Adam Lynch, Alternet

Washington Monthly Editor Bill Scher recently deconstructed Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-SD) explosion on the Senate floor last weekend as he labored to pin the shutdown of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits on Democrats.

“SNAP recipients shouldn’t go without food. People should be getting paid in this country. And we’ve tried to do that 13 times! You voted ‘no’ 13 times!” Thune said. “This isn’t a political game. These are real people’s lives that we’re talking about!”

But it was all performance, according to Scher.

“Look, it’s fair to tag Democrats for being the instigators of the government shutdown, but not for President Donald Trump’s decisions that maximize the shutdown’s pain and hurt people who do not need to be hurt,” Scher wrote. “Before the shutdown began almost a month ago, the Department of Agriculture, led by Secretary Brooke Rollins, made clear that the delivery of SNAP … need not be impacted.”

The details of that reality were "available here at this URL until at least October 10, according to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine," said Scher. Additionally, Thune blocked legislation by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) that would have funded SNAP benefits.

“But Trump’s USDA has memory-holed it,” Scher said, adding that when visitors now visit that URL, they get a Republican attack ad against Democrats that Scher said “almost surely” violates the Hatch Act.

“Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

But the truth is that SNAP has never been disrupted during past shutdowns, either during Republican or Democratic administrations, said Scher. They’ve always been provided by officials using available funding sources to prevent a break in benefits.

“Democrats shoulder no responsibility for Trump and Rollins cutting off SNAP benefits from those who need them to survive,” said Scher. “You can’t even argue Democrats should have expected SNAP to be affected because USDA declared ahead of the shutdown that it wouldn’t.”

Furthermore, the number of SNAP beneficiaries tops 40 million, “more than a tenth of the U.S. population,” said Scher. So, at least until very recently, the program enjoyed bipartisan support.

“Thune can save his performative rage for the people playing political games with people’s lives: Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Rollins,” Scher said.

Read the Washington Monthly report at this link.

On Tuesday, Slate writer Shirin Ali reports nearly half the country will head to the polls to cast ballots on a range of major questions and offices. However, “President Donald Trump just made a not-so-subtle power grab” to complicate that vote in some blue states.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that federal monitors will be sent to California and New Jersey to ensure "ballot security," said Ali, adding that the move has “sparked fear on social media."

California, in particular, is set to vote on Proposition 50, which is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) effort to hand control of the state’s congressional maps to Democratic lawmakers in response to Republican gerrymandering efforts in Texas and elsewhere. If the measure is successful, the state would likely get five additional congressional seats to counter Texas’s mid-decade gerrymander in an attempt to keep the U.S. House under Republican control.

Preeminent elections expert Rick Hasen assured Slate that Bondi’s observers “are more bark than bite, likely intended to 'trigger' Democrats during the lead-up to a critical vote.” However, this initial attempt to use federal officials to push unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud could lead to federal troops at polling places in the future.

“A few days after Bondi’s initial announcement, California countered with its own message to the Trump administration,” said Ali. “State Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that California would send its own state election watchers to watch Bondi’s watchers, while also calling out the Trump administration’s motives.

It’s a “nesting-doll” situation as watchers watch watchers, but Hasen said none of the election monitors will have much to do.

“I think there’ll be a lot of people standing around doing nothing,” he said, noting that of California’s 58 counties, only five are being targeted.

Thankfully, the same states that Bondi is careful to target have built-in freedoms that allow voters to duck her election monitors.

“This is not normal,” Hasen said, “I do think we have to take seriously the possibility that people are going to have to get around federal troops if they want to be able to vote, which would be a good reason to vote early and not have to deal with these things on Election Day.”

Read the Slate report at this link.

MSNBC producer Steve Benen noticed President Donald Trump posting an exclamation point-laden demand on Truth Social for Democrats to “do something” about the state of U.S. healthcare.

“As I have said for years, [Obamacare is a disaster]! Rates are going through the roof for really bad healthcare!" Trump wrote.

