Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
October 6, 2025
October 6, 2025
If White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is at the head of the administration’s deployment of federal agents against undocumented immigrants, it appears that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought is running the administration’s approach to the government shutdown.
As Beth Reinhard explained in the Washington Post in June 2024, Vought is a hard-right Christian nationalist who drafted the plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the first Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank.
In 2022, Vought argued that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought advocates what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.
When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised its far-right members, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.
Vought was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. He wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda.
In August 2024, two men associated with the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting secretly video recorded Vought assuring the men, who he thought might donate to the cause, that he and his Center for Renewing America were secretly writing a blueprint of executive orders, memos, and regulations that Donald J. Trump could enact immediately upon taking office a second time. Although Trump was saying he knew nothing about Project 2025, Vought assured the men that Trump was only disavowing Project 2025 for political reasons. In reality, Vought said, Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”
Since Trump took office, Vought’s predictions have come true. The administration has illegally slashed through programs Congress set up and for which it appropriated funds, and now is using the government shutdown to threaten more cuts to programs and to personnel. As soon as the government shutdown began on October 1, 2025, Vought announced that he would use the shutdown to continue his illegal cuts, vowing to cancel $26 billion in infrastructure and climate projects in states led by Democrats, and to fire—not just furlough, as a shutdown requires—federal employees.
But the program Vought is advancing is hugely unpopular. Republicans have called for cuts to the government for decades using rhetoric that suggested such cuts would only affect racial minorities and women. Those who voted for such cuts assumed they would not be affected by any of the proposed cuts. Now they are discovering otherwise.
There were signs of this dramatic disconnect between Republican rhetoric and reality in the 2024 campaign season: when voters in 2024 learned about Project 2025, only 4% of them wanted to see it enacted. At the time, Trump insisted he had nothing to do with the program. Now, though, he is boasting that he is meeting with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump posted on social media.
But it is increasingly clear that the cuts Vought and the MAGA Republicans are making to government programs are hitting a wide swath of Americans. Those cuts are no longer rhetorical, and members of the administration appear to be aware they are unpopular with a large part of their own base.
At a press briefing today, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out that while Trump had said Democrats would bear the blame for layoffs during the shutdown, in fact shutdowns only create furloughs. If the administration was choosing to lay people off instead of furloughing them, she asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, didn’t this mean the president was responsible for the layoffs? Leavitt responded: “This conversation about layoffs would not be happening right now if the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down.”
But the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down. They refused to vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government—which was necessary because the Republicans have not managed to pass any appropriations bills—until Republicans reverse a drastic cut they have made to healthcare. Democrats want Republicans to agree to extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance that they permitted to lapse when they wrote the law they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”
Both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have been open about their determination to roll back the ACA, also known as Obamacare, a policy advanced in Project 2025. In October 2024, Johnson told a crowd there would be “massive” changes to healthcare if voters reelected Trump. “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board,” he said.
Now, though, those hypothetical cuts are real, and without the extension of the premium tax credit, the cost of many Americans’ healthcare premiums will skyrocket. As NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin pointed out on Saturday, about 24 million Americans who don’t have health insurance through their jobs or through Medicaid buy health insurance in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. According to the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, without the extension of the tax credits, premiums will go up an average of 114% for consumers. Spiking premiums will mean the healthiest people decide to go without health insurance, sending prices up for everyone else.
Enrollment starts November 1, putting pressure on Congress to provide a fix before then. In a partisan twist, more than three in four people enrolled in ACA plans live in states Trump won in 2024. A KFF poll published October 3 shows that extending the premium tax credits is popular. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say they want Congress to extend the tax credits. That number includes 59% of Republicans and 57% of MAGA supporters.
On Sunday, Trump lashed out at the Fox News Channel for interviewing Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and letting him point out that Republicans had shut down the government rather than extend the premium tax credits. “Why is FoxNews…putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare?” Trump posted on social media. “The FAKE SPIN is so bad for Republicans that it is hard to believe that we WIN.”
On the White House South Lawn yesterday, a reporter asked Trump if he was open to extending the premium tax credit for purchasing healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
Trump answered: “We want to fix it so it works. It’s not working. Obamacare has been a disaster for the people. So we want to have it fixed so it works.”
Today Speaker Johnson tried to get out from under popular anger over the shutdown and spiking health insurance premiums. He said: “Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare. Republicans are the party working around the clock everyday to fix healthcare. This is not talking points for us: we’ve done it.”
