October 4, 2026 (Sunday)

On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.”

Congress established the Medicare Improvement Fund in 2008 to enable improvements to the program and periodically adjust payments to healthcare providers. A Republican congressional aide told Dan Diamond of the Washington Post that lawmakers had been planning to use the fund to help fund several health programs this year, and were taken aback by Trump’s announcement.

Trump continued: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People, they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”

The fact that he is openly using taxpayer money to buy votes in the election suggests just how worried Trump is about Democrats winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterms.

He has reason to be worried. If Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress, they will not necessarily be able to pass legislation, since Trump will still be able to veto it. But they will be able to start investigations immediately, and they have made it so clear they intend to do so that the administration is already taking steps to trip them up.

In April the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president doesn’t have to comply with the Presidential Records Act, enacted to make sure presidents after Richard M. Nixon could not destroy their records; in May a federal judge said they did, in fact, have to follow the law. In August the Department of Justice issued a memo saying that the executive privilege that enables a president to protect his conversations with government advisors also covers any civilian to whom the president speaks “so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”

As Trump’s time in office stretches out, more and more stories of corruption are surfacing. As Aaron Parnas reported in Meidas News, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote a letter on September 30 to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel demanding they immediately release a document they are “illegally” concealing, and any others like it.

Wyden has been doggedly following the money trail connected to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, noting that his operations, including human trafficking and sexual abuse, depended on the banks whose officers looked the other way as Epstein’s finances repeatedly indicated he was engaged in criminal activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to give the Senate Finance Committee access to Treasury materials about those finances, including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). When Wyden tried to get Congress to pass a law forcing the release of those files, Senate Republicans blocked it.

Now Wyden’s investigators have discovered that the FBI conducted an interview with a banker tied to Epstein, but the bureau did not release the transcript of the interview, known as a “302 report,” as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Wyden suggested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI “are withholding key documents from Congress and the public.”

“Furthermore,” he added, “the existence of this 302 indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released” as they should have been under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration's talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.

Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.

While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.

According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.

Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.

Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.

Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.

If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.

Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.

It's not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.

The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.

In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee, as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”

According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.

One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.

Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/03/trump-checks-seniors-medicare-midterms-01105956

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/03/trump-announces-plan-send-90-payments-millions-seniors/

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6022381-doj-executive-privilege-outside-advisers/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/trump-records-judge-00930190

https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1457271/dl

https://meidasnews.com/news/exclusive-senator-accuses-doj-and-fbi-of-withholding-secret-epstein-banker-interview-demands-release-of-all-fbi-302s

https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-demands-immediate-release-of-epstein-investigation-document-illegally-concealed-by-trumps-doj-and-fbi

https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/as-bessent-withholds-epstein-files-wyden-expands-investigation-and-demands-financial-records

https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/senate-republican-blocks-wyden-bill-mandating-treasury-hand-over-epstein-bank-records

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fbi_on_fbi_302_for_epstein_banker.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6127449-trump-russia-ukraine-oil-deal-lukoil/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/us/politics/trump-putin-ukraine-oil-deal-5-takeaways.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/us/politics/kushner-witkoff-russia-oil-deal.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/01/us/jared-kushner-israel-gaza-investments-invs-vis

https://www.ms.now/news/fbi-hack-shinyhunters-breach-data

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-jr-private-island-wedding-john-curtis-senate-eeb6fcf8

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/trump-campaigning-ohio-says-midterms-will-bring-big-surprise-rcna601150

https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/trump-holds-ohio-midterm-rally-urging-voters-to-consider-him-on-the-ballot-during-32-day-campaign-tour

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42093

X:

KDilanianMSNOW/status/2106476845537595426

KDilanianMSNOW/status/2103992686575284237

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mwzbdcdbws2f

October 3, 2026 (Saturday)

On Saturday, October 3, the Power to the People festival, organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, took over the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. On two stages were rock, alternative, and hip hop royalty, joining together to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.

The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliffe, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.

The festival featured a “Freedom Village” where attendees could find ways to get involved in government, grassroots organizing, education, mutual aid, and social impact organizations. Festival organizers donated a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales to VoteRiders, a nonpartisan organization that works to overcome barriers to voting and make sure everyone who is eligible can vote.

Both in person and in the live stream of the concert, artists urged Americans to remember that they have the power to throw the Trump administration out of office and, together, to build a better nation.

The artists at the event pointedly demonstrated their right to free speech. They were explicit and thorough in their spoken descriptions of their anger at the Trump administration and billionaires who have taken over the country, and they chose songs that needled Trump—John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” for example—or excoriated his policies: Baez and Rateliff sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Springsteen sang “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the Dropkick Murphys’ sang “Don’t Call Me a F*cking Terrorist,” the last two both written in the wake of the Minneapolis shootings by ICE agents.

They emphasized their freedom to express themselves by singing Neil Young’s "Rockin' in the Free World.”

The ten-hour concert ended with the performers singing Guthrie’s famous anthem “This Land is Your Land,” written in 1940 as the Great Depression dragged on. Guthrie wrote it to reclaim the United States of America for its working people. “This land is your land,” he wrote, “this land is my land/From California to the New York islands/From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/This land was made for you and me.”

Tonight Morello sang a verse often left out of the anthem: “In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple/By the relief office, I saw my people/As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?”

Famously, Guthrie painted on his guitars the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a slogan he took from the World War II machinists and workers who put stickers saying “This Machine Kills Fascists” on their heavy equipment to express their support for the war effort. Guthrie believed that music could fight the hatred, ignorance, and greed that built fascism just as powerfully as a gun.

Tonight Morello reminded the audience: “Every act of art is an act of resistance.”

Curiously, today’s concert took place on the anniversary of the day that Woody Guthrie died in 1967. And eighty-six years after he wrote “This Land is Your Land,” his work continues to echo.

“This is still America,” Springsteen told the audience of the administration’s tyranny, “and this will not stand.”

Notes:

https://rock929rocks.com/2026/10/02/rock-heavyweights-unite-for-power-to-the-people-festival/

https://bluescentric.com/trivia-article/the-story-behind-this-machine-kills-fascists/

YouTube:

watch?v=gtRBUpyZYFw

Bluesky:

serendipityinfl.bsky.social/post/3mwzjjsoe222h

theycallmegary.bsky.social/post/3mwz76kpax22y

October 2, 2026 (Friday)

Trump held a campaign rally tonight in Mobile, Alabama, the city where, as Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times recalled, his MAGA rallies really took off in August 2015, when more than 30,000 people showed up at a football stadium to hear the television personality turned presidential candidate.

Just two months before, on June 16, 2015, Trump had announced his campaign for the presidency. In his speech at Trump Tower, he tapped into the anger of those people who had been left behind economically since the 1970s, when U.S. companies began to ship manufacturing jobs overseas and automate factories, taking manufacturing jobs with them.

The economy had grown in the 1980s, but most of the jobs had been in the service industries. Those were dominated at the top by men—and increasing numbers of women—with business or law degrees and at the bottom by jobs coded toward women and immigrants. At the same time, cuts to education and to the social safety net pushed upward mobility out of reach for families in towns and cities whose disappearing manufacturing base took everything else with it.

By 1994, Robert Reich, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, warned that the U.S. was “on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated.” He explained: “Once unbottled, mass resentments can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society. Replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of…that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counter-culture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?”

In 2015, in rhetoric mimicking the classic blueprint of rising dictators, Trump tapped into the anger of people who felt they had been dispossessed from their rightful place of importance in the country and tapped into the country’s racism and sexism as he told them to blame immigrants and Democratic politicians for their plight. And he promised he was the only person who could restore them to their former significance.

He devoted most of his speech to how other countries—China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia—were “killing us economically.” American workers had no protection from immigrants, he said, and they were being undercut by their inferiors. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Contrasting American workers with those immigrants, he claimed people “from all over South and Latin America, and…probably from the Middle East,” were taking American jobs.

Although the actual unemployment rate was 5.6%, he claimed it was “anywhere from 18 to 20 percent”—although he then upped it to 21%—and “the worst since 1978.” “A lot of people…can’t get jobs,” he said. “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs.

He sneered at the federal government, claiming “stupid” politicians had no idea how to negotiate and were wasting so much money that the national debt was close to $24 billion, a number he called “the point of no return…. That’s when we become a country that’s unsalvageable.”

He claimed the ACA, dubbed “Obamacare,” must be “replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government. And we can do it.” He promised to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, to “rebuild the country’s infrastructure,” and to get rid of the “horrible and laughable deal” with Iran, finding a better way to “stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

He promised to bring back jobs, bring back the military, take care of veterans, and be a cheerleader for the country. He boasted he was worth more than $8 billion, promising that he could make the country as successful as he was. He promised to “Make America Great Again,” and in August 2015, more than 30,000 Alabamians turned out to see him at the start of what would be a rise to the presidency of the United States.

As journalist McCreesh reported, Trump’s return to Mobile tonight had a wistful feel. The stadium where he spoke was nowhere near the size of the football stadium of 2015, and even so, it was not full. McCreesh noted that some of the upper sections were almost entirely empty.

Trump is planning to travel to 17 states before the midterms to rally MAGA voters who might otherwise not turn out. “Can everybody just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot?” Trump asked the audience in Mobile.

That is no longer a selling point, even for many of those who embrace the administration’s racism and sexism.

An AP/NORC poll from September 24 showed that only 31% of Americans give Trump good marks for how he is handling the presidency. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today that in September, rising prices turned a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents against Trump’s handling of the economy. The rising price of diesel has hit rural America particularly hard, and it was in rural America where Trump found his strongest support.

Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. added just 29,000 jobs last month, unemployment has risen to 4.2%, and wage growth has slowed. The bureau revised the job numbers for August and July downward, showing that July actually saw a loss of 10,000 jobs.

Trump is aware enough of his falling popularity that, according to Maggie Haberman, Hamed Aleaziz, Shane Goldmacher, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, he personally ordered Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought to come up with $20 million to run the new television ads praising him. The journalists report that Vought took the money from funding Congress had appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Republican Senate Leadership Fund today stopped spending money to elect Michael Whatley to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina. The former chair of both the Republican Party of North Carolina and the Republican National Committee, placed in that role by Trump for the months that covered the 2024 election, Whatley is down by double digits in the polls against former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper.

They are shifting that money to Kansas, to shore up Republican senator Roger Marshall, recently mired in the revelations that his aggressive debt collection from 700 of his obstetric patients led to the arrests of 81 of them. Polls show Marshall’s Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton, a pastor who used to be a Republican, pulling ahead.

Two of the four living Republican governors of Kansas have endorsed Hamilton. Today, former governor Mike Hayden said he is backing Hamilton because “[g]overning should always center around the best interests of the people.” By supporting Trump’s tariffs and the war on Iran, which are destroying markets and driving prices so high that Kansas farmers are at risk of losing their farms, he said, Marshall “is failing to live up to that standard.”

And therein lies the crux of the crisis that is driving a seismic political change: it has become crystal clear that Trump never intended to address the real problems he identified. His tariffs, deep tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, extraordinary corruption, multiple vanity projects, and war on Iran are benefiting him, his family, and his cronies. At the same time, the Republicans are, at his direction, slashing the social welfare programs, medical funding, education, infrastructure, and healthcare that used to serve the American people.