"Do something Democrats!" he demanded.

“He managed to say quite a bit in three sentences, so let’s unpack this,” Benen wrote.

“First, [Trump] claimed that the Affordable Care Act is a ‘disaster.’ That’s plainly false: The ACA hasn’t just worked effectively for years, it also reached new levels of popularity with the American public over the summer,” Benen said, adding that support for Obama’s signature health reform law reached 66 percent in June, “making it more than 20 points more popular than the president who hates it, and raising the question of whether the president is just jealous.”

Second, Benen took issue with Trump’s complaint that coverage costs are “going through the roof for really bad healthcare.”

“The first part of this is true — consumers are facing sticker shock, though leading Republican officials have spent recent weeks suggesting this isn’t a big deal,” Benen said, referencing the frightening new prices for Obamacare health insurance plans after Republicans and Trump banned subsidies to keep the plans affordable.

“But the idea that the care itself is 'really bad' is baseless,” Benen argued. “People raise concerns all the time about costs and access, but there’s no evidence to suggest Americans are dissatisfied with the services provided by medical professionals themselves.

But at the center of Benen’s anger at Trump’s post was the president’s demand: “do something Democrats,” despite being out of power.

“Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House, most of the nation’s gubernatorial offices, most of the nation’s state legislative chambers and the U.S. Supreme Court — but the president wants Democrats, who have minimal power and even less influence in the nation’s capital, to fix the health care problem that Trump and his GOP allies have helped create,” Benen said.

He added that Democrats are actually working to “do something” about the issue by refusing to sign onto a budget that blows up subsidized health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

“Democrats continue to show up for work on Capitol Hill, pleading with GOP officials to negotiate a bipartisan solution,” Benen said. “So it’s now up to Trump and his party to ‘do something.’”

Read the MSNBC report at this link.

Writer Rafi Schwartz is puzzled how President Donald Trump’s apparent mental deterioration isn’t ringing alarm bells and scaring people.

“Are we just going to sit around and pretend that the president isn’t having a lot of … questionable moments these days?” Schwartz asked the Nation.

“I’m saying that something is rotten in the fizzling neurons and squelching gray matter sluicing around Trump’s skull — you know, the stuff that is supposed to interpret the world around him, differentiating reality from whatever phantoms must haunt septuagenarian billionaires with lifelong daddy issues.”

But questions about the president’s mental state are largely absent from the public discourse during his second term. Schwartz argued that Trump is an increasingly senile president working to “consolidate fascistic power in the hands of an imperial executive branch.”

Trump recently let slip that he’d been given an MRI during his last doctor’s checkup without explaining why he’d been told to take the test to begin with.

“And … shortly after this admission, Trump was filmed meandering aimlessly beside an uncomfortable-looking Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s new prime minister, as if in search of an aide to place a ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ sign under the soupy brain dripping from his ears,” said Schwartz.

Trump’s first term contained plenty of “incoherent gibberish,” but Schwartz warns there’s been a big change in both the frequency of those upsetting moments and the relative “lack of cumulative accounting for their larger implications.”

Trump displayed a moment of self-reflection last month during a call with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek (D) over his claim of Portland being “war-ravaged.” He later admitted to the press that he’d asked Kotek: “Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? … My people tell me different.”

That revelation, said Schwartz, looked like “an unexpected acknowledgement of decidedly un-MAGA vulnerability,” that “Trump is aware his relationship with reality may be more malleable than a ‘very good brain’ would have us believe.”

It also suggests that people around Trump know this and are manipulating his vulnerability.

“Is it so out of the realm of possibility to imagine Stephen Miller flashing Trump a Sora2-rendered fantasy on his phone to convince the president that fishing boats are full of drugs and the streets of Chicago are soaked with the blood of law-abiding white folks?” Schwartz asked. “More importantly, is it so out of the realm of possibility to imagine Trump actually buying it?”

