep publishing, and we’ve only lost one offer of a five-figure contribution because the donor needed to send it to a tax-exempt organization. (Your two-, three- and four-figure donations made up for it. And we still need them.) — JMC