In fact, Johnson has sent the House home until October 14, and what he appears to mean by “working around the clock to fix healthcare” is that Republicans have made cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in their budget reconciliation bill of July, claiming the cuts will address “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates those cuts will increase the number of people without health insurance by 10 million by 2034.
Yesterday, Meryl Kornfield and Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reported that another of Vought’s priorities is also on the table: the Trump administration is overhauling Social Security to eliminate age as a factor in evaluating disability claims, which are separate from retirement benefits. Right-wing thinkers say that since people are living longer and fewer work in manual jobs that hurt their bodies, many could adapt to desk work rather than claiming disability benefits.
In a statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the Washington Post journalists: “This is Phase One of the Republican campaign to force Americans to work into old age to access their earned Social Security benefits, and represents the largest cut to disability insurance in American history. Americans with disabilities have worked and paid into Social Security just like everybody else, and they do not deserve the indignity of more bureaucratic water torture to get what they paid for.”
The pushback against the administration’s politicization of the civil service—another hallmark of Project 2025—continued today when 282 former Department of Justice career officials wrote a letter warning that Trump and his appointees are destroying the Department of Justice. MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the former prosecutors, FBI agents, intelligence analysts, civil rights attorneys, and immigration judges called out the administration’s violation of court orders, destruction of anti-corruption units, endangering national security, and using law enforcement to persecute those Trump sees as enemies, saying, “We believe it’s our duty to sound the alarm.”
Today the New York City Bar Association drew its own line against the administration, warning that whatever legal advice officials are using to justify their attacks on Venezuelan boats will not protect them in court. The bar association called the strikes “illegal summary execution” that are “prohibited by both U.S. and international law,” or “murders.” It called for Trump to stop such attacks and for “Congress to remind the President that he lacks authority to continue to misuse our military forces for similar unlawful attacks on foreign vessels and their civilian crews and that continuation of such attacks is unlawful.”
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Notes:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/renewing-american-purpose/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/02/19/russ-vought-republican-debt-ceiling-strategy/
https://time.com/7323278/trump-project-2025-government-shutdown/
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-health-care-shutdown-sobad/#
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/05/disability-social-security-age-benefits/
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/ex-justice-officials-duty-warn-trump-rcna235868
https://www.nycbar.org/press-releases/unlawful-attacks-on-venezuelan-vessels/
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October 5, 2025
October 5, 2025
On Friday the Minnesota Star Tribune reported a conversation on the messaging app Signal between one of Stephen Miller’s top deputies, Anthony Salisbury, and a senior advisor to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Patrick Weaver. Stephen Miller is the deputy White House chief of staff and is widely identified as the figure directing the administration’s attacks on immigrants and diversity initiatives.
Salisbury was in Minnesota to attend a funeral. His Signal chat was clearly visible to bystanders, one of whom provided images of it to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The two men were discussing a plan to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Portland, Oregon. Since World War I, the elite 82nd Airborne has specialized in parachute assaults into hostile areas.
But President Donald J. Trump had apparently not signed off on the plan. Weaver told Salisbury that Defense Secretary Hegseth wanted Trump to give him a clear order to send troops into Portland. “Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver wrote.
As Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian reported, Weaver said Hegseth preferred to send in the national guard owing to potential backlash over using the famous 82nd. “82nd is like our top tier [quick reaction force] for abroad,” Weaver wrote. “So it will cause a lot of headlines. Probably why he wants potus [Trump] to tell him to do it.”
This conversation raises the question of how involved Trump is in the decisions his administration is making about the use of the military. On September 29, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Miller has taken the lead in the administration’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean, vessels the administration claims are Venezuelan drug boats although it has offered no evidence either to lawmakers or to the public for that claim.
A White House spokesperson said in a statement that Trump directed the strikes and that he oversees all foreign policy. The statement said: “The entire administration is working together to execute the president’s directive with clear success.” But that raises echoes of the conversation on March 15, 2025, also on Signal, in which Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance included editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in a discussion about whether to strike the Houthis in Yemen. Miller ended the March discussion simply by invoking Trump: “As I heard it,” he wrote, “the president was clear: green light….” And the attack was on.