“The dangers of an executive with degraded executive functions are not simply a question of what he might do but also of what others will try to get him to do on their behalf,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz said a decade’s worth of scandal and broken behavior “has turned most of us into frogs boiling in the waters of our national melting pot.”

“We’ve become helplessly inured to the odd and outrageous behavior from Trump that not too long ago may have prompted serious … questions about his cognition — and would have justifiably caused a national meltdown if another president were in charge,” Schwartz said.

Trump also has the advantage of swarming news watchers with government shutdowns, SNAP benefits, masked deportation squads and Trump personally “demolishing a third of the White House to make way for an oligarch-funded ballroom in his honor.”

“There are only so many hours in the day,” argued Schwartz, but with Trump’s advanced age, “the time may soon come when thinking about it becomes unavoidable.”

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) tells the Bulwark he would not sign Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s demand that military serving in President Donald Trump’s violent campaign against so-called “narcoterrorists" sign non-disclosure agreements.

“Soldiers don’t serve individuals; they serve the Constitution,” Hertling said. “They don’t conceal truth from oversight; they protect truth from exploitation. There’s a difference between secrecy that saves lives and secrecy that is based on misplaced loyalty. Our system is designed to tell those apart.”

Hertling said he knows “why businesses need NDAs,” but argues NDAs “have no place in our government.”

“They belong in corporate boardrooms, not command tents. They substitute legal fear for professional trust, and in doing so they erode the very foundation on which military leadership stands.”

Senior military officers, he said, “have a statutory obligation, when requested, to appear before Congress and report honestly on the state of their forces and their missions.” Congressional oversight of the military isn’t optional, he argued. It is one of the pillars of civilian control.

“When generals testify before Congress, they do so under oath, not as political appointees defending an administration but as professionals describing the security of the country as they see it,” said Hertling, adding that he “watched that obligation tested in 2003,” when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki testified before Congress with honest information that contradicted then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s claim of what it would take to stabilize Iraq following the U.S. invasion.

“Shinseki was publicly rebuked and then quietly sidelined. Yet history proved him right. His testimony remains a defining example of professional integrity: a senior officer fulfilling his duty to speak truth to power, even when it carried personal cost. That is what the system demands, and what democracy depends upon,” said Hertling. “If an NDA were to restrict that obligation — to limit what a commander can say to Congress or to the American people about operations, readiness, or the use of force — it would cross a constitutional line. It would turn a protective instrument into a political one. The goal of secrecy is to protect the nation, not to protect leaders from scrutiny.”

Beyond the problems of a politicized military, the NDA itself is “counterproductive and insulting,” said Hertling, and signals mistrust in a system that “already functions with rigor, gravity, and extreme disciplinary action if violated.”

It’s not supposed to be about secrecy, in the first place, said Hertling. It’s about trust in the laws that already govern classified information, as well as trust in the officers and NCOs who have spent their careers safeguarding it and trust in the system of checks and balances that keeps our military strong, apolitical, and accountable.

“That’s why, if asked to sign such an NDA, I’d respectfully decline. Because the duty of a commander or any military officer isn’t to protect a narrative — it’s to protect the truth, the troops, and the Constitution they serve,” said Hertling.

Read the Bulwark report at this link.

Matt Ford tells The New Republic that Trump is furious at an anti-tariff ad from the Canadian province of Ontario because he knows his tariffs are on shaky ground.

Ontario aired a commercial during the games that used a 1987 speech by then-President Ronald Reagan to oppose Trump’s tariff-blasted trade policy.

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,” Reagan said in the ad. “The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.”

Trump, “who gets reliably worked up any time the television isn’t nice to him,” reacted accordingly, said Ford.

“The sole purpose of this FRAUD was Canada’s hope that the United States Supreme Court will come to their ‘rescue’ on Tariffs that they have used for years to hurt the United States,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Now the United States is able to defend itself against high and overbearing Canadian Tariffs (and those from the rest of the World as well!).”