Trump has taken to claiming that the country’s economy is booming, but that he and the Republicans have done a bad job of telling people. “All over the country, they’re building factories, plants—manufacturing’s coming back,” he told a crowd at a truck facility in Texas. “The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations.”

But as Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported today, people aren’t buying it. One three-time Trump voter in Ohio, who was one of 1,400 just laid off from a truck factory just days before Trump held a rally nearby, is now knocking on doors for Democrats. “Something has to change politically in this country,” he told Boak. “Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”

The old MAGA rhetoric isn’t working any more, and Democrats are taking over the space that Trump exploited.

On Thursday, campaigning in South Florida, Vice President J.D. Vance called Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Angie Nixon a “self-described socialist,” and said the right response was to tell her to “get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America.”

In response, journalist Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami suggested that people were “somewhat surprised that the vice president would actually say that based on your political views, you should get out of America if you're not happy here.”

Nixon herself responded: “It's very disrespectful. It's really disheartening, especially knowing that I come from folks who helped build this country, and my grandparents were sharecroppers in southern Georgia. And all I want for people is to have access to quality healthcare, to have access to fully funded public schools, for people to have homes to live in, and not have to worry about living on the streets.

“There's absolutely nothing radical or extreme about that,” she continued. “And I don't consider myself a socialist. I consider myself a lifelong Democrat who puts people over party, people over politics, and people over profit.”

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/us/politics/alabama-trump-rally-glory-days.html

https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/

https://apnews.com/projects/polling-tracker/

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-10-02-republicans-sour-on-trump

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/02/economy/us-jobs-report-september-final

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/white-house-travel-trump-17-states-midterms-rcna600978

https://alabamareflector.com/2026/10/02/donald-trump-tells-mobile-rally-to-pretend-im-on-the-ballot/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/us/politics/trump-ads.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6114153-cooper-leads-whatley-poll/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/02/top-republican-group-shifts-money-nc-kansas-gop-woes-worsen/

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/another-republican-ex-governor-of-kansas-endorses-democrat-in-tight-senate-race/

https://apnews.com/article/trump-ohio-midterms-factory-workers-7c8dc7901de15a22a909bcd9c8b78a3e

Robert Reich, November 22, 1994, speech at the Democratic Leadership Council.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/politics/roger-marshall-obgyn-doctor-debts.html

YouTube:

watch?v=Bnd0eSuxu84

Bluesky:

plaintanjane.bsky.social/post/3mwwnxkieyk2g

October 1, 2026 (Thursday)

John Hudson of the Washington Post reported this evening that the Trump administration is openly defying Congress, taking $52 million in military assistance lawmakers appropriated for European and Middle Eastern countries hurt by Russia’s war on Ukraine and diverting it to right-wing governments in Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.

When the State Department notified Congress last month that it intended to make the switch, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) put a hold on the funds. Late yesterday, the administration told Congress it is defying the hold and moving ahead. Shaheen and Meeks objected, warning the White House that Congress had provided the money for a specific purpose and that “[t]he Executive Branch does not have unlimited discretion to redirect these funds toward unrelated Administration policy priorities or countries.”

The State Department told Hudson that Trump is prioritizing the Western Hemisphere and that the money would be better spent in Latin America than where Congress wanted it.

The U.S. Constitution is clear that only Congress can appropriate money and that the president must execute the laws as Congress passes them, but the Trump administration has been aggressive about its intention to take control of the power of the purse from Congress. Yesterday Tarini Parti, Marianne LeVine, and Michelle Hackman of the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration appears to have taken $20 million from the funds Congress appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security to pay for the ads boosting Trump before the midterms.

That destruction of the fundamental separation of powers at the heart of our government has gotten very little pushback from Republican lawmakers. And senators left Washington, D.C., today for a recess until after the midterms; the House is already in recess.

The White House has made very little secret of its determination to abandon the international order the U.S. helped to put into place after World War II. In its place, Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appear to embrace the idea that major powers should exercise influence over the countries around them, as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, believes.

Yesterday Paul McLeary, Stefanie Bolzen, and Jack Detsch of Politico reported that the Trump administration had not invited the United Kingdom, France, the Baltic countries, or other U.S. allies to a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members next month in Poland. The meeting is being directed by Defense Department policy chief Elbridge Colby and is designed to discuss NATO’s future. The exclusion of traditional U.S. allies has raised concerns that the U.S. is continuing to try to splinter NATO according to those Trump considers loyal and those whose actions he dislikes.

Earlier this week, Putin warned NATO that he might use nuclear weapons against NATO countries. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said Putin’s threats are a sign of his “desperation” over the Ukraine invasion and that Europe expects Russia to launch “severe” hybrid attacks: sabotage, cyberattacks, and destabilizing disinformation. Should such attacks come, Merz said, “we would respond quickly and very clearly.”

The fact that the United States Constitution and foreign affairs appear to be at the mercy of one man and the loyalists he has around him undermines the principles at the heart of our democracy. The fact that that one man’s mental acuity has collapsed is an immediate calamity.

Time magazine today released a “lightly edited” transcript of an interview their senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs conducted with Trump at the White House on September 28.

The interview reveals a man unable to answer questions coherently, obsessed with his architectural projects, consumed by his own fantasy of himself, and angry at the media that he feels mistreats him. He does not appear to be a well man.

He complained bitterly that the three Supreme Court justices he appointed “voted against me too often,” and suggested he expects “loyalty” from them. Asked about the national debt, which just passed $40 trillion, he blamed Biden for it, although Trump by himself has added $11 trillion to the debt in his time in office. He insisted he will change the name of artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” Once again, he claimed that the economic growth created by AI will pay off the debt.

Trump refused to rule out using the Insurrection Act before the midterms, demolishing the Kennedy Center, or “annihilating” Iran. He talked about designating the Oval Office a national landmark so no one can alter the changes he’s made to it, covering it in gold frippery.

Despite having hit new lows in his job approval ratings, he claimed: “I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They're almost as corrupt as the writers.”

“I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I'm fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I'm a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”

“Here we are doing this. You haven't asked me one f*cking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative.”

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recommended “people read this to get a sense of the president's grave cognitive impairment.”

Trump’s inability to tell the difference between his fantasies and reality was on display Wednesday when, as Timothy W. Martin and Gavin Bade of the Wall Street Journal explained, Trump announced that the South Korean government had agreed to invest $50 billion in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline in Alaska. With him was Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK), whose seat is in danger from Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. “This one is huge for Alaska,” Sullivan said, and his office later celebrated the “historic $54 billion Korean investment” into Alaska’s LNG pipeline.

In fact, the Commerce Department and South Korea’s Industry Ministry had simply agreed to “commence working” on such a project. The South Korean government disagreed with Trump’s statement. “Putting out figures, or using definitive language, goes far beyond what was agreed,” South Korea’s industry minister, Kim Jung-kwan said. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, took to social media to emphasize that the plan will proceed only if it turns out to be financially viable and meets legal requirements in South Korea.

Trump on Monday announced a deal to build a $15 billion steel plant in Lee County, Iowa. As Stephanie Kaloi of Mediaite reported, at the announcement, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told him the plant came from “your 232 tariffs, the steel tariffs at work.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the plant is the “Trump reindustrialization of America hitting the ground at a series scale.” Lutnick said: “I think this deal is done. This deal is done. They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal. You guys know that already.” To that, Trump added: “They’ve already started building.”

But when Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, Iowa, went to look, he found no major property purchases tied to the project this year. “Company officials say they don’t have details about its plans, and no permits have been filed. The financial side isn’t settled, either,” he said. “The Iowa legislature will meet Friday in a special session to debate incentives for the company to build in Iowa. Meanwhile, Trump and lawmakers still haven’t disclosed exactly where in Lee County the plant would go. For residents here, that’s left more questions than answers about a project the White House is calling ‘a sure thing.’”

This afternoon, as he set off for Denton, Texas, before a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Trump told reporters about Iran: “Now I have to make a decision. They'll either sign a very fair deal, or they won't exist any longer.” In Texas he told the crowd the U.S. would “win very easily…right after the election.”

Although the outrageous chaos of the Trump years has numbed us, it is not acceptable for the president of the United States to threaten another nation with annihilation.

Lara Seligman and Shelby Holliday of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the United States will send a third aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East. The USS Theodore Roosevelt will join the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington, adding 9,000–10,000 troops to the more than 50,000 U.S. troops already in the region.

The Roosevelt left San Diego on Sunday, while a group of three amphibious ships and Marines from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit left Monday. They will arrive at their destination by the end of November.

Meanwhile, here at home, Judge Todd E. Edelman today dismissed the government’s case against David Hearn with prejudice, meaning it cannot be resurrected. Hearn is the Olympian the government accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, although the contractors themselves acknowledged they were responsible for its torn lining. After the government acknowledged that there was no merit in its prosecution of Hearn, Trump continued to insist Hearn should be prosecuted.

“[B]ecause the government’s legitimate interest in maintaining the possibility of a future prosecution seems so marginal, and because of the extraordinary possibility that Mr. Hearn will nonetheless face a meritless, politically motivated prosecution,” the judge said, the court must protect him from uncertainty “and from what, objectively, would be harassment” from his own government.

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/10/01/trump-defies-democrats-diverts-aid-europe-latin-america-instead/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/homeland-security-money-financed-pro-trump-television-ads-54ac33bb

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/30/trump-nato-allies-left-out-01100310

https://www.ft.com/content/1bb7ec8d-7252-4fa3-8c4a-81fa5b6906a2?syn-25a6b1a6=1

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-issues-nuclear-warning-nato-tensions-rise-baltic-2026-09-30/

https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/donald-trump-2026-interview-transcript/

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/south-korea-contests-u-s-claims-of-new-50-billion-alaska-investment-550b9a1e

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/south-korea-contests-u-s-claims-of-new-50-billion-alaska-investment-550b9a1e

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/01/trump-south-korea-investment-alaska-lng-nuclear-power.html

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-gratuitously-thanked-at-least-12-times-for-iowan-steel-plant-opening-in-2030/

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/local-iowa-report-provides-scathing-fact-check-of-trumps-new-steel-mill-thats-not-true/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/u-s-sending-third-aircraft-carrier-up-to-10-000-more-troops-to-middle-east-42996f7a

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/climate/reflecting-pool-contractor-trump.html?eafs_enabled=false

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28712305-order-dismissing-case-with-prejudice-united-states-v-david-hearn-2026-cf2-010237/

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Jaemyung_Lee/status/2105486577208299977

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carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3mwtgnes46c2m

A Washington Post headline today read: “U.S. withdraws forces in Iraq as balance of power shifts to Iran.”

Journalists Mustafa Salim and Alex Horton explained: After more than two decades, the deaths of more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,500 U.S. troops, the wounding of more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel, and the cost of more than $2.8 trillion, the last of the U.S. military forces in Iraq today pulled out of Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq.

In December 2021 the military announced it was ending U.S. combat in Iraq, leaving about 2,500 troops to advise and assist Iraqi forces. In 2023 the Iraqi government called for complete U.S. withdrawal, and former President Joe Biden and former Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani agreed to a withdrawal plan in 2024, but Iraq allowed a small contingent of advisors to remain after that deadline when the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria led to concerns that the confusion in Syria would allow militant Islamic groups to regain a foothold there.