As Dan Froomkin spelled out last week in Press Watch, Trump has been focused on the misguided idea that Portland, Oregon, is a war zone ever since he apparently watched a September 4 Fox News Channel special report that passed off footage from the violence of 2020 as happening now. About twenty people protest every night outside an ICE facility, but while the protesters are insulting (they have been “ICE fishing” with donuts on fishing poles), the protests have been peaceful, with very few arrests.
On September 25, Trump asserted that “nobody’s ever seen anything like it every night and this has gone on for years. They just burned the place down…. These are professional agitators. These are bad people and they [are] paid a lot of money by rich people….” He claimed Portland was plagued by “anarchists” and “crazy people” who were trying to “burn down buildings, including federal buildings.”
Two days later, on Saturday, September 27, Trump’s social media account posted: “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Oregon governor Tina Kotek told Trump his impression of Portland was wrong. On Sunday morning, Trump told NBC White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor: “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice. But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”
The same day, Hegseth federalized 200 National Guard personnel from Oregon to “protect U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other U.S. Government personnel who are performing Federal functions.”
Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield and the city attorney of Portland immediately sued to stop the mobilization, saying it is unlawful, infringes on Oregon’s state sovereignty and police powers, and would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids federal troops from being used for law enforcement. On October 1, Trump’s social media account posted that in Portland, “conditions continue to deteriorate into lawless mayhem…. We will never allow MOBS to take over our streets, burn our Cities, or destroy America. The National Guard is now in place, and has been dedicated to restoring LAW AND ORDER, and ending the Chaos, Death, and Destruction!”
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, a Trump appointee, heard arguments in the case. As Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reported, deputy assistant attorney general Eric Hamilton said that the administration had called out troops to defend against “cruel radicals who have laid siege” to the ICE facility in Portland and who, this past summer, threw rocks at law enforcement officers. Lawyers for Portland pointed out that local police had handled the situation and that the order for deployment had come several months later.
Senior deputy city attorney Caroline Turco told the judge: “We ultimately have a perception-versus-reality problem. The perception is that it is World War II out here. The reality is that this is a beautiful city with a sophisticated resource that can handle the situation.”
Judge Immergut said she would rule by Saturday, but before she ruled, Hegseth activated the 200 National Guard troops. Shortly after, Immergut handed down her decision blocking the deployment. She declared “the President’s determination” that law enforcement could not execute the laws of the United States “was simply untethered to the facts.”
“[T]his is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote. The administration has “made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.” Miller called her decision “[l]egal insurrection.” He posted: “This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.”
Troy Brynelson and Alex Zielinsky of Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that after Immergut’s ruling, federal officers showed force. They pushed protesters “hundreds of yards down city streets and fired tear gas, flash-bang grenades and pepper balls without any clear signs of provocation.” Brynelson and Zielinsky noted that the troops “were flanked by videographers, toting professional equipment and wearing high-visibility vests. They filmed from behind the lines of officers, capturing the show of force. At least two drones swept over the scenes.”
At 7:56 on Saturday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Noem posted a video that appeared to show the federal raid on a Chicago apartment building on September 30. The video used that raid to show a fantasy military-style invasion that misrepresented the actual event in which federal agents arrived with a Black Hawk helicopter and large vehicles and dragged the unarmed residents out of their beds. Agents took all but one of the residents outside in zip ties before trashing the apartments. Their targets included U.S. citizens and children, some of whom were separated from their parents and all of whom were terrified.
Over the video, Noem commented: “Chicago, we’re here for you.”
Later on Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents wounded a woman on Chicago’s Southwest Side. DHS immediately claimed agents had fired “defensive shots” after being “rammed by 10 cars,” but no reporter has been able to confirm that story. Later, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted that Hegseth had called him. “This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” he wrote.
Pritzker added that the administration planned to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. “They will pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance—not a serious effort [to] protect public safety. For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.” On Saturday afternoon, a spokesperson for the White House said Trump has “authorized” the deployment of 300 Illinois National Guard members. Later, Pritzker said he had been informed that members of the Texas National Guard would be deployed to Illinois.
On Saturday afternoon, Miller posted: “The issue before us now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
Blocked from deploying Oregon National Guard troops in Portland, the administration on Sunday deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland instead. California governor Gavin Newsom broke the news, adding: “This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power. The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words—ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents.”
Governor Kotek confirmed that troops had arrived. “This action appears…intentional to circumvent yesterday’s ruling by a federal judge,” she said. “The facts haven’t changed. There is no need for military intervention in Oregon. There is no insurrection in Portland. No threat to national security. Oregon is our home, not a military target. Oregonians exercising their freedom of speech against unlawful actions by the Trump Administration should do so peacefully.”