Trump then threatened to arbitrarily increase his tariff on Canada by 10% over what they are paying now, “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act.”

Ford said Trump’s reference to the Supreme Court indicates his very real fear about the court’s impending decision on his power to levy tariffs from the White House.

“Oral arguments in the tariffs case are scheduled for November 5, and their outcome is clearly on the president’s mind,” said Ford. “… But the ad made no mention of the court itself, nor did it appear to be directed toward the justices.”

There’s also no guarantee that justices were watching the game when Ontario aired the ad, said Ford, adding that they would have reached judges better by simply filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

“If nothing else, Trump’s mention of the Supreme Court would seem to betray a churning sense of concern that the justices might rule against him,” said Ford. “That would be a seismic blow for his administration: Trump’s domestic economic agenda is built on the premise that he can impose trillions of dollars in tariffs on imported goods to punish foreign trade practices, stimulate domestic manufacturing, and raise revenues for the federal government. Without that freewheeling power, Trump would have to rely on Congress to pass new tariffs as he cajoles, bullies, threatens, and occasionally negotiates with foreign governments over new trade deals.”

Ford said, “If it is willing to do so, the Supreme Court could easily end the tariff madness — and its ever-escalating costs to ordinary Americans,” but he does “not expect the court to curb its historic reluctance to second-guess executive and legislative decisions on foreign policy.”

Read the New Republic report at this link.

Adam Gopnik tells the New Yorker that Trump destroying the White House is a performance display broadcasting his unbroken power over the presidency.

“After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged,” said Gopnik. “And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are.”

A nation writes its history in books, but its buildings is a kind of enduring book itself. The Eiffel Tower is an expression of a nation’s history, as is the Lincoln Memorial. The White House’s East Wing, however, was a place of accomplishment. Franklin Roosevelt created room for staff and military protection.

Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists. It was there that Jacqueline Kennedy presided founded the White House Historical Association. Rosalynn Carter established an office there and used it for a host of benevolent endeavors, including mental health advocacy and humanitarian work, including helping pass the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 and global human rights initiatives.

“All of that is now gone,” said Gopnik. “The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.”

Trump apologists argue that Jimmy Carter installed solar panels and Barack Obama put in a basketball court, but that’s “mismatched matching,” said Gopnik.

“[These] … earlier alterations were made incrementally, and only after much deliberation. When Harry Truman added a not very grand balcony to the Executive Residence, the move was controversial, but the construction was overseen by a bipartisan commission," Gopnik said.

"By contrast, [Trump’s] project — bankrolled by Big Tech firms and crypto moguls — is one of excess and self-advertisement. The difference between the Truman balcony and the Trump ballroom is all the difference in the world. It is a difference of process and procedure — two words so essential to the rule of law and equality, yet doomed always to seem feeble beside the orgiastic showcase of power.”

Architecture embodies values, argued Gopnik.

“The shock that images of the destruction provoke — the grief so many have felt — is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it,” Gopnik said.

The Oklahoma State Board of Education plans to review, and possibly dismantle, social studies academic standards approved during the tenure of controversial former state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters.

The Oklahoman reports "the controversy surrounding the standards started with how they were approved."

Walters released a draft version of the standards in December, but held the final version until February. Board members had not received the final version until about 4 p.m. the day before a 9:30 a.m. meeting. Walters then incorrectly told board members the standards needed to be approved that day to meet legislative deadlines, when the deadline wasn’t for more than two months later.

Walters’ standards drew national attention for requiring students to learn about the influence of Christianity on U.S. history and election-denial language that pushed lies and fabrications about Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden. They have two legal challenges pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The board discussed the two lawsuits during a closed-doors portion of its meeting on Thursday, and after exiting that executive session, board member Brian Bobek made a motion that “the board undertake a review of the 2025 social studies standards for a period of 60 days for consideration, for possible further action with respect to those social standards.”

The board passed Bobek’s motion unanimously.