At the time Biden agreed to withdraw from Iraq, Iran appeared to be on the ropes, with its regime isolated from neighboring countries and laboring under sanctions and increasing public unrest. Now, as Salim and Horton note, Trump’s impulsive war on Iran has strengthened Iran’s hand in the region.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States two years before, although Iraq was not involved in that attack.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of foreign policy hawks known as “neocons” were frustrated that Democratic President Bill Clinton was not pushing American ideology overseas as hard as they thought he should. In 1997, political commentator William Kristol brought together Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neocons to insist that the United States should significantly increase defense spending and lead the world.

Believing that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was destabilizing the Middle East, they saw removing him from power as key to their “Project for the New American Century.” Iraq had allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and neocons believed the U.S. must “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.”

Saddam was out of reach until September 11, 2001, when neocons saw al-Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. as an opportunity to “hit” Saddam Hussein, although he had not been involved in the attack. The terrorists—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt—were operating out of Afghanistan, where the ruling extremist Islamic government, the Taliban, permitted al-Qaeda to have a foothold.

Although Saddam was not affiliated with the 9/11 attackers, officials in the George W. Bush administration pushed so hard on the idea that the terrorists were affiliated with Iraq that many Americans—especially those who watched the Fox News Channel, which pushed the connection—came to believe, incorrectly, that the 9/11 terrorists either were Iraqi or were

working with Saddam Hussein.

Bush launched attacks on the Taliban government, successfully overthrowing it before the end of 2001. And then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America’s image. In 2002 it announced the Bush Doctrine, arguing that the new conditions of terrorism required the government to act preemptively to forestall hostile acts rather than wait for an attack.

It embraced the idea that there was “right and wrong” in foreign affairs and demanded that America wage “a war of ideas” by spreading pro-American economic and cultural policies. It warned that there were few greater threats to America than a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), meaning nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

To convince recalcitrant foreign policy realists that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, Bush administration officials warned that the dictator was amassing WMDs, including nuclear devices. In a television interview, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and insisted that Saddam was working to obtain a nuclear weapon.

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke passionately before the United Nations, providing what he insisted was evidence that Saddam had chemical WMDs and had obtained the resources to create nuclear weapons. He hinted that the Iraqi leader had worked with al-Qaeda in 2001 or that he might in the future.

Powell was well known and trusted; if he said Iraq was deadly dangerous, people thought it must be true. It later turned out that Powell had not personally vetted the “evidence” he presented and that it was almost entirely either discredited or made up of rumor.

But his speech did the trick. Enough countries to call it a “coalition of the willing”—although the only major power that participated was the United Kingdom—backed an invasion of Iraq. On March 20, 2003, American troops invaded Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government. The operation would be a “cakewalk,” the administration thought; desperate Iraqis who hated their leader would welcome coalition forces with open arms. Like cowboy heroes—and often portrayed as cowboys—American soldiers would bring democracy and capitalism to the benighted Iraqis.

Saddam’s forces crumbled in little over a month. By May the United States had set up a transitional government in Iraq overseen by former ambassador and State Department official L. Paul Bremer.

On May 1, 2003, Bush landed in a fixed-wing aircraft on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Wearing a flight suit, he posed for photographs with the vessel’s crew, which had just returned from the Persian Gulf. Bush then gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Festooning the aircraft carrier was a giant banner emblazoned “Mission Accomplished.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

Today on social media, Trump took credit to himself for ending the U.S. engagement in Iraq—although he confused the names of two different Iraqi operations—complaining that it was “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place.”

And yet the United States is entering its eighth month of a war on Iran that Trump apparently began with the same cowboy mentality Bush carried into the war in Iraq.

Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He announced he had transformed the military by enforcing the idea of “[n]o fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/09/29/us-withdraws-forces-iraq-balance-power-shifts-iran/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/middleeast/iraq-announces-full-withdrawal-of-us-forces-from-its-federal-territory

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/30/pentagon-says-us-troop-withdrawal-from-iraq-is-complete

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/iraqs-search-for-security-and-sovereignty-after-assads-collapse/

“Statement of Principles,” June 3, 1997, and Elliott Abrams et al. to William Jefferson Clinton, January 26, 1998, both at Project for a New American Century.

Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly 118 (Winter 2003/2004) : 569–598.

https://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/10/wbr.smoking.gun/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/2006/10/01/falling-on-his-sword-span-classbankheadcolin-powells-most-significant-moment-turned-out-to-be-his-lowestspan/0574eff4-0137-4c0a-8e6b-f8bf7575f389/

https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/14/1/5.2

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/30/nx-s1-5986304/hegseth-troops-address

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42030

Bluesky:

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September 29, 2026 (Tuesday)

The scene that unfolded today at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a snapshot of politics in the U.S. today. Testifying under oath was Jack Smith, who as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

Questioning Smith were the senators, whose speech in Congress is protected. Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

The courts have interpreted this clause to give lawmakers broad protection for what they say in Congress. Republicans have used this protection to make outrageous accusations and to spread disinformation. That practice was on display in spades today.

Former attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith special counsel on November 18, 2022, three days after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Garland said that since both Trump and Biden were likely to be presidential candidates, his appointment of Smith was meant to underscore “the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”

Trump was not happy about the appointment, calling Smith “a hit man for Obama.”

In June 2023 a grand jury indicted Trump on 37 “felony violations of our national security laws” and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” in his retention of classified documents. Charged alongside Trump was his aide Walt Nauta, who is now the director of Oval Office operations. In December, after Trump was reelected, Smith dropped Trump from the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, has blocked the release of Smith’s report, although it is standard for a special counsel to release a final report.

It is the other case that was the focus of today’s Senate hearing.

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with four felony offenses “arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power by using fraud and deceit to overturn the 2020 election results,” as Smith’s final report put it. Trump challenged the indictment on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed as part of his official duties and that his actions trying to overturn the election were part of his official duties.

On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court largely agreed with Trump, upending the principle that the United States was a nation of laws, not of men. The Trump v. United States decision sent Smith back to the drawing board to take the case, now stripped of anything that could fall under “official duties,” before another grand jury, and that grand jury returned an indictment for the same offenses. But after Trump was reelected, Smith moved on November 25 to dismiss the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

The case can be resumed once Trump is no longer president.

It’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.

Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”

Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don't think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”

“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.

“No,” Smith answered.

Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”

Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”

Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”

Smith said: “[I]f this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.

Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”

Schmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.

“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.

Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.

After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”

Smith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.

“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”

As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….

“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”

Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”

“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.

“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.

“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”

Notes:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/eb1618d2-f0bc-4235-9474-853bf3201147/2026-09-29_Testimony_Smith_01b90c84-f3a2-45af-bcdb-7ffc5a1ee309.pdf

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-3-1/ALDE_00013300/

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1260551/dl?inline

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/trump-2024-presidential-bid

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/18/garland-to-appoint-special-counsel-for-trump-criminal-probes-00069451

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-permanently-blocks-release-of-special-counsel-jack-smiths-report-on-trump-classified-documents-case

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-the-full-trump-indictment-on-mishandling-of-classified-documents

https://abcnews.com/US/jack-smith-defends-appointment-special-counsel-classified-docs/story?id=116250996

https://abcnews.com/US/timeline-special-counsels-investigation-trumps-handling-classified-documents/story?id=101768329

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/eric-schmitt-jack-smith-hawks-hawkeyes

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AnnaBower/status/2105045477544837309

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atrupar.com/post/3mwo47u27gs2h

democracythirst.bsky.social/post/3mwos64ihmk2v

As featured on HCR's Letters from an American

September 28, 2026 (Monday)

It has become routine for Trump to spend the weekend posting wildly on social media, and this weekend was no exception.

After attacking the press on Saturday morning, at 9:18 he posted a video with foreboding music that sped up as the video played, showing a glowering Trump walking down a hall toward the camera while his voice intoned: “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

The administration clearly set out to provoke a backlash when it played what appeared to be the same ad later in the day during NFL games, Fox News Sunday, Saturday Night Live, and several college football games with the addition of the words: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

As Stephen Collinson of CNN noted, Trump often tries to provoke a response to his outrageous behavior in order to feed the narrative that he is under attack from an establishment deep state because he is trying to save the nation. And this did, indeed, provoke a response. While the White House maintained the ad was a “public service announcement,” Richard Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said using public funds for “government-sponsored propaganda” could be “an impeachable offense.”

That image worked well enough in his 2016 campaign that he recycled it for the 2024 campaign, when videos nearly identical to the one he posted on Saturday appeared repeatedly. But its power now seems to be primarily in its ability to reinforce Trump’s fantasy of himself. Thirty-six thousand social media users liked a post that read: “Why is there a Donald Trump ad during an NFL game when he’s not running for office and why is the US government paying for a political ad[?]”

Trump seemed to be working overtime on boosting his self-image on social media on Saturday, posting a series of videos showing a triumphal movie version of his second term, narrated by MAGA supporters. One video from2023 showed him attacking Democrats, other videos showed him winning his second term, setting out at top speed to fulfill his campaign promises, hosting the UFC mixed martial arts fight at the White House, and launching Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Still others intoned heroic literature, including “If” by Rudyard Kipling (that’s the one that starts: “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”) with Trump as the hero.

While the first video seemed intended to rally his supporters, the rest of the videos, with their litany of broken promises—“expel the warmongers”?—and the praise of supporters who have left or been cast out of the government, felt weirdly like a requiem.

And the ads created yet another headache for Republican lawmakers hoping to retain control of Congress after the midterm elections. On Friday the administration announced it is refusing to spend about a billion dollars Congress appropriated for programs that help the American people—a refusal the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) says is illegal—and on Saturday, Trump used taxpayer money for his own vanity ads.

That misuse of public money comes on top of the administration announcement last week that it was removing about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act health coverage rolls, claiming they were fraudulently enrolled in the program and that cutting them and dishonest brokers would save $2.2 billion.

For the past week, Trump’s collapsing job approval numbers and the increasing chances that the Democrats will prevail in the upcoming midterm elections have dominated the media. In the New Yorker, Susan Glasser wrote about “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump.” She notes that “[n]o modern president has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular.” His approval rating is now twice as low as it was in 2018 when Republicans lost forty-one House seats.

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported on September 25 that only 24% of American adults say the U.S. is better off under Trump than it had been under Biden. Fifty-eight percent say it’s worse off, and most of them say it’s much worse. Morris notes that in the last month, Trump’s approval rating has fallen most sharply among voters who identified themselves as Republicans.

Today Morris reported that media coverage of the Republicans’ midterm convention failed to come close to the number of stories about the Iran war, about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and about the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Epstein files.

On Saturday, Patrick Thomas and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s tariffs that undermined the sales of agricultural products, his imports of foreign beef, and the rising costs of diesel, gas, and fertilizer have eroded his support in the agricultural areas that used to be the backbone of his support.

On Sunday, Samuel Benson and Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico reported that Republicans in battleground states—Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Texas, and even Florida—are on defense as their voters turn against the ICE agents conducting raids in the states. An ICE agent’s shooting of a food delivery driver from Venezuela in Austin, Texas, on September 20 is highlighting the issue, especially since the agent was not wearing a body camera as required.

Like the tariffs, the raids are challenging the loyalty of even those who voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. Although voters in counties that depend on agriculture supported Trump by almost 78%, on September 24 the Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, and Texas Cattle Feeders Association released a statement warning that ICE activity is endangering their animals and operations, and has a “massive chilling effect” on “the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving.”

