VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump posts unhinged meltdown in attempt to bully his fans into silence over Epstein
The outcry from MAGAworld over the Trump administration's flagrant bait-and-switch over the alleged client list of notorious archpedophile Jeffery Epstein has only grown louder with each new attempt by the Trump team to tamp it down — and now a desperate Trump is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to regain control of the narrative. Throwing his support behind Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump presented the hilarious and ridiculous explanation that Obama and Hillary created the Epstein files, which is why they won't release them. So in the space of a few months we've gone from "the Epstein list is on my desk and here's a teaser" to "actually it doesn't exist and the case is closed" to "actually it does exist but it was written by Obama, Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Biden administration so let's just forget about it." He's gotten so used to just blaming everything and anything on his pantheon of enemies and being able to get away with it, but this shows a level of desperation and condescension that not even the MAGA faithful can simply wave away. This post earned Trump his first ever "ratio" on Truth Social — a post with more comments than "likes" — as people expressed their frustration and sense of betrayal. Whether it'll translate into anything substantial is yet to be seen, but...this post sure seems like a thing that a guy prominently featured in the Epstein files would write!
Take Action: Impeach Kristi Noem for abandoning Texas flood victims!
Two days talking to people looking for jobs at ICE
Yanis Varoufuckice (pseudonym), N+1: "On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended a Department of Homeland Security job fair at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia. One of the ICE applicants I spoke with seemed to have an insatiable desire for conflic. All his life, he said, he had hoped to fight wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. He’d joined the army hoping to fulfill this desire. But our foreign wars had wound down by the time of his enlistment, and he never got a chance to fight abroad. He said he’d seen videos of a member of the Taliban getting into an argument at a fast-food restaurant in California (I couldn’t find any evidence of this—not even as a conspiracy), and that he wanted to join ICE to protect his family. 'I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,' he said. 'So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.' Previously impressed by the connections between war and domestic policy elucidated by the historians Kathleen Belew and Stuart Schrader, I found this man’s account almost embarrassingly transparent. This was the most straightforward articulation I’d ever heard of someone bringing the war home. Other applicants offered similar explanations for their motives. There was the young, taciturn southerner managing a batting cage near New Orleans, and the pimply youth from Kentucky, churning out Yahoo Finance content for twenty dollars an hour. Both said they were tired and bored. The latter said his father had been in ICE, but he “didn’t really know what he did.” I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines. The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with 'pretty nice guys' who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people."
Take Action: Demand the Senate reject Trump's corporate USPS board nominees!
Top Democrat comes under furious GOP fire for opposing Trump's catastrophic bill
Chris Pappas for Senate: Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Chris Pappas did the right thing, as he has for each of his 20 years in public service, and voted against Trump's tax bill because it would kick millions of Americans off their healthcare, and now the GOP is trying to make him pay the price. Within hours of passage, the Republican National Senatorial Committee blasted Pappas on social media for having “just voted against the largest middle class tax cut in history" (an outrageous lie) in an attempt to derail his campaign for the must-win New Hampshire Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Sen. Shaheen. Will you chip in to Chris Pappas' campaign to say THANK YOU for doing the right thing and help him fight back against the relentless attacks from Trump's cronies?
"Alligator Alcatraz" showcases Trump’s surreal brand of stylized cruelty
Moira Donegan, The Guardian: "The concentration camp seems to have been erected largely for the sake of a photoshoot. The camp was first proposed in a video posted to X by Florida’s DeSantis-appointed Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier. Uthmeier, who has mimicked Trump officials in ignoring judicial orders in order to carry out deportations, coined a name for his proposed camp that seemed especially designed to appeal to Trump’s fantasies of high-drama, cinematic domination of his enemies. Trump has reportedly mused both about creating a moat filled with alligators along the Mexico border and about reviving Alcatraz, the former federal island prison in the San Francisco Bay which has been the subject of action movies, including a 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood and a 1996 Sean Connery vehicle, which the president has probably seen playing on cable television. It has long been a feature of Trump’s regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement’s style of masculinity. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is the kind of place the hero would have to escape from in a television show, or in a level of a video game, and its stylized cruelty is supposed to seem hyperreal, even uncanny. Perhaps this sense of scripted unreality surrounding what is in fact a concentration camp is supposed to help Trump’s supporters and the rest of the American people partake in the pleasures of domination while avoiding the recognition that the horror and pain they are inflicting is real. But it is real. The camp has been open, now, for just over a week, and already one prisoner has been hospitalized, reportedly as a result of the camp’s inhumane conditions. According to news reports, many of the men there were not permitted to shower for days. Broken air conditioning left men alternately freezing and sweltering in the heat. Detainees report that they are only being fed one meal a day, and that the food has been infested with maggots. There is no secure line by which the prisoners – who, again, are being detained on civil, not criminal, violations – can speak to their lawyers without being monitored. Toilets don’t flush, and the facility is infested with bugs. It is not clear that the concentration camp, housed in the low-elevation swamps of south Florida, can withstand the rains and winds that are typical of the east coast’s summer hurricane season. It has already flooded. If the immigrants are kept in these conditions, more of them will die. They will die of heat, disease and exposure; they will die when heavy winds from a hurricane rip the camp’s tents apart or send their metal beams flying; they will die when they are left without edible food or drinkable water for long stretches in severe weather; they will die when the stagnant human waste in the unflushed toilets and the tight quarters with scores of other immigrant strangers causes disease to spread. These are not conditions that can sustain human life, let alone human rights or dignity. For Trump and his followers, that might be the point."