Walters was a right-wing firebrand who sought to screen teachers from California and New York with an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology.”

He also tried to charge the state $3 million to purchase more than 50,000 Bibles for classrooms. His bid requirements for the books were specific enough to exclude all but "God Bless the USA" Bibles marketed by President Donald Trump. The so-called “Trump Bibles average in price between $60 and $1,000 for copies signed by the president, who receives fees for his endorsement."

Oklahoma legislators refused Walters’ funding request.

In May, the Supreme Court reached a 4-4 tie on a case brought by Walters to allow taxpayer dollars to subsidize a Catholic charter school.

Walters left the state weeks ago to lead a conservative teacher organization to compete with teacher unions, but one of his final actions before departing the district was a plan to install Turning Point USA chapters in every state high school.

Critics, including Nadine Gallagher, a middle school English teacher and president of the Crooked Oak Association of Classroom Teachers, expressed support for student-organized clubs but voiced concerns about outside political influence.

"I don’t have any problem with a student club, if it’s initiated by students," Gallagher said. "If a student were to pop up and say, ‘I would really love to start a club,’ then I’m all for it. If that’s what students are interested in and that’s what students need for whatever their reasons, for social or something that they need for schoolwork, but I don’t like forced anything."

Read the Oklahoman report at this link.

The conservative editorial board for the National Review delivered choice words regarding President Donald Trump’s strategy to charge U.S. taxpayers $230 million over his prosecution for alleged criminal behavior.

“Donald Trump is in the odd position, by his own admission, of ‘suing myself,’” the Board notes. “It’s a case he should drop. … Trump reached for whatever legal levers he could grasp to fight back."

This included filing administrative claims against the Justice Department for “alleged violations of his rights by the FBI in the Russiagate investigation and the search of Mar-a-Lago," the Board adds.

Two of the prosecutions against Trump, including his incitement of a Jan. 6 mob to destroy the Capitol and his theft (and refusal to return) classified documents after leaving the White House, were never fully litigated, and could have ended with conviction had Trump not won re-election and effectively ended the prosecution.

“The legal strength of these claims, which were always beside the point, were questionable,” the Board says. “The government has many defenses to such suits. At the time, however, Trump was a private citizen with federal, state, and local authorities arrayed against him, so a counteroffensive made a certain kind of sense even when the odds were long.”

The settlement would be approved and paid by the same DOJ that answers to Trump himself, the Board notes.

“Trump says that ‘I’m not looking for money,’ but anything else he could ask for — public vindication, the firing of misbehaving agents, changes in how DOJ and the FBI do business — he has either obtained by winning reelection and ending the cases against him, or can obtain by his position overseeing the Justice Department,” the Board writes. “… So, it comes to money. Which Trump doesn’t need, and which would be obscene to shell out in any nontrivial amount on the taxpayers’ dime.”

The only “proper end to this is for Trump to declare victory and abandon the claims,” the Board says.

“But this is the sort of ethical conflict that cannot be eliminated by procedure. Sometimes, our system actually needs leaders to act ethically, and can punish them only through political processes. This is one of those situations,” the Board argued. “Trump should do the right thing, both ethically and politically, and stop suing himself.”

Read the full National Review report at this link.

Economist Paul Krugman said President Donald Trump’s removal of a whole White House wing is typical Trumpian style: an “act of vandalism" being paid for by large corporate donors — mostly tech and crypto companies — seeking to buy Trump’s favor.

“I am sure there will be a Trump meme-coin dispenser installed on every table,” Krugman said.

But the vandalism is a symbol of an even bigger destruction, warned the Nobel laureate. Trump’s demolition of the White House “isn’t a remodeling or building an addition, it’s a teardown." And he added it’s a “highly visual metaphor for the way MAGA is tearing down almost everything good about our country.”

“Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building,” Krugman said. “Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance.”

So why does Krugman talk about Trump’s "appalling design sense"?