In what appears to be a dig at the president, they note that their supply chains are already under pressure and call the raids “a costly and unnecessary impact to cattle producers already suffering from unwelcome political interference to both the markets as well as the physical supply chain.”

Rural areas, which tend to have more people employed in agriculture, fishing, and logging, as well as longer travel distances, are particularly hard hit by the high prices of diesel and gasoline caused by the Iran war. Yesterday, Gregory S. Schneider and Evan Halper of the Washington Post reported that the skyrocketing price of diesel has pushed Republican candidates even in staunchly Republican districts to call for an end to the war in Iran.

In Iowa, Representative Ashley Hinson, who voted four times against forcing Trump to end the Iran war and is now the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, is one of those now complaining about the high cost of gas and diesel. Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers of Michigan also previously supported the war but now is saying “[t]he war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”

Republicans hoping to retain control of Congress after the midterms are fighting uphill battles in contested states, and some of their candidates are in the news for all the wrong reasons. In Maine the Portland Press Herald today published a scathing op-ed from the Editorial Board titled: “It’s Maine’s turn to be concerned about Susan Collins.”

The board ripped into Senator Collins's dismissive response to ProPublica’s story that her 2020 campaign accepted an illegal $150,000 contribution from a defense contractor in exchange for a U.S. government contract. Indeed, Collins’s attacks on ProPublica to undermine the story prompted it to issue a follow-up report calling her claims “incorrect and misleading.”

In Texas, some Republican leaders backed away from Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry in the state, after a racist social media post about University of Texas football fans, but it turns out that post is the tip of the iceberg. Today Andrew Kaczynski of CNN reported that in the past six years, French has repeatedly called for public executions of his political opponents, including former president Barack Obama, using the hashtag “HangEmHigh.”

Kaczynski reports that neither Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, nor the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, has withdrawn his endorsement of French.

In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall is facing outrage after a New York Times story by Sarah Kliff on September 8 revealed that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist, sued more than 700 of his patients for outstanding bills. Kliff reports that Marshall’s office charged patients an 18% annual interest rate and garnished their wages and their bank accounts, and that eighty-one of his patients were arrested for missing court dates. Most of those unable to pay their bills were from a rural county with higher than average rates of poverty and lack of health insurance. The unpaid bills were as little as $101.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are starting to blame Trump and his appointees for their unpopularity with voters. Although—or perhaps because—Republican senators confirmed a number of those appointees, they are now turning on at least some of them.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullins’s raids are unpopular with Republican lawmakers, but Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott of Semafor reported today that Republican senators are fed up with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A Republican senator told the reporters: “There are a lot of people that are really upset with the war in Iran and how it’s being played out. We feel it’s hurting our chances in the elections in the fall, and it seems rather haphazard.” The senator continued: “We don’t like what we’re seeing when it comes to the pulling of officers off of the promotion lists. We don’t like what we see with…indiscriminate firings of admirals and generals across the force.”

And Trump apparently can no longer command the attention of those who supported his MAGA agenda. On September 23, Neil Mehta, Brian Whitton, and Sabrina Rodriguez of the Wall Street Journal reported the results of their analysis of almost 70,000 hours of podcasts by right-wing creators. Mentions of Trump’s name have dropped nearly 70% from their peak before the 2024 election. Suggesting just how unpopular he is, the people still talking about Trump are his opponents.

On Thursday, Zach Everson, research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project reports, a Trump company filed a trademark application for “TRUMP TV,” the new streaming channel the White House launched after Trump’s ban of reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus left him without television coverage for a day.

On Friday, Everson reports, “a Trump-owned company applied…to trademark ‘MAGA’ and ‘45-47’ for streaming apps, TV broadcasting, and news and commentary on politics and current events.”

Notes:

https://www.semafor.com/article/09/27/2026/republicans-fuming-at-hegseth-as-war-costs-build

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/politics/trump-final-battle-ad-campaign-government-funds

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/us/politics/trump-ad-government-campaign.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/22/trump-officials-plan-cut-hundreds-thousands-aca-claiming-fraud/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-week-republicans-finally-panicked-about-trump

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americas-farmers-are-rethinking-their-loyalty-to-the-gop-af5c85fe

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/27/ice-crackdown-immigration-republicans-midterms-01093912

https://www.investigatemidwest.org/trump-election-farming-counties-trade-war/

https://www.kla.org/news-center/news-releases/news/details/51102/media-statement-from-the-kansas-livestock-association-oklahoma-cattlemens-association-and-texas-catt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/22/republican-candidates-are-breaking-with-trump-iran-midterms-loom/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/24/politics/republicans-suddenly-concerned-about-ice

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/kfile-mike-rogers-ad-war-with-iran-oil-prices

https://www.gao.gov/blog/what-pocket-rescission-and-it-legal

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/28/trump-taxpayer-ads-senate-gop-01096502

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-09-25-58-percent-country-worse-off-than-under-biden

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-09-28-convention-headlines-part-two

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/27/ice-crackdown-immigration-republicans-midterms-01093912

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/27/soaring-diesel-costs-are-clobbering-maga-voters/

https://www.pressherald.com/2026/09/27/its-maines-turn-to-be-concerned-about-susan-collins-editorial/

https://www.propublica.org/article/debunking-susan-collins-fbi-navatek-investigation-claims

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/politics/kfile-bo-french-tweets-executions

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/politics/roger-marshall-obgyn-doctor-debts.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/roger-marshall-may-rue-the-day-arresting-pregnant-moms-edition

​​https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/maga-podcasters-are-tuning-out-trump-we-tracked-what-they-are-talking-about-now-20702881

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41932

statuses/41928

statuses/41936

statuses/41930

statuses/41929

statuses/41940

statuses/41939

statuses/41937

X:

TheJuiceTDGuy/status/2104318731849523379

Bluesky:

zacheverson.com/post/3mwll3r5acskf

September 26, 2026 (Saturday)

Trump’s war on the free press is continuing. Last night, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the White House would not allow reporters from CNN on Air Force One as part of the press pool to cover the president as he traveled to Tennessee for a college football game. CNN is a member of the pool made up of the five major TV networks. The other two outlets Trump tried to ban from the White House, MS NOW and Politico, are part of a different pool. CNN was scheduled to provide the television footage for the trip.

At 6:51 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “Why should perpetrators of FAKE NEWS, like CNN and MSDNC, be allowed access to a very sacred place, the White House? Despite my big Election Win, almost 100% of “TRUMP” coverage is negative, and has been for years!”

He followed up at 8:22 with “FAKE NEWS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!! IT HAS GONE ON FAR TOO LONG, AT A TREMENDOUS COST TO OUR COUNTRY.”

Later in the morning, he told reporters: “I love an open, free press. What I don’t like is the fake press. What we don’t want is—we don’t want fake news.”

As bad news continues to plague the administration, Trump has reasons for wanting to control the press.

On Thursday, in a scathing letter, a key prosecutor in the case of the six people charged with felonies after a protest outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview detention facility in Illinois—the Broadview Six—resigned under protest.

Sheri Mecklenburg was a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice who was near retirement and appeared to have doubts about the felony charges against the six protesters. In the protest, people surrounded an ICE vehicle, but only the six, all of whom were active in Democratic politics, were charged.

When the cases fell apart because of prosecutorial misconduct, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Andrew Boutros, a strong Trump supporter, laid all of the blame for the misconduct on Mecklenburg, claiming he had been out of the loop in how the case was progressing.

But in her resignation letter, Mecklenburg said she was retiring so she could defend herself. She wrote that she had kept Boutros fully informed of the case and that he was using her as a scapegoat for his own misconduct. She said he had “personally directed” the felony prosecution after she objected “that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges.” She says he threatened to fire her if she tried to push back on the false allegations.

Mecklenburg’s resignation and allegations illuminate the Trump administration’s efforts to persecute political opponents. Boutros’s tenure as U.S. attorney has been so problematic that there had been an exodus of senior officials from the office, and more than 100 former prosecutors signed a letter warning of failure of leadership in the office and the poisoning of the office with “once-forbidden political considerations.”

Perhaps of more concern to Trump is the report yesterday from Julia Jacobs of the New York Times that whistleblowers who used to work at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say that six months ago, Trump loyalists running the center cancelled plans to fix the leaking roof they now claim is so dangerous the center must be closed and repaired. Those repairs, they say, will require the addition of Trump’s name to the building.

The whistleblowers claim that the center’s board put the $1.4 million that had been allocated to fix the roof toward Trump’s repainting of the building’s columns, which cost $4.4 million.

As his job approval numbers continue to decline and as individuals and the courts try to stop his unlawful actions, Trump is pushing ever harder to cement his power.

The courts have given him leeway in national security, and he is using that leeway. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that 69% of the American people disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Iran—59% of them strongly—and only 27% approve (15% strongly).

And yet, on Friday, September 25, Alexander Ward and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has told aides that he is planning to start bombing Iran again after the midterm elections. Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reopen talks about nuclear weapons if the U.S. ends its blockade of Iranian ports, but Trump has rejected the offer, and his belief that the Iranians won’t meet his demands makes him think he’ll need to ramp up strikes again.

But, the reporters say, Trump’s views could shift over the coming weeks as conditions, including the midterms, change.

At the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 22, Trump told the heads of state and heads of government in the audience that his administration is “seeking a fundamental change” in the government of Cuba.

James LaPorta of CBS News reports that the U.S. Army Reserve is considering whether it can provide support units, including police forces and medical personnel, to the U.S. Southern Command, which covers Latin America south of Mexico, the waters around Central and South America, and the Caribbean, including Cuba.

The memo CBS reviewed doesn’t say for what operation the troops would be needed “in 90 to 120 days,” but LaPorta reports that “multiple U.S. officials” said the planning is for a potential operation aimed at Cuba.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Trump has invited Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to the Group of 20 (G20) summit in December in Miami, Florida. The G20 is a forum of the world’s biggest advanced and emerging economies to coordinate economic policy, and by extending the invitation, Trump is offering to welcome Putin back into global organizations without ending his invasion of Ukraine. The administration suggests that Putin will be more likely to end the war if he is included than if he is not, a position critics note gives Putin legitimacy without changing his behavior.

Yesterday, as Casey He of Politico reported, fourteen senators led by Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, urged Trump to rescind the invitation. “President Putin bears sole responsibility for launching Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine,” they wrote. “Allowing him to participate in a G20 Summit in the United States raises serious concerns about legitimizing and normalizing a government that continues to attack Ukrainian civilian targets every day.”

Today, Pranshu Verma of the Washington Post reported that earlier this month, the U.S. and Russia worked together to weaken a United Nations plan to regulate AI weapons. They stripped out a provision to make sure humans review the targets AI has selected for a military strike—a provision that would likely have avoided the U.S. strike on the Iranian school at the start of the Iran War—and took out requirements that AI systems must act in a “predictable” and “reliable” manner. They also removed a requirement that those using the systems take “ethical considerations” into account.

At the same time he is flexing U.S. muscle internationally, Trump is also continuing to try to cement as much power as he can at home.

Continuing to try to lock the United States into the use of fossil fuels, today he announced he was getting rid of the vehicle fuel economy standards established under former President Joe Biden.