Both California and Oregon asked Judge Immergut to stop the Trump administration from taking this end-run around her initial ruling. Tonight, Judge Immergut held an emergency hearing on the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops from California to Oregon. She forbade the deployment of any federalized National Guard troops from any state to Oregon for 14 days.
After staying out of the public eye since his performance last Tuesday in front of the nation’s top military leaders and the press conference later that day, Trump spoke to sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, today. The president arrived an hour late and delivered a meandering, political address much like the one he gave on Tuesday.
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/04/us-military-portland-oregon-trump-administration
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/29/stephen-miller-venezuela-drug-boat-strike
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ord.189270/gov.uscourts.ord.189270.1.0.pdf
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/portland-fears-violence-national-guard-deployed-rcna235047
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ord.189270/gov.uscourts.ord.189270.56.0_1.pdf
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna235726
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/05/newsom-sue-trump-california-national-guard-oregon-00594527
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October 4, 2025
October 4, 2025
Today was unseasonably warm and I spent the day on the water. It was a much needed and most welcome respite, but now I’m too tired to start writing.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
Here’s a picture I took today from my kayak. There is nothing like the low light of an October afternoon in Maine.
October 3, 2025
October 3, 2025
Although President Donald J. Trump has not appeared in public since Tuesday, his social media account has been posting up a storm. Just three weeks ago, administration officials were insisting that Democrats were responsible for hateful political speech. Trump’s account last night posted images of prominent Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, with the heading “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.” It went on to say: “The Democratic Party is Dead! They have no leadership! [N]o message! [N]o hope! [T]heir only message for America is to hate Trump!”
The Trump account posted another AI video last night, as well. Set to the music of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the video shows Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance as band members—Trump on cowbell and Vance on drums—and features Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper.
As the video shows the U.S. Capitol, changed song lyrics say: “Here the power’s gone.” Under Vought, they say: “Russ Vought is the reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain… Dems you babies… gonna tie your hands… won’t be able to fly… cry baby end your plan.” The video shows people as zombies walking past an unemployment office, then shows Democratic leaders behind a chorus of “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” before ending with a Halloween-nightmare image of AI ghouls trick-or-treating in MAGA garb.
Veterans of the U.S. national security community posting as The Steady State noted that “a president posting a video depicting his opponents as prey for the Grim Reaper and zombies outside the ‘unemployment office’ is the opposite of what we expect in a healthy democracy.”
Russell Vought is not an elected official. He is best known for his contributions to Project 2025, a plan for gutting the U.S. government and installing a theocratic dictatorship. Project 2025 was so unpopular when it came to light last summer—only 4% of voters who knew about it wanted to see it enacted—that Trump insisted he had nothing to do with it. Trolling the American people with the idea that Congress has no power and Russell Vought is running the government to destroy it is an odd choice for a president who is already deeply unpopular.
But turning the government over to unelected individuals who ignore the law is a theme for this presidency. First, billionaire Elon Musk, who ran the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) apparently with the help of Vought, impounded congressionally appropriated funds and fired government workers. Then reports surfaced that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller was in charge of deportations, detentions, and the attempt to get rid of diversity programs, while also exercising influence over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Now Trump appears to be turning the reins of the government over to Russell Vought.
Turning the powers of the government over to unelected bureaucrats has not been going terribly well. On September 25, from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), top-ranking Democrat Gary Peters (D-MI) and his staff issued a report on the actions of DOGE, which slashed through government funding and fired employees on a crusade to combat what they called “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
The hurried actions of those working for DOGE collapsed vital services, leaving government officials backpedaling. On September 24 the Associated Press examined the effect of DOGE on the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency established in the 1940s to manage the thousands of workplaces used by federal employees. DOGE employees targeted the GSA as a prime example of waste, fraud, and abuse. They abruptly canceled almost half of the leases for government space—without telling the tenants—and called for generating savings by selling off federally owned buildings. They also cut staff at headquarters by 79%, portfolio managers by 65%, and facilities managers by 35%.