“… [B]ecause tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand,” he said. “Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.”

“… And that ballroom’s hideousness is an equally good metaphor for all the political ugliness that lies in our future,” Krugman said. “… The ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi (I am the state).”

Spying Trump’s handiwork, Krugman said he now finds himself “frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship.”

“What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.”

“The modern parallels are obvious,” said Krugman, who posted a photo of Jeff Bezos’s $250 million yacht, with its large pool, jacuzzi and personal “beach club.”

Read Krugman’s full essay on his Substack here.

Podcast host and former Jeb Bush campaign communications director Tim Miller says Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now running the risk of getting “Brutused,” Roman style, by people inside his own Pentagon and from inside his own right-wing movement.

Referring to a recent story in the conservative Washington Times claiming Hegseth has “lost trust” with “senior military commanders” and trust has “evaporated,” Miller argued that the threat to the secretary’s career is elevated now that stories are showing up in conservative outlets.

“This coming out of the Washington Times is something that makes Pete Hegseth more vulnerable than if it would have come from a mainstream outlet,” Miller told MSNBC. “We're in this weird upside-down place, kind of like that movie “Men in Black,” where you have to read the National Enquirer to get the real news about the aliens. We're kind of there now. You have to read the far-right MAGA news to know what people are really thinking inside the White House in a lot of cases. … These are probably people inside the military, who are maybe even sympathetic to [President Donald] Trump but want just more competent leadership, and they’re trying to send a signal to him and a message to him.”

Trump largely ignores legitimate media and focuses on under-researched, highly opinionated right-wing outlets. When these news sources produce stories of Hegseth's fixation on facial hair and limiting press access Miller said it is intended to target the president.

“I think it's a really vulnerable moment for Hegseth right now,” said Miller. “You know, on the one hand, there was [the Signal chat] firestorm around him initially that I think he survived because he basically made the case to the president that ‘they're coming after me like they're coming after you, and we're going to go after the fake news.’ [But] now these complaints are not really coming from somebody they can turn into a boogeyman. This is coming from military leaders. This is coming from a right-wing media outlet.”

This time, he said, the tactic could work.

“At some point, all of that bad press starts to pile up and Trump doesn't like it. And we've seen this time and again going back to the first term where, you know, he wants to defend his people for a little while against the media. But after a while, you know, it's all about him.”

Miller said lawmakers are also losing patience with Hegseth’s obsession with controlling information, even to the point of keeping them from it.

“The members of … both the House and the Senate, who are veterans, who are on the Armed Services Committee members, they expect to have access to the military. They've been around for a while, a lot of them. They have had that access. And the idea that Pete Hegseth — a former weekend talk show co-host — is going to take it away from them is something that bristles. And then on the crackdown of the media … it is truly a banana republic situation over at the Pentagon at this point,” Miller said. “If you look down the list of the media [Hegseth is allowing], it is it is no different than Sputnik or the types of media outlets that would cover the Russian president. It is mostly foreign outlets of countries run by authoritarians like Turkish media outlets, etc., and sites that are so far right that … even Fox and Washington Times look askance.”

Economist Paul Krugman says U.S. consumer sentiment is much weaker than it was pre-COVID, “in fact comparable to its level at the depths of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.”

And people have good reason to feel that way, according to the Nobel laureate's Wednesday Substack article.

“While there have been no mass layoffs so far, people who have lost their jobs or are just entering the work force are finding it very hard to get new jobs,” said Krugman, describing a “K-shaped” economy with affluent people becoming more wealthy and the less well-off “under severe pressure,” as indicated by the rise in car loan and credit card delinquencies and grocery shoppers buying cheaper food. Meanwhile, the top 10 percent of Americans now account for nearly half of all consumer spending.

The rate at which businesses are hiring is currently “not far above its level during the 2008-2009 financial crisis,” Krugman said, although the Trump administration hasn’t released the latest figures.