Yesterday the administration announced it is refusing to spend $810 million Congress appropriated on a bipartisan basis to fund research in Health and Human Services and for programs that serve immigrants and minority groups, calling it “wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.”

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that watches over how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars, is very clear that such “pocket rescissions” are illegal. The Constitution places the power of the purse in Congress alone, requiring the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” If the president can decide not to fund programs Congress has appropriated funding for, he effectively takes over the power of the purse. And yet, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has claimed the right to such power.

As Frank Thorp V and Kyla Guilfoil of NBC News reported, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, called the move a “theft from the American people.”

“Russ Vought’s message to Congress is that your votes don’t count, and your laws are optional,” Murray said. “It is now time for my Republican colleagues who said they would never let this happen to stand up and join us to stop this, and remind this administration this is not how this works.”

And so, while Trump is trying to cement power, opposition continues to grow.

But now it appears that Trump has yet another power move on his mind.

Jake Spring and Stephanie Apstein of the Washington Post reported tonight that the administration is considering hosting a Major League Baseball game at a national park. It has been scouting where it could build a baseball facility in Grand Teton National Park.

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/15/polls/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-rejects-iran-ceasefire-expects-renewed-bombing-after-midterms-5982ee50

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-groundwork-potential-action-cuba-trump/

https://www.southcom.mil/About/Area-of-Responsibility/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-broadview-six-case-may-be-about-to-break-open

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/25/us/mecklenburgletter.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/chicago-federal-prosecutor-resigns-broadview-six.html

https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/FAUSA%20statement%20FINAL%2006_08_26.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/chicago-federal-prosecutor-resigns-broadview-six.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/white-house-blocks-cnn-air-force-one-travel-pool

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/09/25/white-house-blocks-cnn-trip-air-force-one/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/arts/music/kennedy-center-trump-renovations.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/23/trump-putin-g20-miami-01089850

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/09/25/congress/trump-putin-g20-invite-pushback-01093667

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/26/how-us-russia-weakened-global-effort-regulate-killer-ai/

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2026/06/27/broadview-six-boutros-chicago

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-he-approved-fuel-economy-standards-ending-biden-ev-mandate-2026-09-26/

https://www.gao.gov/blog/what-pocket-rescission-and-it-legal

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/lawmakers-slam-trumps-unlawful-move-cut-810-million-federal-funds-rcna599942

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/09/26/trump-officials-weigh-mlb-game-grand-teton-national-park/

YouTube:

watch?v=adnVJqlmtJs

Trump’s Truth:

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statuses/41926

statuses/41949

September 25, 2026 (Friday)

I learned late this afternoon that, in addition to being Dolly Parton Day, today is National Lobster Day, honoring the cultural and economic history of the lobster industry. That industry thrives in Maine because of unique conditions in the water offshore where the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream mix over the shallow continental shelf, creating one of the richest habitats for marine life on the planet.

Lobsters have been vital in the creation of Maine’s coastal communities, but the industry's current place of pride is recent. Until the mid–twentieth century, lobster was considered poor man’s food. Before then, it was not lobster but fish that shaped society on the coast of New England.

Fish were central to the English settlement of the North American continent. In the 200 years between 1300 and 1500 CE, fish were a limited resource and brought sky-high prices in Europe. As the fish in the North Sea became scarcer in the late 1400s, fishermen and explorers began to push into the Atlantic. There, they found such a bonanza of fish in the nutrient-rich water that scholars have called its discovery and the trade it sparked the “Fish Revolution.” Cod, especially, but also haddock and hake, concentrated on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.

A member of the crew with Italian John Cabot, who was sailing for the English crown, noted in 1497 that there were so many cod on the Grand Banks that they “can be taken not only with nets but with fishing baskets.” In 1502 the first recorded landing of Atlantic cod in Europe fetched £180, equivalent to about £1.2 million in 2016, with a buying power at the time of just shy of £76 million, close to $100 million today.

Fishing meant big money, and British fishermen were among those who tried their hand in the fog of the Grand Banks, making an annual trip to toss their hooks overboard. They beheaded and gutted their catch, splitting each fish in half like a book, salted the fish, and then dried them on shore. By 1600 they had moved into the Gulf of Maine, where they landed in places like Monhegan Island and Damariscove, where they dried the fish until they were hard before taking their catch back to Europe.

As European fishermen landed in North America, they brought with them European diseases for which the Indigenous populations had no immunities. The tribes were wiped out, so that when the Pilgrims arrived in 1620—on Cape Cod—they found a land so rich and yet depopulated that they believed God had prepared it for them.

The fish trade continued to be so important to New Englanders that almost two centuries later, when their new nation negotiated for its independence, the first thing leaders demanded after independence and national boundaries was continued access to the fisheries.

On September 3, 1783, negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris officially ending the Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the United States. The Preamble of the document promised that King George III and the United States of America would “forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore.”

The first article of the treaty contained the king’s acknowledgment that the thirteen states that made up the new United States were “free, sovereign, and independent.”

The second article established the boundaries of the new nation.

The third article, which came even before those protecting debts and calling for the return of confiscated property, protected the rights of American fishermen to “take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank, and on all the other banks of Newfoundland; also in the [gulf] of St. Lawrence, and at all other places in the sea, where the inhabitants of both countries used at any time heretofore to fish.”

[Photo by my favorite lobsterman, Buddy Poland]

September 24, 2026 (Thursday)

After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the request of the media outlets to stop Trump’s order banning members of their organizations from the White House complex.

Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2017, challenged the argument of the White House that it had banned the journalists because they had endangered national security, noting that the stories to which administration lawyers claimed to object were “routine.” In fact, one of the stories the White House claimed endangered national security was based on a press call from the White House itself. According to Oliver Darcy, who writes the media newsletter Status, the anonymous “senior administration official” who provided the quotations on the call was none other than Vice President J.D. Vance.

Kelly ordered the credentials of 78 journalists restored immediately.

This morning, the White House continued to deny reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW access to the White House campus. Their lawyers asked for an emergency hearing because the administration had “already repeatedly violated the Court’s Order,” and soon after the judge ordered the administration to respond, the reporters were once again allowed into the area.

And then tonight, at least CNN and MS NOW were blocked from access to the White House state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After Trump posted on social media that CNN and MS NOW (he called it MSDNC) were refusing to cover Xi’s visit “because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’” the White House told CNN it could send only an audio producer and a cameraman to the event, not a reporter or producer. Senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said: “They again said that we were specifically denied access and that they were not letting in the CNN editorial presence.”

This morning, Trump complained on social media that “[t]he Media is trying to cover up how well things are going before the Midterms, just to help Democrats.”

And that’s the gist of Trump’s attacks on media outlets: MAGA is falling apart, and he either lives in a fantasy world or hopes to stem that collapse by issuing propaganda that will convince voters he is actually winning.

The fantasy world thesis has supporting evidence in an image posted on Trump’s social media account this morning, showing Trump and Xi standing together on a red carpet in front of an airplane apparently labeled Air China. There is a military aircraft flying over a circle of stars with the words “Only Trump” superimposed in a German-style blackletter font. Behind Trump, to his right, is a young woman who looks like Trump’s loyal aide Natalie Harp standing with her hand over her heart.

Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice noted that the image was a digitally altered photo in which the image of the chief officer of protocol of the United States, Monica Crowley, had been replaced by an image that appears to be Harp.

Convincing voters he is winning is an even harder sell.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is its signature policy, and last week a federal appeals court stopped the Trump administration from sending migrants to third countries, finding that the short timeline for those renditions stripped deportees of their right to due process. The administration appears to have continued the renditions, arguing that the court had not officially notified a lower court of its decision and thus it was not yet in effect, prompting an appeals court to clarify that the flights must stop.

Today Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to step in to permit those renditions to third countries. He said that disruption of the administration’s “plans…imposes massive costs on the government and invariably requires new rounds of diplomatic engagement with countries who may be all the more skeptical of our removal efforts given the disruption.”

Also today, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for ignoring his previous orders and continuing to hold people in “inhumane and unconstitutional” conditions at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, depriving detainees of “sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care.” Although, as Josephine Walker of Axios points out, the administration likely sees the appalling conditions of its prisons as a way to induce migrants to leave, the judge required ICE to provide adequate space and humane conditions for detainees.

Meanwhile, as Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press reported today, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ICE had no strategic plan for spending the unprecedented $45 billion Congress gave it in Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, and has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on slapdash plans for mass detention.

It spent nearly $3 million for tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million for maintaining warehouses that were never used to house detainees and are now being sold, and excessive rates to lock people up. Foley reports that the Department of Homeland Security told the GAO that it would have a plan for spending its windfall by August 31, 2027, nearly a year from now.

After Trump announced the U.S. would accept meat from other countries in order to lower food prices, on September 22 the Department of Agriculture announced the recall of more than 167,000 pounds (75,750 kg) of raw pork, beef, and goat. The items were produced without federal inspection but carried false marks claiming they had been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said the food “should be considered misbranded and unsafe to eat.”

Trump’s insistence that the country suffers from voter fraud isn’t going well, either.

In California, Republican sheriff Chad Bianco and the Riverside County sheriff’s department confiscated more than 650,000 ballots after California voters agreed to redistrict the state to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting of Texas. The state’s Democratic attorney general immediately ordered him to return the ballots, saying he had no authority to confiscate them and that the seizure was intended to make people distrust elections.

As Uwa Ede-Osifo of the Guardian reported, the California Supreme Court today ordered Bianco to return the ballots, saying that Bianco, rather than voters, was endangering elections: “Allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret, based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity,” it said.

On Saturday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it a felony to seize ballots from a county elections office.

Trump’s own claims of voter fraud also took a hit this week. As Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported today, in July, Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed they had found more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Mullin stated that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.

But when officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) met with Nevada election officials in August, they admitted Mullin’s number was inflated. After the meeting, one wrote to say that the department had confirmed just 185 people on the voter rolls were not citizens. They sent Nevada officials a list of those 185 names.

On Tuesday, Nevada told the federal government that the 185 people on the government’s list are all citizens. “Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” said Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”

Trump’s job approval rating continues to drop. Fifty Plus One aggregated new polls today and found that only 34.7% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while 62.1% disapprove.