The Associated Press reports that 131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees. Now officials are asking hundreds of GSA workers to come back after what the Associated Press says “amounts to a seven-month paid vacation.” Chad Becker, a former real estate official with the GSA, told the Associated Press: “Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed. They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”
The report from Senator Peters suggests that DOGE was efficient in at least one way: individuals associated with DOGE created databases that “contain highly sensitive personally identifiable information on every American” and that “can be manipulated with little to no oversight.” The report found even more concerning that administration officials “were unable or unwilling” to say who was “functionally in charge of significant policy changes at these agencies.”
Some agencies couldn’t say what data DOGE had accessed or what the DOGE teams were doing. Some agency officials would not directly acknowledge they had DOGE teams, although Executive Order 14158 required each agency to have at least four DOGE people. And agency officials refused to show investigators offices or the infrastructure of Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by Elon Musk.
The report concluded that DOGE has violated the law and created unprecedented privacy and cybersecurity risks, while the secrecy surrounding DOGE prevented congressional oversight and public accountability. The report called for shutting down the accessible database DOGE created, revoking DOGE access to private information, reasserting agency control, identifying DOGE employees, and conducting a comprehensive audit of what sensitive data DOGE compiled.
The escalating raids on undocumented immigrants are also running afoul of the law. Tuesday’s raid on an apartment building in Chicago, in which residents, including U.S. citizens, were detained, has galvanized opposition. Today, after reports that children were zip tied, separated from their parents, and detained for several hours, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker directed state agencies to evaluate the treatment of children during the raid and to “determine any formal steps or investigations that the state should initiate to hold federal agents accountable.”
Today in Nashville, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw rebuked the Justice Department and its top officials for prosecuting Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, on federal charges in what appears to be a vindictive prosecution. Crenshaw said officials from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security might have prosecuted Abrego for filing a successful lawsuit challenging his unlawful deportation to El Salvador. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes that vindictive prosecution motions are very hard to win, and the fact that the court is even considering it is “a hugely embarrassing blow to the Trump administration.”
A second federal court today rejected the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, saying it is unconstitutional.
On Monday, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Stephen Miller has directed the administration’s strikes on Venezuelan boats, taking precedence over secretary of state and national security advisor Marco Rubio.
Today Defense Secretary Hegseth announced he had ordered a strike on another boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people Hegseth called “narcoterrorists.” Both Hegseth and Trump posted a video in which a small speedboat was blown to fragments by a strike. Trump declared that the boat was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.” The administration declared yesterday that such strikes are justified because it considers the U.S. in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Legal experts reject this assertion.
If Trump’s reliance on unelected bureaucrats to run his administration has led officials astray, another video posted by the Department of Homeland Security today seemed to offer a different window onto what the president is trying to accomplish. The video shows a bar with words in a font that mimics that of early video games, saying: “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED.” Behind the bar runs a series of images of the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. It shows Trump himself as a young man and what appears to be the Trump Tower in New York City in the early 1980s.
The nostalgic hope for reclaiming Trump’s glory days has tucked within it the McDonalds Mac Tonight moon image, an image used by white supremacists.
The world depicted in that video reflects the period before Trump met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but that story is not going away. The House of Representatives was supposed to be back in session on Monday, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has sent members home until October 14. Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) noted today that Johnson appears to be delaying the swearing-in of newly elected Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Grijalva says she will sign the discharge petition that will require the speaker to bring to the House floor a vote on instructing the Department of Justice to release the files from the investigation into Epstein’s actions, which needs only one more signature to force the vote.
Regarding Johnson’s declaration that the House will take another week away from the Capitol rather than coming back to negotiate a way to end the government shutdown and preserve Americans’ access to healthcare, Pingree asked: “Is this about the shutdown, or is this about the Epstein files?”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/opinion/stephen-miller.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/24/politics/doge-federal-workers
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/DOGE_REPORT_FINAL_7.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.tnmd.104622/gov.uscourts.tnmd.104622.138.0.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/us/politics/abrego-garcia-vindictive-prosecution.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/hegseth-announces-us-attack-alleged-drug-boat-off/story?id=126188707
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2011/04/short-history-of-trump-roots-of-donalds.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mike-johnson-gives-congress-a-vacation-during-shutdown/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/29/stephen-miller-venezuela-drug-boat-strike
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/moon-man
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October 2, 2025
October 2, 2025
At about 1:00 on Tuesday morning, federal agents from Border Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) raided an apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive. Using helicopters and large vehicles, as well as flash-bang grenades, and dressed in military fatigues, agents broke down the doors of the residents of the five-story building and pulled them from their homes in zip ties, some of them naked. Agents left the people tied up outside for hours before letting all but 37 of them go. The apartments residents returned to were trashed.
