DISPATCHES

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.