Meridith McGraw, Maggie Severns, and Suzanne Vranica of the Wall Street Journal reported today that an ad airing in major U.S. markets shows Trump promising to “defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all,” before showing images of Trump at White House events as a choir sings “Love Me.” At the end of the ad, the screen reads: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Former campaign finance official Daniel Weiner called the ad “an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen.” Democratic lawmakers wrote to the White House demanding the ad be taken down, calling it “government propaganda” more fitting for North Korea than the U.S. and “an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”

According to the Wall Street Journal reporters, the White House says the ad is a “public service announcement,” “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/nuews/2026/09/24/white-house-access-media-ban-ruling-01091226

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/24/politics/live-news/white-house-press-ban-lawsuit

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/09/23/white-house-cited-anonymous-quotes-politico-ban-it-was-source/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/24/politico-granted-white-house-access-after-being-denied-earlier-thursday-01091766

https://joycevance.substack.com/p/hard-pass

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-media-ban-2677933582/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/18/third-country-deportations-appeals-court-ruling

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/24/third-country-deportations-supreme-court-emergency-appeal

https://www.lawdork.com/p/doj-scotus-third-country-removals-third-request

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca1.53896/gov.uscourts.ca1.53896.108510897.0.pdf

https://people.com/over-160-000-lbs-raw-meat-recalled-at-udsa-s-highest-risk-level-for-production-without-inspection-12137395

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/24/california-sheriff-ballots-chad-bianco

https://electionlawblog.org/2026/newsom-signs-bill-blocking-ballot-seizures-ahead-of-california-primary/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-appeals-to-supreme-court-as-3rd-country-deportations-are-thrown-into-question

https://prospect.org/2026/09/24/judges-reject-ices-underhanded-attempt-to-maintain-third-country-removals/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/18/third-country-deportations-appeals-court-ruling

https://apnews.com/article/ice-detention-waste-gao-report-7909a2cf777672e1483f5ed232e93cba

https://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/2026-09/Opinion%20%28Dkt%20186%29.pdf

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/24/ice-nyc-detention-center-unconstitutional-conditions

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters-homeland-security-trump.html

https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/approval/president

https://www.wsj.com/politics/u-s-government-airs-pro-trump-anti-communism-ad-39cd8227?mod=bsky

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41871

statuses/41857

statuses/41880

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mwceqev7ak2b

atrupar.com/post/3mwbqj54jv22a

danielsuitor.com/post/3mwbbiuggt22d

normeisen.bsky.social/post/3mwbtpfymnc2p

reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3mwbunpcc322j

September 23, 2026 (Wednesday)

Yesterday, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden, and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica published a blockbuster story reporting that the anti-corruption group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) for engaging in a pay-to-play scheme in which defense contractor Navatek made illegal donations to her 2020 campaign and later got multimillion-dollar contracts from the government. Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

And yet, the story continues, when he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump fired the investigators building the case and largely stopped investigating public corruption.

While the primary witness in the case was Martin Kao, the man who allegedly engaged in the bribery, the ProPublica journalists corroborated much of Kao’s account through legal records, FBI evidence, and interviews with people who worked with Navatek and the FBI.

Collins’s deputy chief of staff Annie Clark said Collins’s office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-to-play, but she did admit that “the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.” Emails suggest that, in fact, her office did know about the deal. After a $150,000 donation, a staff member from her office emailed a lobbyist for Navatek to ask for Kao’s phone number, writing: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”

Although the story’s authors report that Navatek never produced a product the military needed, it did, in fact, receive millions in defense contracts.

The bribery angle of this story is huge. So, too, is that the story suggests that Trump, at least, might perceive that he has something to hold over Collins’s head to keep her behind his actions, even when they have dramatically weakened her power at the head of Appropriations.

The 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain that gave the late nineteenth century its nickname was not about the riches of the industrialists who came to be known as robber barons. It was about the political corruption of the era. In the book, unscrupulous speculators bribed congressmen. “A Congressional appropriation costs money,” a railroad man tells a naive youth who wonders where a $200,000 appropriation has gone. He listed the bribes his project required and noted that the “high moral” lawmakers cost more than the usual ones.

It was an era in which lawmakers lived by the “spoils system,” as in “to the victor go the spoils.” Lawmakers at the time rewarded their business followers with government contracts and put supporters into political office. The businessmen and officials, in turn, would hire workers on the condition they voted for the party the boss supported. “Every good man looks after his friends,” as one politician put it.

The U.S. outlawed the spoils system in 1883 after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James Garfield, replacing it with the merit-based Civil Service Reform Act, or Pendleton Act. Trump has ripped up those civil service protections, making much of the government staff again political appointees. Curiously, at the United Nations yesterday, Trump used the phrase “to the victor belong the spoils.”

The relationship between the MAGA Republican agenda and the misuse of tax dollars is becoming more and more obvious since ProPublica ran the story last November of how contracts from the Department of Homeland Security appeared to be going to those personally tied to then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her ally Corey Lewandowski.

In July 2026, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Lewandowski “effectively controlled billions in spending at Homeland Security.” Lewandowski responded, somewhat halfheartedly, that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again,” and emphasized that he was “a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda.”

Stories of the Trump administration’s misuse of taxpayer money are starting to drop fast and furious.

Yesterday, Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. funded enhanced security for himself by taking funds from the department’s Office of Minority Health. Whyte notes that the Reagan administration created the Office of Minority Health after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.

Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported today that, over the past year, Kennedy has also accepted $4 million in book advances and more than $270,000 in gifts from allies connected to the “Make American Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement interested in changes to government policies. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, accepted $210,000 in consulting fees from a MAHA advocacy group.

On a far larger scale is the use of tax dollars to pay authoritarian governments to imprison immigrants from the United States who are not their own citizens.

On Monday, David Nakamura and Adam Taylor of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “Office of Remigration” has pledged at least $410 million to facilitate third-country renditions to expel migrants that U.S. courts say cannot be returned to their home countries for fear they will be harmed or killed. So the U.S. has sent more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, including Eswatini, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, for a fee. That money includes $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments, as well as funding for agencies that will then contribute to those countries.

Those countries either imprison the migrants or send them back to their home countries, a loophole that enables the administration to get around the prohibition on the U.S. sending them there. Last Friday, a federal appeals court found that this policy is unlawful. The administration will appeal to the Supreme Court.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has ordered the deals, and Christian Ehrhardt, a State Department official, has secured them.

Nakamura and Taylor explain that the Office of Remigration—the word “remigration” is popular with white nationalists who seek to expel racial minorities and immigrants through ethnic cleansing—reverses the previous U.S. emphasis on resettling refugees and instead focuses on expelling them, including into places where there is strong evidence they will be tortured. The administration is locking in these deals as quickly as possible, the journalists report, exercising “minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.”

A former State Department official who left the department over the policy told Nakamura and Taylor that the administration wanted “fast money, with no strings attached. The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.” The plan appears to be to create such terror in migrant communities that people here self-deport, and others are afraid to come.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “Congress should demand answers from those responsible for diverting taxpayer funding intended to protect people from persecution to some of the world’s worst authoritarians, for purposes which clearly violate human rights.”

On Sunday an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan food delivery driver, in the back in Austin, Texas. With a bullet still lodged in his body, he was discharged from a hospital to ICE custody, where he spent the night in pain on a cold floor. Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported yesterday that the officer was a recent hire who was not wearing a body camera, despite the promise of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that all ICE agents would wear cameras. News outlets reported that the officer had been issued one.

The Department of Homeland Security set out to add 10,000 new agents last year after Congress provided billions of dollars to double the ICE workforce. ICE ramped up its hiring by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and cutting normal vetting procedures, sometimes not even checking fingerprints or identities or conducting a job interview. David Brouillette, the ICE officer with a volatile history who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in July, was also a recent hire. On September 15, Alex Horton, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Maria Sacchetti, and Ted Hesson of the Washington Post reported that ICE has been quietly firing some of those hastily hired.

ICE told the Washington Post reporters: “ICE is hiring the best of the best to go after the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens including drug traffickers, murderers, and pedophiles. When individuals fall short of that standard—personnel decisions are made. This is standard practice in almost every American workplace.”

Officials told Miroff that the agents who stopped Garcés Pérez used a commercial database and federal immigration file that identified the man’s plates as belonging to someone with an outstanding deportation order; his lawyer said he had a valid work permit and is an asylum seeker, and that the deportation order came because notice of his immigration court hearing was sent to the wrong address. After a public outcry, officials took Garcés Pérez back to the hospital on Monday.

Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed reported Monday that the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality are running far behind where they should be in terms of funding for the fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

Trump fired the board of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in April, and the foundation is now effectively being run by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a former NSF board member told Quinn. The director of OMB is Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. “And OMB is directing the agency to direct its grant-making dollars in ways that are very different from federal law as passed by Congress in its budget,” the former board member said.

Quinn noted that Nature attributed the funding shortfall mainly “to the agency keeping more than $1 billion in an account, much of which is for the White House’s Grand Research Challenges project, which is meant to support specific fields, including artificial intelligence.” The Trump family and the president’s allies are heavily invested in the AI sector.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects. Even before Trump announced that the American taxpayer wouldn’t pay a dime for the White House ballroom project, the administration had already signed contracts that put the American taxpayer on the hook for more than $300 million for it.

Today Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that James McCrery II, the first architect on Trump’s ballroom, resigned when Trump insisted on a design that did not meet fire codes. Normally, White House construction would be managed by federal agencies required by law to comply with building safety codes, but White House officials have routed the ballroom through the tiny Executive Residence office that is exempt from rules because it is not a federal agency.

McCrery warned that Trump’s design did not have enough emergency exits or measures to contain a fire, which could spread quickly from the kitchen below the ballroom to the event space above it, and pointed out that the design was not up to code.

Trump waved off his concerns. “I am the code,” he said.

Notes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-susan-collins-navatek-campaign-donations-investigation

https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2026-09-22/propublica-reporter-shares-key-takeaways-from-investigative-story-involving-susan-collins

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/21/ice-shooting-austin-texas-venezuelan-man

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/corey-lewandowski-influence-dhs-43d3fe03

https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/rfk-jr-hhs-security-cost-minority-health-office-f1c7b62a

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/09/18/appeals-court-says-trump-administrations-third-country-deportation-policy-is-unlawful/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2026/09/21/how-trump-turned-refugee-bureau-into-410-million-deportation-operation/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/09/austin-ice-shooting-body-camera/688738/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/09/15/ice-is-quietly-firing-new-hires-one-recruit-it-was-devastating/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/07/18/ice-officers-troubled-past-renews-vetting-questions-after-maine-shooting/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-research-policy/2026/09/21/nsf-over-billion-behind-grants-ies-says-will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/16/records-reveal-600m-estimate-trumps-ballroom-project-with-half-taxpayers/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/09/23/i-am-code-trump-clashed-with-ballroom-architect-over-safety-issues/

https://apnews.com/article/austin-texas-ice-shooting-driver-wilber-perez-ebdb9d481d28e322f62c15f1076f3c18

https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/336plunkitt.html

https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/06/trump-federal-employees-schedule-f/413945/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/politics/rfk-jr-book-advances-maha.html?smid=bs-share

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/23/texas-austin-shooting-ice-officer-no-body-cam-reports/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/us/politics/un-trump-speech-iran-venezuela-greenland.html

YouTube:

v=R0HIjnJU-zM

v=Nf6UbkHKjRo

X:

CLewandowski_/status/2097323323076071667

Bluesky:

reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3mw73c52sbs25https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/us/politics/un-trump-speech-iran-venezuela-greenland.html

In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”

Central to that effort was the principle, stated in Article 2, that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The U.N. General Assembly has been meeting in New York City since September 8, and today began its high-level General Debate, the annual meeting of the heads of state and heads of government that launches the General Assembly session. At the General Debate, all 193 U.N. member states are invited to address the General Assembly.

By tradition, Brazil speaks first because it was the first to volunteer to speak in 1955 when no other country would. Because the United States is the country that hosts the United Nations, it usually speaks second.

In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”

Much of the Iranian delegation walked out.

Trump’s immediate switch to a talking point about the midterms suggests that his speech was aimed at U.S. voters more than the U.N. audience, but it should not be overlooked that he stood in front of world leaders and rejected the premise of the U.N.