Cindy Hernandez of the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the raid, noting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said some of those arrested ““are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.” It also said the neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.”
But, as Hernandez reports, DHS did not offer any evidence to support its assertions. Some of the people detained during the raid are U.S. citizens.
Eyewitness Eboni Watson told Cate Cauguiran, Craig Wall, Tre Ward, and Lissette Nuñez of ABC News 7 that the people “was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other. That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*ck them kids.’”
Eyewitness Darrell Ballard told the reporters: “We’re under siege. We’re being invaded by our own military.”
Today, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration informed congressional committees that the president has decided the U.S. is in a formal “armed conflict” with the drug cartels the administration has labeled terrorist organizations. If the U.S. is engaged in such an armed conflict, the administration said, those suspected of smuggling drugs for the cartels are “unlawful combatants.”
This declaration backfills the administration’s justification for striking three boats in the Caribbean in September, killing 17. According to international law, Savage and Schmitt explain, in an armed conflict it’s lawful for a country to kill enemy fighters even when they don’t pose a direct threat.
This redefinition is problematic not just because most overdose deaths in the U.S. come from fentanyl from Mexico, not drugs from Venezuela, the home base of the boats the administration struck. Legal experts say that trafficking an illicit consumer product is not the same as armed conflict. It is problematic also because the administration did not identify any of the drug cartels it claims it is engaging in armed conflict, who must be engaged in organized armed combat to be part of an armed conflict.
Even more problematic, as retired judge advocate general (JAG) lawyer Geoffrey S. Corn, who was the Army’s senior advisor for interpreting the laws of war, told Savage and Schmitt, the administration’s declaration is an “abuse” that crosses a major legal line. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, posted: “Every American should be alarmed that Pres[ident] Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy. Drug cartels must be stopped, but declaring war & ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge—nor legal justification—is unacceptable.”
The declaration means that the administration is laying claim that the U.S. is in an active armed conflict, which would give the president extraordinary wartime powers. This dovetails with the September 17 demand of DHS that the “media and the far left” must stop “the demonization of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS law enforcement.” It also supports Trump’s warning to military leaders on Tuesday that “[w]e’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy,” followed by complaints that “Venezuela emptied its prison population into our country” and a vow to “straighten…out” the cities “run by the radical left Democrats.”
That assault is underway now, not only through raids like the one in Chicago on Tuesday, but also by administration figures who are using the government shutdown to hurt Democrats and their constituencies. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported this morning that the Department of Education changed out-of-office email replies for furloughed employees from generic messages to ones blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. Leah Feiger and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that when employees changed their out-of-office responses back to neutral language, the message changed back to blaming the Democrats.
Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has vowed to cut $26 billion from projects in New York City that Congress approved, despite the illegality of such impoundments, and has vowed to slash the federal government, again without a lawful basis for such cuts. A shutdown gives Vought no more legal authority than he ever had.
Jordain Carney of Politico reports that even Republicans are concerned about the damage Vought is doing to their own constituents as he attempts to weaponize the government against Democrats. But, as Carney reports, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) says the Republicans have no control over what Vought might do.
The nation’s rapid advance toward authoritarianism is one story right now, but there is another: the administration is rotting from inside.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports that the groundwork required for the mass layoffs Vought has threatened is not apparent, suggesting the administration is trying to project power it does not have.
The Republicans are trying to pin the blame for the shutdown on the Democrats, but Trump is apparently so unstable he is hurting their cause. The Democrats are insisting they will not be complicit in slashing through Americans’ healthcare. The law the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations but permitted the premium tax credits that subsidized the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) to expire at the end of 2025, and people are already seeing dramatic increases in their healthcare premiums.
On Tuesday, after his 70-minute incoherent speech to the nation’s top military leaders, Trump proved Democrats’ point when he told White House reporters that the administration intends to use the shutdown to cut programs the American people want, including ones that give them access to medical care.
Trump said: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for [Democrats] and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. And you all know Russell Vought, he’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way. So they’re taking a risk by having a shutdown because because of the shutdown, we can do things medically, and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people out.” Then, as if recognizing that he had just proved the Democrats’ point, he added a non sequitur: “We don’t want to do that, but we don’t want fraud, waste, and abuse, and you know we’re cutting that.”