Surveys conducted by the Conference Board tend to skew optimistic, with nearly half of respondents saying in late 2019 — on the eve of the pandemic — that jobs were plentiful. But the latest Conference Board survey had only 26 percent of respondents saying jobs were “plentiful.”

“And they’re right,” said Krugman. “Overall unemployment hasn’t risen that much, but the number of long-term unemployed — would-be workers who have been jobless for more than 6 months — had soared as of August, and has probably continued to rise since then.”

Another important indicator of a troubled labor market is Black unemployment, which is a reliable Geiger counter for what to expect in the greater economy later, said Krugman.

“After all these years, Black workers still tend to be ‘last hired, first fired.’ And while the overall unemployment rate hasn’t risen much so far, the Black unemployment rate has soared, presumably because Black workers are finding it especially hard to find jobs in this frozen economy,” Krugman said.

And even as the U.S. stock market cranks along, Krugman urged Americans not to be fooled.

“Investors seem to have decided that the wonders of AI matter more than Trump’s tariff madness, so we’re seeing a stock market surge dominated by technology companies,” said Krugman, adding that the AI boom “is troublingly reminiscent of the 90s tech bubble.”

“JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon suggested parallels between bad lending in the private credit market and the bad subprime lending that brought on the 2008 crisis,” said Krugman. “To quote Dimon: ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.’”

But aside from the question of whether this is a bubble, Krugman said it’s important to “be aware that the top 10 percent of households own 87 percent of equities, while the bottom half own almost no stock at all and gain nothing from a rising market.”

Read Krugman’s full report at his Substack here.

Correspondent Andrew Buncombe tells The I Paper that our neighbors across the ocean are half-expecting a second Civil War to break out in the U.S. if tempers continue to flare.

The assassination of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk prompted many to demand an end to political violence and the rhetoric that led to it. But President Donald Trump blamed the “radical left” for the majority of political violence: “[Kirk] did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”

Buncombe says British readers were already aware of violence escalating in the U.S., including an attack on Minnesota legislators and an April arson incident at the home of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro. Then Trump seized on Kirk’s killing to justify sending troops into cities such as Chicago, Portland, and threatened to invade New York.

His invasion has spurred local outcry from state governors like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who accused Trump of following a playbook to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them … to create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”

The Insurrection Act allows Trump to call up federal troops to put down domestic rebellion or insurrection, and U.S. courts could allow Trump to paint anything he wants as an “insurrection.”

“An armed uprising,” reports Buncombe, “is entirely possible.”

Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, tells The i Paper that the definition for a civil war used by modern scholars is a conflict in which at least 1,000 people are killed. But what’s more likely is “something similar to the 1791 armed uprising known as the Whiskey Rebellion,” which lasted two years, with hundreds of rebels taking up arms, with casualties.

Jensen said the rebellion could take the form of “sporadic acts of violence that will not be neatly defined by right or left but that stop short of becoming formal, organized parties locked in civil conflict.”

When asked to name a circumstance in which a violent conflict might take place, Coventry University political sociology professor Joel Busher proffered Republicans refusing to step down after losing “the next election.”

“Would they accept the result and support the process of democratic transition?” asked Busher. “I hope so, but if they did not, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that decentralized networks of armed actors would seek to mete out violence against their political enemies – Democratic lawmakers, minorities identified as being somehow less ‘American’.”

“If such violence were not condemned by senior Republicans, we would be looking at a potential civil war scenario,” Busher said.

Read The i-Paper report at this link.

A slate of emails collected by the New York Times reveals a period of grinding stress between Jeffrey Epstein and his biggest financial supporter, billionaire Leon Black.

The chairman of the board of Apollo Global Management had been backing away from paying Epstein $40 million a year for various advisory work after Epstein’s first Florida indictment related to charges of underage sex.

“So Mr. Epstein threw a tantrum,” the Times reported. "The typo-strewn tirade was one of dozens of previously unreported emails … in which Mr. Epstein hectored Mr. Black, at times demanding tens of millions of dollars beyond the $150 million he had already been paid.”