You’re not angry enough about homelessness in America
Lily Sánchez, Current Affairs: "As a renter, I’ve got no love for the way we do housing in this country. The rent is too damn high, shady landlord practices abound, and so many apartments are priced at 'luxury' levels yet are anything but luxurious inside. Instead, they’re depression-inducing, 'greige'-coated, devoid of usable kitchens, and sometimes even windowless. And good luck making life decisions about, say, jobs or moves when your lease tethers you to a property for a specific amount of time that cannot be changed unless you’re willing to pay exorbitant penalty fees. Housing is often on my mind, and so is homelessness. I’ve moved about a dozen times in the last couple decades, dealt with too many sleazy real estate agencies, and have been frustrated and priced out by too-high apartment income requirements. And my housing frustrations pale in comparison to the experiences of the estimated four million homeless people in this country. Despite all this, I still was not quite prepared for the amount of disgust I would feel while reading Brian Goldstone’s new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. What I mean is that what the book says about our country disgusts me. By the time I was about two-thirds of the way through reading it, I could not get one word out of my mind: cruelty. There’s no two ways about it. The way we do housing and the way we purport to address homelessness in this country is nothing short of absolutely cruel. It’s completely unacceptable. The book describes so many practices that are cruel and situations that should never happen. SWAT-style 'surprise mass evictions at gunpoint.' Predatory profit-making off people who are in desperate situations—trapped in overpriced extended-stay hotels because they have been shut out of the rental market, or taken advantage of by rental assistance companies like Liberty Rent, which cosign leases and guarantee approvals for a hefty fee. Weak or nonexistent tenant protection laws. Government housing vouchers that vanishingly few landlords will accept and that expire as soon as 60 days after they’re issued, making them all but impossible to use. Endless nonrefundable fees just to apply for rental housing. Given all these obstacles, one couple described in the book, desperate for cash, even goes on a reality show for feuding couples to get $550 apiece. We need to be enraged that a book like this can even be written, that our fellow Americans are facing such horrific conditions every day while politicians refuse to even talk about the financial precarity that makes their housing insecure while at the same time trying to rid our public spaces of homeless people. It’s much easier to typecast homeless people as lazy or deserving of their fate—or as nothing but 'violent drug addicts,' as Elon Musk said last year—if you ignore the reality that as rents rise, so does the level of homelessness. When you plot the two things out on a graph, the line gets steeper—meaning a higher rate of homelessness—when the rent rises to certain thresholds. People don’t lack housing strictly because there aren’t enough buildings but because the landlord class limits housing access by making it unaffordable."
Trump’s toxic toolkit: lies, corruption, idiocy, loyalty, propaganda
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic: We’re a week short now of the six-month mark of Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, and while a lot remains to be seen (gulp), we should have a pretty clear idea of how a democracy becomes an authoritarian police state. The five key ingredients: lies, corruption, idiocy, loyalty, and most important, a blanket of sedating propaganda swaddling the first four and protecting the administration from any remote hint of democratic consequences or accountability. The lies are big and small, consequential and petty. And that’s the point. Authoritarians know that you’re not really lying unless you’re lying with absolute and unconditional impunity. They started on day one, with Trump’s inaugural address, when he said the voters gave him a “massive mandate ... like hasn’t been seen in many years” (he won by 1.5 percent). The lies have proliferated ever since, about Elon Musk’s DOGE and so much else. And these aren’t just lies. They’re complete and intentional inversions of the truth. Iran’s nuclear capability was “obliterated.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rounding up only “the worst of the worst.” The Medicaid cuts are just “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acted swiftly this week in response to the Texas flooding. In case you missed that one, Noem’s edict that she personally had to approve every FEMA contract worth more than $100,000 slowed down the federal response by three days, which is a long time when flood waters are rising and eight-year-old girls are drowning. The corruption is essential to authoritarian and fascist regimes. Through it, they send a vital message about the extent and nature of their power: We can do whatever we please. This will get much worse. Just one example: Noem, thanks to the Republicans’ recently passed budget bill, is about to go on a nearly limitless hiring spree of ICE agents, empowering them to wear masks and badges and drive around in cars without license plates and round up people by the hundreds of thousands, who’ll be deposited in a string of concentration camps that red states will be eager to build. On this front alone, we’re going to descend into a darkness most of us couldn’t have imagined for the United States. But there’s so much more to come. Public opinion is against this madness, though not as much as it should be. That’s partly a reflection of the opposition’s confused ineffectiveness, but mostly of the power of the MAGA propaganda network, which will only get more and more frantic and dishonest the more public opposition hardens. The silver lining is that the United States is still enough of a democracy, for now, that public opinion matters. Trump can try to change that: He can use the Insurrection Act to create a secret police force to round people up. That would be an extraordinary step, in the world’s oldest democracy. Until then, we’re not frogs in pots of heating water (which is a myth anyway). We see what’s happening. We are all well aware that we’re losing our democracy day by day. And millions of us are doing something about it—bringing lawsuits, protesting, whistleblowing, writing columns, making videos of ICE agents, what have you. There is still time to stop this."
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