Trump reiterated his support for Vought’s program today, posting: “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
This is another unforced error, with Trump tying himself to Project 2025 after assuring voters before the 2024 election that he had nothing to do with it and knew nothing about it. An NBC News poll from late September 2024 showed that voters who knew about Project 2025 hated it. Only 4% of voters said they liked the plan. It was unpopular even among voters identifying as MAGA Republicans; only 9% of them liked it. As the administration has put Project 2025 into place, it’s unlikely people like it more than they did before. Government agencies are not “Democrat Agencies”; they are agencies that provide services and protections for all Americans. Cuts to them have been widely unpopular.
Yesterday, the day after Trump’s 70-minute rambling talk in front of the nation’s top military leaders, Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) confronted House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). A camera caught the exchange:
Dean: “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”
Johnson: “A lot of folks on your side are, too. I don’t control him.”
Dean: “Oh my God, please. That performance in front of the generals?”
Johnson: “I didn’t see it.”
Dean: “That is so dangerous! You know I serve on Foreign Affairs and Appropriations, this is a collision of those two things. Our allies are looking elsewhere. Our enemies are laughing. You have a president who is unwell.”
Johnson: “I just left the Speaker’s apartment.”
Trump has been posting on social media often since Tuesday but has not appeared in public. Vice President J.D. Vance took the White House press briefing today to answer questions about the government shutdown.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/politics/trump-drug-cartels-war.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/01/john-thune-interview-shutdown-00591176
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/10/02/congress/john-thune-russ-vought-warning-00591596
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thebulwark.com/post/3m27q5rdwdk2b
atrupar.com/post/3m26cxb7ixo2e
October 1, 2025
October 1, 2025
Last night, as the government barreled toward a shutdown, President Donald J. Trump posted yet another doctored video on social media. This one showed House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reacting to Trump’s deepfake video of September 29 that faked Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) attacking Democrats and racial minorities and showed Jeffries sporting a Mexican sombrero and waxed mustache while Mexican music played.
On September 29, Jeffries told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell: “It’s a disgusting video and we’re going to continue to make clear: bigotry will get you nowhere. We are fighting to protect the healthcare of the American people in the face of an unprecedented Republican assault.”
Trump’s video from last night replayed Jeffries’s statement up to “bigotry will get you nowhere.” Then four images of Trump, each wearing a sombrero and playing an instrument in a mariachi band, popped up behind Jeffries, whose image suddenly had a sombrero and a mustache again.
The president does not appear to be taking the government shutdown very seriously.
Republicans are though: not to resolve it, but to use it to attack Democrats. Republicans control the Senate and could end the filibuster for the continuing resolution that would fund the government, thus enabling them to pass it through the Senate with a simple majority if they wanted to. Instead, they want Democratic votes for it, evidently wanting to make sure Republicans alone do not take the blame for their budget reconciliation bill of July as its deeply unpopular measures are becoming clear.
That measure cut Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits as well as a slew of other programs. While it extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, Republicans permitted the premium tax credit for purchasing health insurance under the Affordable Healthcare Act to lapse at the end of this year. The end of that program is already sending healthcare insurance premiums skyrocketing.
Democrats say they will not agree to a continuing resolution to fund the government until the premium tax credits are extended past their end date of 2025. Republicans want to force Democrats to abandon this demand, thus getting at least a semblance of a buy-in to the dramatic cuts that are already hitting Americans hard.
Administration officials are making sure the shutdown doesn’t affect their own priorities. They have prioritized the $20 billion bailout of Argentina’s failing economy as essential, so it will proceed. The bailout will help right-wing leader Javier Milei, a Trump ally. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported Monday that the bailout will also help billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, an associate of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who has invested heavily in Argentine companies and in Argentine debt.
The White House says construction of Trump’s ballroom in place of the East Wing of the White House will also continue during the shutdown.
Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought has weaponized the shutdown by continuing his illegal impoundments of congressionally approved funding, but this time using them solely against states with Democratic senators. Today he said he is canceling $8 billion in funding for programs that he claims “fuel the Left’s climate agenda.” “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA,” Vought posted on social media. Amelia Benavides-Colón of NOTUS reports that states have not yet been notified of the plan.
Vought also announced on social media: “Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” He said he was referring to funding for the Hudson River Tunnel Project known as Gateway, and the Second Avenue Subway project.