And the pressure campaign appeared to work. Black continued to fork over tens of millions of dollars in fees and loans, according to the report. After Epstein served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor, many of his contacts backed away. But not Black, who “kept Epstein afloat for years,” according to the Times. Eventually, Black was pushed out of the private equity firm he co-founded over his ties to Epstein.

“The two men had been personally entwined for more than two decades. When a former girlfriend accused Mr. Black of sexual assault, he turned to Mr. Epstein for advice about paying her millions of dollars to keep it quiet,” said the Times, according to court records. “Another woman said in a lawsuit that Mr. Black had raped her at Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. She eventually dropped the lawsuit.”

“And, for reasons that are unknown, Mr. Black wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to at least three women who were associated with Mr. Epstein,” the Times added, also according to court documents and notes taken by congressional investigators that were shared with The Times.

In one email, a frustrated Epstein boasted of his protective services to Black: "If you reflect on your financial life, you have been kept safe, had remarkable results and no disasters."

Their intimate tangle of machinations might explain how Epstein could berate Black so abusively in letters that sometimes referred to his children as “r-------” for supposedly making a mess of his estate.

“The emails … sent in 2015 and 2016 to Mr. Black through his personal assistant, as well as to a handful of his advisers, show another dimension of Mr. Epstein’s cruelty,” the Times reports. “While he was known for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful, he could also veer into nastiness and was willing to turn the screws on his biggest client.”

Mark Joseph Stern tells Slate that the conservative Supreme Court’s pending ruling on the Voting Rights Act “appears certain to hand an electoral bonanza to Republicans” by letting southern Republicans “gerrymander Black and brown communities into oblivion.”

“The resulting maps will hand white voters almost total control over these states’ congressional maps, producing a net gain of 15 to 19 GOP seats in the House of Representatives,” Stern wrote.

But in a twist, Stern said Democrats could end up robbing Republicans of their victories by doing the same thing to the same minority communities in blue states, including in places like New York.

“Currently, to comply with the VRA, [the New York] legislature has grouped many minority neighborhoods — so-called communities of interest — in districts together. But since nonwhite voters are disproportionately Democratic, that produces 'wasted votes': ballots cast in excess of what the Democrat needs to win,” said Stern. “If the legislature ‘unpacked’ these districts by dispersing minorities into areas now dominated by white Republicans, it could enact a map that gives Democrats 24 House seats and Republicans just two. That’s a five-seat pickup for Democrats.”

Similar opportunities await the party in New Jersey, said Stern, with that state’s House delegation split between nine Democrats and three Republicans.

“The state has about five majority-minority districts. If nonwhite voters were redistributed more ‘efficiently,’ Democrats could likely pick up one or two more seats. Illinois currently sends 14 Democrats and three Republicans to the House, but as data scientist Zachary Donnini has shown, unpacking the state’s five majority-minority districts could wipe out its three GOP representatives. Democrats would then hold all 17 seats," he said.

Additionally, in Maryland and Nevada, redrawing multiple VRA-compliant districts could knock off each state’s lone GOP congressman. Together, these gerrymanders could give Democrats 12 more seats in the House, compared to Republicans’ estimated 15-plus pickup in the South.

“That doesn’t even include California, which is on the brink of handing Democrats five more seats through a ballot measure,” said Stern, citing California Democrats’ plan to neutralize blatant Republican gerrymanders in Texas. But after the Roberts court dissolves the Voting Rights Act, California could enact “an even more aggressive gerrymander that awards Democrats several more seats.”

But there is an ugly side effect to this gerrymander-free-for-all.

“The number of competitive elections will dwindle, and nonwhite representation will almost certainly fall,” said Stern. “Majority-minority districts have long driven diversity in the House, as the VRA intended, and their decline would likely deny Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans the federal representation they deserve.”

Read the Slate report at this link.