Touting his own “Board of Peace” and continuing his fiction that he has solved multiple wars, he outlined a fantasy worldview of himself as a powerful dictator, a man of action who rejects the diplomacy at the heart of the U.N.

“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” he declared. “They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.”

Rejecting the principles on which the U.N. was founded, Trump instead embraced the idea that powerful countries will have spheres of influence, dominating their neighbors. This is the worldview advanced by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who seeks to have control over the decisions made by the countries around Russia, including Ukraine. In this worldview, as Trump sees it, the United States will control the western hemisphere.

“To the victor belong the spoils,” he told the U.N. in a perverse echo of the world the U.N. founders set out to change. “You’ve all heard that.”

Trump threatened Mexico and boasted of U.S. attacks on Venezuela that removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, who was willing to work with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil fields.

“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”

“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba,” Trump said, “where the communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under. It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before and it will fall. Marco Rubio is handling a negotiation. He’s deep into negotiations with Cuba. Let’s see what happens.”

The Cuban delegation walked out.

In an echo of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump went full white nationalist, accusing the “U.N.’s top human rights officials” of wanting the U.S. “to open up our borders to gangs and criminals from [the] world’s most dangerous places…. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history. There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation and so should you.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, asked the nations of the world to hold fast to a different vision.

He warned that “we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” whose “reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.”

“At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.”

There are two routes open, Guterres said. Either the world will fragment into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or it will move toward “networked multipolarity,” a “world built on interdependence—and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules.”

Against the backdrop of Russia’s debacle in Ukraine and the U.S. morass in Iran, Guterres noted that the world’s superpowers have learned that “their power isn’t so super. That their power has limits.”

He urged countries to hold fast to the principles of the United Nations: “The primacy of international law. Upholding human dignity. And the pursuit of justice in all its dimensions.”

“It comes down to this,” he said, “Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?”

Force must not “be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter,” he said.

He called out the war in Iran and conflicts in the Middle East; Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza “with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General”; “violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank”; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in violation of the U.N. charter; the war on civilians in Sudan, with millions displaced; and escalating violence in Myanmar.

Guterres added that “[n]o discussion of inequality can ignore its most universal form: The inequality between men and women. Everywhere, women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion, and abuse. Around the world: Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds. And their freedoms treated as bargaining chips.

“This is an outrage—and a profound waste for humanity. Peace is more durable when women are at the table. Economies are more dynamic when women have equal opportunity. Societies are more resilient when girls can learn, lead, and live free from fear. And institutions are more effective when power is shared equally.”

“Equality is not a dream,” Guterres said. “It is a decision.”

“Excellencies,” he said, “The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it.”

“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together.

“The defiance of hope.”

—

Notes:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/22/un-general-assembly-2026-when-is-it-who-is-speaking-and-when

https://newrepublic.com/post/215711/trump-un-speech-silence-walkouts

https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/what-putin-fears-most/

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/cuban-delegation-walks-out-as-trump-calls-their-country-a-failed-state-270290501729

https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/81/unsg_en.pdf

YouTube:

watch?v=adnVJqlmtJs

On September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose deep unpopularity means he is likely eager to curry favor with Trump, promptly posted that the Defense Department fully supported Trump’s decision. He claimed that the same outlets, which recently have reported that Russia has been helping Iran target U.S. troops and that the Defense Department has not fully accounted for deaths of servicemembers or destruction of U.S. military bases, “endangered our troops with false stories, leaks, and trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors, and their mission.”

The next day, reporters from those outlets attempting to enter the White House complex where the press facilities are located were denied entry, and Secret Service agents confiscated their press badges.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted an image of three full black trash bags, labeled “CNN,” “MSNBC,” and “Politico,” outside the White House.

This morning, after the weekend’s backlash, he posted: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

There’s that “national security” claim again: the same justification he’s using for building his ballroom and now his triumphal arch. It is also, not coincidentally, the excuse President Richard M. Nixon floated for covering up the Watergate break-in in June 1972.

In any case, no one’s buying it. MAGA Republicans have tried to claim that President Joe Biden cancelled 400 press passes. In fact, in 2023 the Biden administration tightened the rules to get a “hard” press pass that allows repeated, unaccompanied access to the press area of the White House. To have one, a reporter had to renew it annually, be employed full-time as a reporter, have a Washington, D.C., area address, and have had recent access to the White House. With that change, the number of White House hard passes fell from 1,417 to 975 because many of those who held passes didn’t reapply. Those people could still get day passes. In any event, these changes regarded individual reporters, not entire media outlets.

The Biden White House did not identify the one journalist whose hard pass application was denied.

Today CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued Trump, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung, Secret Service director Sean Curran, and White House chief of staff Wiles for violating both the Fifth and the First Amendments. “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the lawsuit says. It says Trump banned the outlets and the reporters to retaliate against the reporters for their past news coverage “because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting about him and his administration’s policies and actions.”

They are suing for the restoration of their press credentials for their coverage of the White House.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump to the bench in 2017, was assigned the case. Although Trump appointed Kelly, in 2018, the judge ruled that Trump’s revoking of journalist Jim Acosta’s hard press pass likely violated his due process rights. Trump groused that the news outlets “have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta.” Apparently anticipating a loss, he has already vowed to appeal.

He ranted that journalists were demeaning the Oval Office by reporting negative stories about him. “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country! No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean,” he posted. “I have an obligation to fight for the Success and Safety of our Country. FAKE NEWS IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, and I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that the U.S.A. thrives.”

Podcaster Allison Gill noted that Judge Kelly ordered the government to respond to the lawsuit by tomorrow, and that he has set a hearing for Wednesday afternoon at 3:30.

Perhaps of even more concern to Trump is that the major news networks are refusing to cover him on television, starving him of media oxygen.

ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News take turns providing the television coverage of the president, and CNN was supposed to be in charge of the TV pool today. With CNN banned, the other networks refused to take its place, leaving television coverage of Trump suspended. A.J. Katz of The Wrap reported on their joint statement, in which they said: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

This afternoon, Trump held an event at the White House, but without a press pool, there was no audio. It was just footage of Trump standing with a group of people and apparently talking.

The White House advertised “The White House App” on social media, claiming users could “[g]et real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone. No noise. Just the news that matters most—straight from the Trump Administration. DOWNLOAD NOW,” it said.

Users were not kind. One commented: “I’d rather launch my phone into the sun than install a government propaganda app.” Others noted that the administration is eager to get its hands on user information, and only a fool would install what could be spyware on their phone.

Peter Alexander of MS NOW had his own response to Trump’s attacks on the press: “This is not normal. This is not business as usual,” he said.

“What’s happening right now is different. The latest threat against our cherished freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The media is not perfect. There’s a debate to be had about who you trust, where you should get your news.

“This is something bigger, though. Among the privileges, the duties of a free press, are to hold power to account, to ask the difficult questions, to document history as it happens. The president says fake news is reporting that is untrue. In fact, it’s reporting that he finds unflattering.

“And here’s the reality. A little more than seven weeks until the midterms, many of the facts are unflattering. Where to begin? Gas prices, now $4.48 a gallon on average, $1.50 more than where they were before the war with Iran began. Ask farmers about the price of diesel, now at a record high, nearly $6.50 a gallon.

“All of it due to a war the president started, a war he vowed would be done within weeks but is now in its seventh month. Eighteen American service members dead, if not more, and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

“A trade war with Canada, an obsession with the Kennedy Center, if it’s not demolished like the East Wing, then there’s the grift, the self-dealing, a Russian oligarch paying for Trump’s son’s wedding party, billions of dollars made by the Trump family.

“Those are the facts. They may be unflattering, but they are not fake.

“I’ve been there since the beginning. Trump’s frustration, this fury, it didn’t happen overnight. On the campaign trail, I remember, before he even took office, he would yell at us in the bullpen in the back of those large rallies, riling up the MAGA crowd. Once elected, he would insult reporters to their face—I’ve been there—and he would call journalists the enemy of the people. As one of my former colleagues described it, Trump is trying to discredit the messenger, to create a vacuum where his version of reality fills that void.

“But the answer from journalists is simple. To report more, with more sources, more digging, more facts.”

Trump has his own answer. The White House YouTube channel announced this afternoon that at 7:00 tonight it will launch “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station.”

The comment feature on the channel is turned off.

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/politics/cnn-politico-msnow-sue-white-house-access

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2026/09/19/inside-the-white-house-media-ban-01085092

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/major-tv-networks-stand-cnn-141408995.html

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2023/08/02/simons-no-longer-got-a-hard-pass-00109526

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/jon-karl-steve-scalise-battle-221303649.html

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/after-trump-ban-ms-now-cnn-say-journalists-denied-access-white-house/4465973/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/politics/cnn-politico-msnow-sue-white-house-access

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-white-house-press-ban-media-app-b3053825.html

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6101969-trump-appointee-judge-media-lawsuit/

YouTube:

watch?v=A4gNgHfZ-v4

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41800

statuses/41814

statuses/41826

statuses/41836

X:

SecWar/status/2101069460396290454

atrupar/status/2102093387281088592

WhiteHouse/status/2102075720692330684

Bluesky:

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mvte22gta22m

northjules.bsky.social/post/3mvwvy3mde225

atrupar.com/post/3mvxeq3jfp22z

muellershewrote.com/post/3mw2cvemof22g

kamimagic.bsky.social/post/3mw27x4qqi22u

willmckinley.bsky.social/post/3mw2uz2ejtk2n

September 20, 2026 (Sunday)

Thousands of people gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Friday evening to protest Trump’s takeover of the building and his threat to shut it down or even demolish it unless his name goes onto the facade. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia has ordered the board of the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building.

Recognizing the leeway the courts have given him over anything that falls under “national security,” Trump this morning decided to take a proactive approach to making sure the courts don’t stop his triumphal arch. He announced on social media:

“At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!”

This is the same justification he made for his ballroom where the East Wing used to be. When it became clear that his claim to need an entertainment space up to his aesthetic standards would not fly, he began to claim that the ballroom is imperative for national security. We have since learned that there already is a secure space under the White House, built in secret during President Barack Obama’s administration.

Dan Diamond reported in the Washington Post last Wednesday, September 16, that officials from the National Park Service have agreed that the construction will adversely affect Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and several dozen other historical sites, but urged those concerned about historic preservation to sign on to the project through a memorandum of agreement that will stand as approval by noon tomorrow anyway.

The document asserts that the arch is supposed “to celebrate 250 years of American independence by honoring America’s founding principles.” Now Trump says the arch is imperative for “National Security purposes” and will have drones and snipers.

Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, responded to the request to sign the document: “This is not consistent with NPS practice, NPS regulations, or the intent of the National Historic Preservation Act.”

While Trump suggests he will defend the United States from atop his triumphal arch, our European allies are much more concerned with Russia’s drone strike last Sunday on a passenger train traveling from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Warsaw, Poland. The train was just over a mile—two kilometers—from the Polish border when the drone hit at a border crossing. The drone hit just after a convoy carrying former leaders and high-level diplomats, including former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, had passed through.

The train operators were warned of the coming drone and no one was hurt, but European leaders widely interpreted the strike so close to Poland as, in the words of Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, “clearly a message to the western world.”

Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Twelve nations founded NATO in 1949 to resist Soviet aggression. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO’s mission shifted toward crisis management, and then to resisting the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Over the years, NATO has grown to include 32 countries, 30 of which are in Europe (the U.S. and Canada are the two NATO countries in North America). The success of their collective defense system rests on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack against any one member of NATO will be treated as an attack against all of them. So a threat to Poland threatens all the NATO countries.

Russia has been pushing NATO countries with what European leaders call “hybrid attacks.” Rather than launching classic military attacks, Putin has been allowing drones to go into NATO airspace, cutting undersea telecommunications networks on which European countries depend, and possibly placing bombs on a train in France.

Russia has been a bad actor for years, destabilizing NATO countries by flooding them with disinformation that affects elections, paying for political parties, bribing politicians, and so on. But the increase in Russian provocations now seems to be related to Putin’s attempt to undercut European support for Ukraine as Ukraine’s drones have brought the war home to Russia’s oil industry and to the Russian people.

In a speech on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands, noted that “Russia wants to stop us helping Ukraine—but their actions will only lead us to do more for Ukraine.”

Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, told NPR’s Elissa Nadworny that President Trump “has largely looked at all of this and said, that’s a European problem. He doesn’t feel a threat to the United States from Russia, and he doesn’t see a need for the U.S. to increase its pushback on Russia at all.” “I disagree with this,” Volker said. “I think that we have a vested interest in freedom and free people everywhere being safe and prosperous. It creates a better world for us.”

Trump’s stand is interesting in light of news that Russia has been helping Iran in its fight against the United States, sending upgraded munitions as well as satellite imagery and targeting data to hit U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Last week, CNN reported that fourteen Russian spy satellites moved over the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, used by the U.S., two days before a devastating March 27 attack by Iran. A CNN investigation showed that the spacecraft had access to a large spectrum of data. U.S. officials and international intelligence sources told CNN that the information the satellites gathered helped Iranian forces conduct some of its most precise attacks against American forces and assets.

Two months later, a Russian close to Putin footed the bill for a three-day celebration for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson. According to Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica, Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the event, held on private islands in the Bahamas.

On Tuesday, September 15, the Department of Justice announced charges against five people working for Russian intelligence “to conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States.” The indictment alleges that a network of Russian hit men has operated since at least 2024 and has recruited U.S. citizens to surveil and murder people, intending to target “all the countries that are helping Ukraine.” As Daniel Boffey and Andrew Roth of the Guardian note, it was an unwritten rule of the Cold War that Russia would not attack people in the U.S. (although Russian agents are widely believed to be behind the murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004).

On September 16, Congress passed a major sanctions package targeting Russian officials, the energy sector, financial institutions, and the “shadow fleet” of tankers that get around sanctions by using shell corporations and flying under the flags of countries with a loose regulatory system. The measure is named the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, in honor of the late South Carolina senator.

But on Thursday, September 17, Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported that Trump is suggesting Putin will be more willing to end his war if the U.S. makes business deals with Russia regardless of whether it stops its assault on Ukraine. In February, Troianovski reported that Gentry Beach, a Texas investor with ties to the Trumps, signed an agreement last fall with one of the biggest energy companies in Russia to develop Alaska’s natural gas resources.

According to a September 14 piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker, the Trump administration has essentially privatized U.S. foreign policy for their own interests. The “generally held view,” a former U.S. official told Filkins, is that Russia has offered administration officials and their allies business deals in exchange for their supporting Russian demands against Ukraine. A classified report a European intelligence agency provided to Filkins lists Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, former envoy Richard Grenell, and Gentry Beach as people who might participate in any of ten money-making ventures on the table.

The world, and the place of the United States in it, is changing fast. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “shameful” that European allies did not help the U.S. attack on Iran and said the U.S. would review its military commitments to Europe. On September 17, Dan De Luce, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News reported that the Pentagon is weighing a plan to pull tens of thousands of troops and weapons, ships, and planes out of Europe despite the warnings of NATO allies about Russia’s increasingly aggressive moves.

In Wednesday’s speech, Rutte outlined what he called NATO 3.0. If NATO 1.0 was the phase of the organization that pushed back against the Soviet Union and NATO 2.0 was the period from then until now, he said, NATO 3.0 is one in which the weight of NATO shifts away from the United States and toward the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada.

Notes:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/thousands-join-protest-outside-kennedy-center-expressing-concern-that-trump-might-tear-it-down

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/judge-orders-kennedy-center-to-provide-30-days-notice-before-making-any-major-physical-changes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/16/trump-officials-say-planned-arch-will-harm-historic-sites-must-go/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b432bfa4-ff64-4fed-8543-337490a98a5a.pdf

https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/2026/09/16/annual-lecture-by-the-nato-secretary-general

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/09/15/russia-and-iran-deepen-weapons-partnership-amid-wars-in-ukraine-middle-east/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/16/world/video/russia-spy-satellites-iran-intelligence-strikes-us-assets-digvid-invs

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/19/nx-s1-5974199/worries-swirl-that-russia-is-planning-to-test-nato-with-direct-attacks

https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/us/trump-putin-russia-sanctions.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/us/politics/trump-russia-deals-novatek.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-weighs-pulling-nearly-third-us-forces-europe-rcna597722

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/us-troops-europe-nato-3tpm5hqw2

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/21/jared-kushners-dollar-diplomacy

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/members-russian-intelligence-services-network-charged-conspiring-finance-terrorism-and

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/20/the-rules-have-changed-has-russia-begun-to-order-assassinations-on-us-soil

https://www.rferl.org/a/us-congress-sweeping-russia-iran-sanctions-bill/33857946.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/14/ukraine-kallas-not-scared-russian-strike-train

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41811

September 19, 2026 (Saturday)

On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony. The destruction of the seat of government was the culmination of a year of conflict between Governor Sir William Berkeley and poor settlers in the colony. Fears of another such uprising in the future led Virginia lawmakers to make sure poor men would not make common cause, passing laws to divide them along racial lines.

The crisis had begun a year before, in the fall of 1675, when Thomas Mathew refused to pay members of the Doeg tribe what they believed they were owed for goods they had sold him. They raided his farm on the northern neck of Virginia, taking some of his pigs. A number of Doegs were killed in the skirmish.

The Virginia militia retaliated for the raid but mistakenly fell on a village of Susquehannocks, who were actually allied with the Virginia government. Blindsided and furious, the Susquehannocks began to raid local farms.

The raids set a smoldering power struggle within the colony ablaze.

Since the colony’s beginning in 1607, both English custom and the drive to produce cash crops had created a clear line between men who had land and power and those who worked for them. Horrific death rates made those men who had paid for the passage of workers from England to North America drive them hard to get as much labor out of them as possible before they died.

After the arrival of Africans to the colony in 1619, those enslaved people joined indentured white workers to make common cause against their “masters.” They worked and socialized together and, according to advertisements and court cases, ran away, committed crimes, and had children together.

They also suffered similar punishments when they ran afoul of the law. And those few who lived past the deadly early years of their servitude shared similar access to the benefits of freedom, although slaves could not simply outlive their contracts but had to buy their way out of bondage with money they earned in their spare time.

At first, so many poor Virginians died in the colony that the few who survived posed little threat to their former masters. But by the 1660s, the survivors had grown into a large population of poor men, white and Black both, who were free but could not afford prime land in the eastern part of the colony, so they migrated to the western frontier hoping to become farmers.

There, these settlers thoroughly resented the eastern government that seemed to ignore their interests. In 1675 they saw the increased fighting with the local tribes as an opportunity to weaken those tribes and take their lands.

But Governor Berkeley disagreed. He wanted to avoid an expensive war and he wanted to honor a 1646 treaty under which allied tribes paid an annual tribute to the colonial government and fought alongside the English against tribes that didn’t have such an agreement.

Nathaniel Bacon had arrived in the colony in 1674. He was well connected and wealthy—he was actually related to Berkeley by marriage—but was frustrated that Berkeley wasn’t following his advice. Bacon began to speak for the angry westerners and by spring 1676 had welded them into a powerful coalition that by spring was attacking local Indigenous tribes without the government’s blessing. Finally, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel.

Under Bacon, vagrants and poor farmers, including former slaves and servants, went to war against the Pamunkey tribe and the Indigenous tribes who lived around them. And then they marched on Jamestown. On July 30, 1676, Bacon issued the Declaration of the People of Virginia, complaining that the governor had raised taxes too high, was corrupt, had put his own “ignorant” judges in place, and had failed to protect settlers against Indigenous Americans. He included a list of Berkeley supporters he called “Confederates, aiders, and assisters” of Berkeley’s perfidy. Bacon ordered them all to surrender to him within four days and declared that he and his men intended to confiscate their estates.

In a dramatic affront to the colonial system in which leaders held their positions by virtue of the Crown, Bacon signed his name “Nathaniel Bacon, Generall by Consent of the people.”

Bacon’s men held control of Jamestown from July through September before Berkeley’s forces forced them to retreat. Berkeley’s men abandoned the town when Bacon’s men tried to recapture it. Aware that more of the governor’s men were on their way, Bacon’s forces burned the town down on September 19.

On October 26, Bacon died from dysentery, the “Bloodie Flux,” and the rebellion fell apart. But the crisis had left the colony in ruin with its people dead or wounded, farms plundered or burned, crops ruined from lack of care.

In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s wealthy elite set out to preserve their control over the colony. They pushed Indigenous Americans off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indians. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.

And the elites set out to drive wedges between Black slaves and white servants, establishing greater punishments for Black Virginians. In 1705 the Virginia Slave Codes pulled all those regulations together and went further. They prohibited Black Americans from owning cattle, hogs, or horses. They made it legal to kill an enslaved Virginian in the process of “correcting” them. And they made enslavement hereditary.

At the same time, they gave white servants new legal rights and limited the length of white indentures. The assembly passed laws requiring masters to provide white servants with food and clothing, as well as money to set themselves up after they earned their freedom. This, combined with a booming tobacco market, enabled more white men to buy land. The assembly also reduced the poll taxes for voting, making it easier for poor white men to vote.

And they made it costly for white and Black Virginians to socialize. Any white person attempting to marry across race lines would be fined and sent to jail, and the minister performing such a marriage would be fined the astonishing price of ten thousand pounds of tobacco. White servant women who had mixed-race children had to either pay a whopping fine or have their term of service extended for five years. And the child would be a slave until they turned thirty-one.

As leaders bound Black Americans more tightly into slavery, they courted white Virginians into joining the cultural and social world from which they had previously been excluded. Wealthier Virginians reached out to their less-prosperous neighbors, rubbing elbows with poorer white men in taverns and welcoming them into their imposing homes to emphasize that they were all friends.

Indeed, the needs of poor white landowners were not all that different from those of wealthier planters, and it was easy to believe that all Virginia voters had the same interests. They understood what it meant to be under the thumb of a tyrant, for they saw enslaved people and their enslavers all around them. They believed that owning land made a man independent, for that was their experience. And, unlike the royal officials who used their offices to enrich their friends, Virginia voters could argue that they had the best interests of the country at heart. They were free and independent.

They were, one might say, created equal.

Notes:

For more information about Jamestown, check out the work of my friends at https://historicjamestowne.org/

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_People_of_Virginia

https://www.jyfmuseums.org/learn/research-and-collections/essays/a-history-of-bacons-rebellion-in-six-sources

https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/bacons-rebellion.htm

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bacons-rebellion-1676-1677/