The publication of a new document today shows that the administration has launched another power grab, this one in foreign affairs. On September 29, Trump signed an executive order giving to Qatar security guarantees that are much like those guaranteed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The order says: “The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States. In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”
An executive order is not a treaty and can be overturned by another president, but the declaration of a military commitment to a foreign nation without ratification by the Senate as the Constitution requires shows the belief of administration officials that they can act as they wish without consulting Congress.
The agreement appeared to come to pass during the Monday visit of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, and likely reflects Qatar’s demand for a guarantee that Israel’s recent strike on Qatar would not be repeated. But the deal shows just how ill advised Trump’s illegal demand for, and then receipt of, a $400 million luxury 747-8 from Qatar turned out to be, for now it certainly looks as if Qatar received U.S. military commitments in exchange for a used plane.
Usually, administrations asserting authoritarian power make gains because they are popular. The Trump administration, though, is neither popular nor likely to become more popular as its policies hurt ordinary Americans.
Today the National Employment Report of the payroll processing company ADP said that the U.S. lost 32,000 jobs in the private sector in September. The ADP National Employment Report measures the labor market based on weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees. ADP also revised August’s employment growth, which had been recorded as 54,000 jobs, down to a loss of 3,000.
The independent ADP report has taken on additional significance since Trump has undermined the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In August he fired the commissioner of the BLS Erika McEntarfer, complaining that she had “RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” To replace her, he nominated right-wing economist E.J. Antoni, whose scholarship was not nearly as strong as his support for Trump. Then Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski of CNN uncovered a racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ Twitter account of Antoni’s.
Today Trump withdrew Antoni’s nomination after Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska refused to meet with him, suggesting he could not be confirmed.
Also today, Leonardo Garcia Venegas, an American citizen born in Florida but currently living in Baldwin, Alabama, and working in construction, filed a lawsuit against the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice and officials including Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The complaint says that “[t]wice in the past few months, federal immigration officers have raided…private construction sites…without a warrant, and detained Leo simply for being at work. Both times, Leo told the officers he was a citizen and showed them his REAL ID, an identification card issued only to citizens and lawful residents. But the officers still wouldn’t let him go.”
“Once immigration officers are on a site,” the suit alleges, “they preemptively seize everybody they think looks undocumented. And they detain these workers indefinitely—even those who have a REAL ID—until the officers eventually check the legal status of the people they’ve detained. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes; sometimes it takes days.”
On September 8, in a case that permits Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use racial profiling, Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that such profiling is acceptable because “[i]f the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” In practice, though, reports of abuses have become so commonplace that such encounters have been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops.”
The suit lists similar detentions of U.S. citizens, for example:
“Jorge Luis Hernández Viramontes, a U.S. citizen, was arrested while working at a carwash. Immigration agents took him to a nearby warehouse for questioning even though he had shown them his state-issued identification.”
“Javier Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed during a workplace raid at a tow yard where he worked despite screaming, ‘I have my passport! I have my ID! I’m a U.S. citizen!’”
“Jonathan Guerrero, a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed at gunpoint by immigration officers while working at a car wash in his hometown.”
“Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was detained after he handed out his resume at a Jiffy Lube and put in the back of a van without the chance to tell the officers he’s a citizen. The officers drove Mr. Noriega around for four hours and then held him at a detention center for six more hours before someone checked his wallet and realized he was a citizen.”
“Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen, was tackled by immigration officers on the sidewalk between her mom’s car and her office door.”
“Hediberto Ramirez Perez was arrested during a workplace raid at a nutrition-bar factory despite carrying his employment-verification ID card; immigration officers told him, ‘We don’t care about that for the moment.’”
Such detentions, the lawsuit alleges, violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Venegas hopes to make this a class action suit to stop the government from continuing its abusive policies.
—
Notes:
Popular InformationTrump’s Argentina bailout enriches one well-connected billionaireLast week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion package to rescue the Argentinian economy. The risky taxpayer-financed deal, which involves trading U.S. dollars for Argentine pesos, has little…Read more3 days ago · 723 likes · 93 comments · Judd Legumhttps://abcnews.go.com/Politics/live-updates/trump-admin-live-updates/?id=126029955
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/01/trump-new-york-funding-infrastructure-vought.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/assuring-the-security-of-the-state-of-qatar/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/politics/ej-antoni-nomination-withdrawn-bls
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alsd.76579/gov.uscourts.alsd.76579.1.0.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3xrrzdr0o
Donald J. Trump Truth Social post, September 20, 2025, 8:30 p.m.
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